Blog Post #4

One of the many roles a director and his DP have to work out when planning a shot is where do they want the audience to be looking? What is the subject? Identifying a subject can be done with lighting, composition, and other things. In this video, the director takes a simple scene and make it something that makes you want to watch it back again. As you watch, you'll notice yourself wondering what it is you are supposed to look at. Eventually it becomes clear. This is brilliant cinematography and speaks to what is possible with even a simple idea.

Blog Post 4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dC_4IqXgTs

This guy made a car that runs on air that is built completely by Legos. Big Lego structures have always been cool, but this takes it to a whole new level. Lego's are really like a slower version of 3d printing. It's possible to make anything with them, if you really think about it. It even goes 17 miles an hour. The rest of the video is a collection of other items that were made up of legos. I think a lego project would be a cool undertaking because it would say a lot about your work ethic and patience.

Blog Post #4

This is an artist Emily from Austin, Tx. She is so cool! She's been an inspiration of mine for a while. She is crazy talented and does these huge commissioned murals all over the country. She has amazing colors in her pieces and she recently posted this. These magnificent murals all start with cut up paint swatches. This seems like such a cool creative exercise with color that I want to try! So simple!

Blog Post #3 - Being Good vs. Being Lucky

Many of us are familiar with Alex Honnold's amazing free solo climb of El Capitain. However, not many of us know how much work and preparation went into that actual climb. In this TED talk, Alex explains how before he climbed El Capitain, he climbed Half Dome, another amazing climb. He explained however that during his climb of Half Dome, there was a part in his climb that he wasn't prepared for. This part of his climb caused him a lot of anxiety. Although he managed to get to the top just fine, he was disappointed in himself because he felt that he had not mastered Half Dome, he had simply gotten lucky.

I think any of us would be grateful just to be alive after something like that, but not Alex. He was so determined to master climbing that he knew he could do better than simply scale the wall. This mindset may seem crazy to some, but to others there is an important principle at play here. Imagine if each of us were to take the talents and skills we are trying to develop and looked at our progress the way that Alex looks at his climbs. Do we simply get lucky? Or, do we actually master the things we are trying to do?

I thought it was pretty cool that someone as skilled as Alex, can also be that humble to look at his performances and evaluate them for how he can do better.

Blog Post 4

This week I learned that McDonalds make a first ever restaurant for bees. I have no idea why they did it but I love it and it made me want to eat more McDonalds and render service to more bees. I'm grateful for their honey. Actually I just found out that they did it to raise awareness of the decreasing bee population. so that's pretty cool if i do say so myself.

https://inhabitat.com/mcdonalds-creates-mchives-to-raise-awareness-of-the-worlds-decreasing-bee-populations/

Blog Post 4

This week my sister was determined to make her own mood boards. She had never made a video or a book or anything other than maybe a poster for a class or something. But she saw a mood board online and she had to do one of her own. She even called me to ask if there is a way to make it on a word document hahaha. I just loved it because the way she explained it to me was that she just wanted to dump out some ideas she had and the mood board was the only way she could think of to satisfy that; she had no intention of doing anything else with it. The mood board was enough for her. I think it's cool that she felt inspired by something just couldn't get herself to shove the idea away, she had to do something with it. And she did!

Here's one of the mood boards she made!

Blog Post 4

I was online a couple days ago and I went down a rabbit hole about learning how to draw. I never progressed from the simple stick figures I learned in kindergarten. I want to teach myself but I am afraid of not being good enough. I think this fear is the reason I have not tried sooner. In light of everything we have gone over in this class, I decided it was time to put that fear aside and try just to see what happens. During my search, I kept finding article after article that were all about taking a long period of time and repeating the skill to make it better. I found some though, where the challenge seemed to work better because there was a little more incentive.
One of my favorite articles I found was called 40 Days of Moments. This is a travel writer who gave up her camera for Lent. She still needed to capture what she was writing about so she went back to her roots. She used to do a lot of illustrating so she decided to draw the moments she was trying to capture. In the end she found that through drawing, her skills improved a ton, but what she was more impressed with was remembering the places she had visited a lot better. There was something about drawing the moments that helped ingrain them in her brain even more. She later expanded this challenge to all her followers and had them draw their moments for a month and submit them to her. She wanted people to follow along not to improve their skills (a happy side effect of the project) but to enjoy and remember moments better of their lives better.
I decided that this challenge was what I was going to try and follow, taking a moment each day that I would normally take a picture of and capture it through drawing instead. Today is day 1 of 40 and I will update you all frequently and I guess we will see what happens.