Final Project

For my final project, I made a video.

A music video, in fact.

My friend Seth Irby is a professional musician for "Keynote", the music side of Campus Crusade for Christ.  He and his wife Laura are known as the band "Seth and Laura".
How original.

And their music is great.  Very original.  I especially love one entitled "Outside," and I decided to make a music video for it.

There were several things that would seem weird with this decision.

1) I have never made a music video before.

2) I have never made a video without a central human character.

3) I have never made a movie that tells a non-narrative story.

4) I could have picked something much quicker to make than a movie...  I have several other VERY time-consuming final projects due this week, and could probably have made something a little less time-consuming than a music video.


It went reasonably well, I thought.
I had a script written out...  Had a mental shot list...  Had it all perfectly in my head, and then BOOM.  Snow.  On the day(s) I had planned to shoot outside.
My mental picture had no snow.
And I had only shot the indoor stuff when the grass was green.
Because I'm a moron.

SO.  I revised EVERYTHING.  I went back and figured out how to use the stuff I had already shot (combined with some clips I had filmed a while back) and put them over an abridged version of "Outside"...
It was rough for a while.  It still is roughish.
It is incredibly hard to do handheld moving shots with a DSLR.  Also the colors between the clips still don't really match, but they're as close as I could get them.

But no matter.  It tells a story; it has a message!  Onward to the finished product!






This video is mostly aimed at us new media students who need to get outside every once in a while.  I'm guilty of it as well, yes.

We hear "access the world through your computer", but that's a bunch of baloney.  We are accessing our computer, not the world.  We build relationships with our computer.  We build entire worlds of safety and comfort on our computers.  We entertain ourselves with our movies about people we never will meet; tv characters that have never existed.  We play paintball video games on the xbox, when we could just go and play paintball in person.
We live life less and less each day.

So GO OUTSIDE!
There's a world awaiting.

It's been a blast, Seeing Sideways.
Signing off...
~Thomas Fraley

Oops. Inspiration posted late.

I sent this to Jacob, but forgot to post it here.

I find this inspiring.

Not that it's aesthetically pleasing, but that it's ingenious.

As you probably know, film equipment is hideously expensive.  Basically as soon as you add the word "film" to the beginning of a product name, it AT THE VERY LEAST quadruples in price.

So this hoses someone like me, who is flat broke.

But once I started looking at this and another post by the same guy about how to do the same thing with light stands, I began to see a myriad of other ways to build my own equipment that would otherwise be outrageously expensive.

So far I have an eye loupe and am working on a matte box.

These are incredibly creative things, and also very practical.  People forget about practical creativity sometimes.

Original article here.

11:50 Monday Morning

"Pressure" is what Zach's inspiration for me boils down to.

I don't typically procrastinate in my work.

I usually wait to submit my work until the last minute, but I prefer to DO the work a few days ahead of time.

I know we aren't supposed to do things just for the sake of the grade, but this time, I decided to use that as a method of applying pressure to myself.

Typically the things that keeps me from my work are movies and video games.  So, this morning, I sat down at 11:00 in front of the first gears of war (I just got it) and determined to beat the first level on "hardcore" and afterwards (and only afterwards) write a blog post about how it went.

Experimenting by using unmodified dogma.  Weird.

Anyway, this game has a seriously steep learning curve if you don't play it on "casual" first.  This was actually a bit frustrating, given the time constraints that I had set upon myself (have to turn in blog post link by noon).  I kept dying and not knowing why or how to keep it from happening again.

Eventually I beat what I believe counts as the first level (it's not really divided up much into levels, I don't think...)

Now I'm freaking out trying to figure out how to say what I want to as concisely as possible.

11:58

clarity and conciseness do not come when you're under serious time restrictions.  This is a worthwhile observation, I suppose.

11:59.

And with that observation, I consider this experiment a success.  Followup post to come.

maybe.

after more Gears.

~TomBob

Challenging the teacher...

Ok.
So.

These weekly blog assignments aren't accomplishing what they're supposed to be accomplishing.
Everyone does them just to get a grade...  And not really for any other reason...
Which is exactly what Beth told us not to do...

Other people's blog entries resemble the mandatory forum posts in the online classes I have taken (the classes that require a post and a comment on someone else's post every week)...  They're all meaningless because A) we do them only for the grade, and B) we know they're not being read by anyone but the instructor, who is mostly only looking to see if we bothered to do it so she can give us 10 points.

As whoever follows my blog knows, I only really update it when I have something meaningful to say.  I assumed that this class would be different; less dogmatic about it.  But as I found out as I looked at my gradebook, apparently in this class, you have to post a blog post before noon on wednesday or you get a zero.  It doesn't matter what it is; just post something.

