Heather Rasley @ ITP

I haven’t used the term “emo” to describe things un-ironically since I was in high school, but it’s pretty fitting for my final Flash animation,  “Too Much”.

At one point I had really nice gestural drawings with shading that I did in Illustrator, but those didn’t work out, so I had to quickly do these more rudimentary images. Again, more shape tweening. Not too fancy, but I like the lo-fi aesthetic (as I’m sure many have noticed). The abrupt and oddly-timed ending isn’t so much what I was going for. I’ll go back and fix that. Really.

Music: “The Stars” - Patrick Wolf, edited with Audacity

Drawings based on this photo of me and new friend Shawn

Click to watch “Jazzercise”

Theresa and I combined materials to create this short vid, but couldn’t get it to stop when the music stopped. Will have to revisit this when I have free time over the winter break

I had a very limited role in the editing process. I knew that the other guys were a little better equipped to clean things up, and I definitely wanted Scott to do whatever he needed to so that his vision would come through. And it did. I’m incredibly proud of our final product…

Dr. Dongle

First, the lighting looks fabulous. Big props to Scott and Sean for that. Plus, I think that our many, many takes paid off. We actually kind of come off like real actors. Well, college-level improv ones, at least.

Speaking of improv, you may be interested to know that both of my monologues were completely improvised. We did about five takes of each and I did it a little differently each time. The guys definitely picked the best ones.

I’d really like to put together a blooper/out-takes vid for this and help even out the audio. There were some really funny moments during our day-long shoot, including about five minutes of footage of me saying, “I can’t! I can’t!” about the whole “Fortress Kennedy” thing (though then she was called “Tammy”).

The group for this project consists of Scott, Dan, Sean and myself. Our movie doesn’t have an official name yet, so let’s just call it “Dr. Dongle’s Discovery.”

Last week, we came up with the general concept and a rough storyboard. On Friday we sat down and tried to nail down some details. Scott took on the task of writing a rough script for us to work off of, since it was fairly dialogue-heavy. On Saturday, we shot the whole thing in one go at a single location (Dan’s apartment), from about noon to 10 p.m. (with a dinner break).

The shoot went really well. We get along nicely as a group and were able to move quickly from one scene or angle to the next. Scott served as director and made a great leader and cameraman. Sean was an actor and cameraman when Scott was on screen. Dan and I had the most lines, so we mostly stuck to acting, though all members of the team informed all aspects of the shoot along the way.

Even the parts we hadn’t scripted came together quickly and easily, thanks mostly to (for lack of better words) the “vibe” we had going. In all, it was a great time and I think we came away with some good-looking footage that will hopefully be funny, too.

Next week is post-prod, which may quite possibly involve animated critters, a la Sean.

Somehow I became featured on the Boinx Software homepage for posting pictures of our stop-motion setup on Flickr.

Scott and SeungJun: you’re famous! And I guess I am, too.

The way they have it now, it sounds like Comm Lab is a program unto itself, rather than a class here at ITP. I passed this along to Peter so he or Marianne can give them more info that will hopefully straighten things out.

Here’s our video, posted at last. I bet this isn’t what Boinx pictured we’d produce. Ha. It was a lot of fun, but not as easy as it looks!

Our latest assignment in Comm Lab was to do an animation using iStopMotion. Scott and SeungJun were my partners. Our only plan at the beginning was to bring lots and lots of Play-Doh. Eventually it turned into a love story between two colored balls that was rather inexplicably interrupted by a yellow plastic dolphin and his pals.

It ended up being a two-day process, of about three hours each day. You can see the break between the two sessions when the lighting changes, though luckily that’s really the only giveaway that something changed.

Movie file forthcoming. The pictures of our process (on the first day) are here.

As a fan of comics both online and off, I was delighted to discover that Understanding Comics was required reading for CommLab. So excited, in fact, that I read it two weeks ahead of time — though that was partly due to my love-hate relationship with the Internet (more on that here).

As someone who’s drawn her own stick figure masterpieces over the years, it was comforting to hear that abstraction requires greater levels of perception and are therefore more relateable (pg. 49). I guess I already knew this — and a lot of other concepts in this book — from art history and my own experiences, but McCloud is so meticulous and convincing in his explanations that even familiar material becomes newly poignant.

I also appreciate that McCloud opened up the cartoonist’s bag of tricks and defined every one of them for us. Transitions, panel shapes and an endless number of icons and motion indicators all have meaning, which McCloud neatly outlines and demonstrates. Again, it’s something that I could guess after observing many different forms of comics, but I can save time (and brain cells) with McCloud’s help. Which I guess is what every good expert does: save us from having to perform years of our own research.

And, of course, it was simultaneously heartening and disheartening to read the final chapter, in which McCloud basically sets forth a model for becoming a skilled and informed artist (pg. 170). Heartening because, hey, there’s a path! And there are only six steps! Disheartening because those six steps don’t — and can’t — happen in 30 days or less. In fact, as he demonstrates, some artists never manage to go beyond three. But there is some hope that with had work and persaverence, you can fully understand and accomplish what it is you’re trying to do. Or die trying.

The assignment this week was to form a band with two of your classmates and write a song using GarageBand and at least one real instrument.

Our instruments were our vocal chords. I’m sure you can spot where they were used in our song, Secret Agent.

We had our share of tech trouble using Audacity for this project, so this isn’t actually the final product that we formed together — though it’s very close. Props to Theresa for saving the day at the last minute.

What is this?

The goal was to create a kind of surreal experience by coordinating the entrance of unexpected sounds with the opening and closing of doors.

Sounds used…

Theresa

-Washington Square Park music and conversations

-NYU lobby

-NYU elevator

Heather

-Conversation with Tim about M Audio

-L Train

-Walking to boyfriend’s apartment

I read excerpts from Understanding Media as an undergrad Humanities major and was able to find insight and inspiration there. Now, after one year in the work force and rebirth as a graduate student in the tech field, I find it nearly impossible to.

I fully recognize that Marshall McLuhan has long been regarded as a groundbreaking theorist in the realm of media, and that the era in which he was writing was one very different than ours (1964). Still, I can’t seem to get past his pretentious prose and the proliferation of seemingly needless allusions (though maybe they only seem that way because I don’t get a lot of them).

I also find it really difficult to respect the work of someone who refers to people from Asia as “the Oriental” and writes sentences such as “It is this same habit of using the eyes as hands that makes European men so ’sexy’ to American women” — as much as we are supposed to forgive him for living in an age when this kind of ignorance was widely accepted.

Certainly there are some bits of wisdom in his work that shouldn’t be ignored. McLuhan foresaw both the increasing social interconnectedness that results from what he calls “the electric implosion” (online social networks) — as well as the need to feel simultaneously connected and isolated through private music-listening devices (for him, radio; for us, iPods).

Some key passages related to these ideas…

“The immedate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally away of his total interdependence with the rest of human society.” - p. 50 (First MIT Press edition)

“The power of radio to involve people in depth is manifested in its use during homework by youngsters and by many other people who carry transistor sets in order to provide a private world for themselves amidst crowds.” - pg. 298

He also foresaw that eventually we would be watching movies in the same way that we read books: on a small, portable device (iPod).

As for his idea at large, again, I found it difficult to really grasp and tackle it, as he jumps so quickly from discussion of x medium to an allusion to discussion of y medium to another allusion. Certainly the overall idea that the same message is not actually the same when carried across different media holds great weight. So, too, does the idea that media is more than just a way of receiving information and entertainment. What’s really being said here is that our daily interactions with new media penetrate our psyches, shaping our whole culture in discrete, indirect ways that have a great impact on how we operate as a society. That I can agree with.