Why not think more sideways about this?
Why not have everyone read their posts at the beginning of class the week after?
We could even have a mandatory two comments (or one comment or whatever) in person after the recap blog post reading.  (And don't say we wouldn't have time.  We almost always get out an hour early.)

This makes us actually think about class; it makes us hear from others and draw inspiration from others' posts, and it eliminates the "doing it only for the sake of that little 10/10" dogma that Beth is trying oh-so-hard to get rid of.

This is a disappointment for me; I abhor busywork, and I abhor doing meaningless work just for grades.  I've always done it in other classes, but I decided not to in this one, because I thought what I had to say was more important than how many times I said it.  I thought that putting a heck of a lot more thought into fewer posts would show that I enjoy the class and am willing to think "outside the box."

I guess not.

It turns out school always will be school.

~Thomas

Class Response

My classtime differed greatly from everyone else's classtime.

At 2:40, I began returning the loads of video equipment I borrowed from the Informatics Equipment Checkout.  It took about a half an hour to get everything squared away.
Then I took a leak.
Then I walked to the Seeing Sideways classroom.
If you do the math, you will realize that I was about 15 minutes late at this point.
I saw the worst thing possible written on the board.
"FIELD TRIP!!!"
dang.
I called Zach.
He didn't answer.
I called Beth.
She didn't answer.
I moped.
I went home.

That was about it.  I'm going to discuss what the assignment is with Zach.

End of blog post.

Playing with Bliss

This last assignment raised some interesting questions.

Is playing "just for fun" acceptable?  Is playing still "playing" if you're using it as a means to another end? (For example, if you receive artistic inspiration by playing on a playground, is it still really "playing?")  Is using "stolen" time solely for "traditional" homework any different than using it to "play" to kick up some inspiration for other classes?

This is getting hard to follow.

At any rate, as adults, is "playing" for the sake of itself appropriate, a good idea, or profitable (and does "profitable" even need to be included in this decision)?

I would maintain that we need to be very careful about what we decide to do "for ourselves".  I admit that everyone needs some downtime; something they can do to relax and rest.  Otherwise you'd burn out and be no good to anyone.  But how much of life do we ALREADY live only for ourselves?

I would be surprised if anyone in this class didn't spend an average of two or three hours every single day doing things that have no benefit to anyone but themselves.

That's fine.  I'm not bashing that.

But I AM (probably) bashing the idea that we need "play" on top of that.  Many people in this class enjoy "playing" with photoshop.  Lots love vegging in front of the tv or a video game console.  All of these activities are playing in their own way, and all are designed solely for their own personal benefit.

So don't we already "play" every day?  Most of us do it for hours and hours daily.

The idea of "stolen" time is interesting...  But stolen time is the same as regular time, when it comes right down to it.  It's merely an opportunity to lessen the strain on your "schedule" by either playing and venting steam, or spreading out the load over a longer period of time and benefitting that way.

All in all, this assignment made me think a lot more than I expected it to.  My first thought was about how easy this was going to be to BS about, but then, just to spite myself, I started thinking.

... And I went rock climbing at Climb Time.  I hadn't been before.  It was a heckofalotta fun.  :D

Something Creative...

I play Battletech.

It's a tabletop RPG that me and a group of guys play on most saturday afternoons.  The game is played with little pewter mechs that are moved around a hex board.

These pewter minis are a source of pride for us players; particularly their paint schemes.  We all paint our own, and we come up with various techniques to paint them.  Some players paint each panel separately; this is what I did with this mech.

However, this week I tried something totally different.  Experimenting.  Believe it or not, I dipped the minis in minwax after painting them.  Yes minwax.  The stain seeps into the crevices between the panels and helps give them definition.  After a coat of matte finish, the paint scheme looked awesome.  I did it on a full "lance," or group of four mechs.
Here's a crappy "I-took-this-with-my-cell-phone-because-someone-stole-my-digital-camera" pic.

Class Comes Second

I was unable to attend class yesterday because I was frantically planning (last-minute, of course) my proposal to my girlfriend.  I couldn't post this up until now, because she checks my blog.

It happened today at Fort Benjamin Harrison state park.

She said yes.

True Importance

Love.

Yes.  It sounds cheesy and lame.

But when you boil down my belief system to the most basic, fundamental level, love is what it's all about.

I'm a Christian.

I am not religious.  The distinction for me is that religion involves legalistic effort.  You build up a life and a "goodness factor" and then give it to God.  In response, God is obligated to let you into heaven.  Your long, painstaking effort to "be good" requires that God hand over the keys to the Kingdom.

This model is the same in most religious beliefs.  We do good.  God/Allah/ForestGod lets us into heaven/afterlife/virginland because he/she/it is impressed so much.

The Christianity I believe in is different.

God's requirements to get into heaven (according to the Bible) are as follows: Live a perfect, sinless life.

That's it.  Easy enough, right?  There's a catch, though: anything less than absolute perfection turns you away to hell (which, according to all accounts, is not just a big party).

Now, how many of us have lived a perfect life?  None.  Some of us may have lived pretty darn good lives, and some of us maybe not so much, but it doesn't matter how "good" your life is if it isn't perfect.  Mother Theresa and Adolf Hitler were both equally sinful in God's eyes.  They both had sinned at least once, and therefore were both disqualified from Heaven.

That's where legalistic effort leads to [hopelessness and doubt] or [pride and arrogance.]  Either you realize that you're not perfect and never CAN be perfect (leading to hopelessness) OR you think you really are perfect and look down on those who are not (leading to arrogance).

Either way is bad news.

Ok.  Now for the good news (cool trivia fact: "Gospel" means "Good News" in Greek).  I was introduced to the following analogy a long time ago, and I think it works very well to get my point across.

We all have report cards (nowadays we call them "transcripts").  To get into heaven, God demands all A's.  We all have lied, cheated, stolen time and possessions from others, hated others, been selfish, etc.  That gives us good solid "F's" in every category.  Without Christ, we stand before God and hand him our failing report card and are turned away, to burn forever.

But that's exactly why we need Christ.  He stops us, and takes our report card.  He took all of our cards with him to the Cross and paid the penalty for failure.

But even better than that, he gave us his own card.  Now we don't just start from "C" and work our way to "A": we are given his righteousness and perfection.  Solid A's all the way across.  Now we can go to the gates of heaven and give the A's to God and live forever in paradise.

This is where Love comes in.

What is our response to this gift?  What is the motivator for the whole process?

Love.

Christ did such an amazingly good thing for us that our reaction SHOULD be love.

If someone takes away all your mistakes and gives you the greatest inheritance imaginable, what would you do?  Try to live for that person, right?  You'd be that guy's biggest fan.  You'd want to tell everyone how good he was to you.  You'd cringe when others badmouth him, and you'd be willing to make a fool out of yourself just to share with others how cool he was.

That's how I try to live.  As previously mentioned, I am a sinner and will always be a sinner, so I mess up the whole "love" thing too, but the driving force behind what I try to do is always love.

I don't do porn because God told me not to and I love him.  Typically christians (and conservatives) are ridiculed and/or underrepresented in collegiate settings, but I stand up because I love the Lord for what he did for me and want to share it.  I am a virgin because my girlfriend and I both agree that the loving thing to do is to wait until we're married.  I bare my heart and beliefs on a publicly viewable blog because I love my classmates and anyone else who reads this.

Hopefully I'll be able to answer questions in class.

Class Response

I was blown out of the water by Justin's "presentation/soul baring" in class today.

All I can say is that I applaud his courage, faith, and tenacity.



On an unrelated note (and in the unlikely event that people actually read this):

I think I misspoke today in class.  I believe I said "there is a Bible verse that says 'hate the sin; love the sinner'."  If that's what I said (it might not have been), then I apologize.  I should have said "Biblical principle" instead of "Bible verse."

If anyone wants the verses and concepts behind this principle, I would more than gladly give them...  I hope I didn't confuse anybody OR lose all credibility in the class either.

:P

Fav Experiment

My favorite experiment that someone else in the class performed waaaaaas...

*drumroll*

William Wallace.

Now, I know I'll probably be the only one who preferred his "I'm going to set myself on fire" stunt to the rest of the experiments, but I really do have a legitimate reason.

The "fear" (more "discomfort" than anything else) of watching someone else set his bare skin on fire is completely different than all of the other experiments, for the following reason.

The other experiments all caused fear/discomfort for personal protection reasons.  We jumped at the popping balloon because it might be a threat to our physical selves.  The same reason governs our fears of mice, the unknown (the lsd trip and the ghost recordings), and being confined in small spaces.

But our fear/discomfort during William's experiment was for his physical self.  We were not afraid in order to escape danger; in fact, if William's skin was actually uncontrollably on fire, several of us would have probably put ourselves in danger to try and put him out.

This fear is not motivated by selfishness or self-protection, but out of compassion and/or empathy.

This type of fear is the reason we as an audience respond viscerally to horror and action movies.  If fear was limited to purely selfish situations, these experiences would be essentially meaningless.  Any time someone jumps into a river to save a drowning swimmer; any time a fireman breaks down a burning door; any time someone steps up to defend another person, the fear response (adrenaline dump, etc) accompanies the action.

Evolutionists would say that this type of fear developed in order to protect young from predators.

Christians would say that this type of fear is motivated out of love, and is a gift from God.

Elephants Beware

Analyzing the concept of "fear" is extremely difficult.

Fear is a self-definitive concept: you always have to use the noun itself in the description.  While this may seem like a detriment, in fact it is very revealing.  It shows that fear is a deeply-rooted part of every person.

My favorite fears to analyze are one that are logically ridiculous.  Like fears of small places, pickles, open places, aaaaaaand mice.

Mice are easier to produce than small places or large places (and pickle phobias are hard to come by).

Original plan: Put the mouse in a box and make members of the class, without knowing what is inside the box, put their hands inside and tell me what they find.

Original Hypothesis: most people will be more afraid of the unknown than they will be of the actual mouse itself.  However, a few will probably be more afraid of the boxed mouse AFTER they figure out that it is a live mouse.  Their fear of the perceived risks involved with interacting with a live mouse will keep them from being willing to put their hand in a second time.

However...
This plan went out the window as soon as we put a classmate inside a box to brave his claustrophobia.  Because I had, in my possession, a live mouse, I couldn't resist the temptation to take the claustrophobia experiment to the next level.  I dangled the mouse through a hole in the top of the box.  Everyone laughed. The box shook violently.  I put the mouse away.

This required me to change up my original experiment and hypothesis, leading me to:

Revised Plan:  Hand the mouse to everyone in the class.  If a classmate is found who has a previous phobia of mice, hand it to him/her with his/her eyes closed.  This heightens his/her sense of touch and general unease.

Revised Hypothesis: The majority of the test subjects will be willingly receptive to holding an "adorable little mouse," but at least one should be reticent to hold the mouse; hopefully even downright fearful.

Then...  the experiment happened.

Exactly as predicted, I found four people who were at least "uncomfortable" holding a mouse.  All four people were, with some peer pressure, willing to hold the mouse and even play with her and let her run on their shoulders.  Three of the four were willing to hold her again, later, which surprised me.

There is a psychological method of pushing past phobias known as "flooding."  This technique involves exposing a subject to their personal fear repeatedly in a controlled environment to condition them to push past their phobias.  This is essentially what I accomplished with the three test subjects.  Mice phobias are easy to cure by "flooding" because domestic mice are relatively calm and free of most contagious diseases.  They are also adorable.  "Flooding" a person to these cute little furry animals helps them realize that mice are not something to be afraid of.

... unless they have rabies.  :P

Before Class

I have mixed expectations about this upcoming experiment.  I think that, given the right participants, I could get some worthwhile reactions.  However, I feel that performing the test in public might ruin the following participants' tests.
I think most people will be briefly disturbed, with a select few turning that disturbed feeling into downright panic.
Then they can run away.  I won't stop them.
Should be fun.

Senses

I took a slightly unconventional look at this project...

We use the term "sense" for more than just our five physical senses.  We use the word to describe a "feeling" (also not technically a physical feeling... gosh this is hard.) at times, and sometimes even just a premonition.

My example: fear.  We say cats can "sense" fear, or that we have an overdeveloped "sense" of fear.

Well.....  What if we actually, literally had a fear sense?

Alright, I suppose I mean more of a "danger sense" more than a "fear sense".  Almost like Spiderman, I guess, only much less "omniscient."  The real-life danger sense could be fooled by a roller coaster, for instance.
... otherwise roller coasters wouldn't be fun anymore.  :P

Anyway, while I was researching this potential idea, I came across an article that said that extremely low-frequency notes (lower than the human ear can hear)  can bring on feelings of intense terror in people subjected to them.

I was hooked.  The human ear hears all the way down to 20hz.  After using a noise generator to create a series of 15hz, 18hz, and 20hz notes, I powered up my Pioneers and let the music roar.  I ran them through my home speaker system (pic 1) and my computer speaker subwoofer (pic 2) and waited to be terrified.

Alas, no such terrible feelings happened.  I pulled out the owner's manuals and discovered to my disappointment that neither speaker set has the frequency response to pull off notes any lower than about 20hz, because quite simply, why would a speaker designed to be heard by humans create sounds any lower than the human could hear?

This was disappointing.  I'm currently looking into speakers with lower frequency response, but no luck so far.

If I do find a cheap speaker system capable of playing lower notes, I'll be sure to post my experiments and experiences with it.

~TomBob

Pic 1: home speaker system (I have a pair of speakers)

Pic 2: computer speaker subwoofer.

Class Response

"Why" and "Because" were iffy for me in class today.

The answer to "Why" should ALSO be what follows "Because," if we are following english grammatical rules.  ... So I just treated it like jeopardy.  "Why" is the answer.  "Because" was the explanation.

Maybe I didn't listen closely enough.

But then again, maybe I'm too caught up with the rules of English.

Well if we're not following english grammatical rules, then I stinky with purple clearly Red Socks.

MONTAGE!!!

I have a number of blog posts to put online from my little non-net-capable netbook (Ironic, no?), so I decided to combine them all together into one honkin’ big post before posting it.

Post 1)  “INSPIRATION”

I visited a park.  Specifically Fort Benjamin Harrison park.

There’s a lot of history at Fort Ben.  Unfortunately, by design or by coincidence, the park has essentially no informational signs.  

We have just identified a problem.

The AVL has a solution!  Enhanced Reality.

Enhanced Reality is different than Virtual Reality because some of what you are seeing is real; just not all of it.  Typically, special glasses are used to project data on top of the “real world”.  This would be specially useful in places like Fort Ben, where conspicuous displays and plaques would ruin the area’s natural beauty.

Here are a few concept sketches I whipped up.

Forgive the crappy sketch.  This is what it looks like now.

Virtual "signs" are projected onto the user's glasses.  The signs are informative, yet unobtrusive.  Amazing!

That concludes post #1.  On to...

Post 2) “AWW, CRAP. I BROKE MY EYEBALLS.”

I broke my glasses.

This wouldn’t have been a problem until recently, because I used to be able to wear contacts all day with no problems.

However, recently I have developed an allergy to the plastic used in the contacts.  They become unbearable to wear after four or five hours, tops.  Sometimes I can’t even stand wearing them for thirty seconds.

Now, I’m pretty blind without my glasses.  I can’t read any further than about 9 inches in front of my face.  I’m waaay past being able to drive without them.  I can barely function in a social setting without them because I can’t see people’s faces.

So I had to go four days without them while they were getting new lenses.

It really was an eye-opening (har har) experience.

Before the use of eyeglasses was widespread, “visually impaired” people (such as myself) would have been practically helpless.  I had to rely on family members to drive me everywhere.  I couldn’t watch TV or play video games, and I could barely use a computer.  I read several novels and ran into a lot of walls.  

You wouldn’t think I’d run into walls, but while my left eye can read at 9 inches, my right eye can only read at about 6, so my depth perception gets wonky without vision correction.

I know the “sensory deprivation” assignment isn’t coming up for a while, but I figured this was certainly worth blogging about.

Hope you enjoyed post #2.  Now for...

Post 3) “SDRAWKCAB GNIKLAW” (oh, if only I could make this sideways, too.)

This was less of a big deal than I thought it would be.

I have always had good balance, so the whole “staying upright” part was easy as pie.  The navigation part was a little harder, but not too much.

It reminded me of when I took swimming lessons over a decade ago.  When doing the backstroke, you can’t see in front of you; you have to gauge your distance to the wall by looking backwards at a line of flags.

I wasn’t very good at it at the time.  I would ram headfirst into the wall when I thought I still had a dozen feet left.

But now that I have better depth perception (partly due to my wearing glasses...) I used fixed reference points behind me to determine where I was.

Looking backwards in seeing sideways to know where I am now.  Complicated.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this blog montage.  If I could put music to it, I would.

~TomBob

Reaction to class 2

Field trips are awesome.

Let's see... Where to begin?
Big huge screens, COLOR 3D imagers (still geeking out about that one), a plethora of 3D doodads and "THE CAVE"...
What more could anyone possibly ask for?

I guess the only real "response" to this is that it has all inspired me to begin writing a proposal for a possible independent study.  I've gotta get a move on it, though.  Deadlines coming up.

~TomBob

The Incredible Edible Egg

The title is a little misleading: I did not eat the egg.

However, there are a number of things I could have done with this egg.  I will group them by stereotypes.

If I was:

• An Emo
• I could write poetry about the egg and how it is like me: hard on the outside, and squshy and gross on the inside.
• I could draw a dead face on it and sqush the yolk all over the table like brains.
• A Redneck
• I could see how many bottle rockets I could strap to it and send it into orbit.
• Less concerned with legality
• I could throw it at someone's house
• I could throw it at someone's car
• I could throw it at someone
• Less concerned with being original
• I could eat it (and defy death while doing it)
• I could give it to someone else
• I could draw a face on it and take a picture of it
• I could paint on it and take a picture of it
• I could take a picture of it

But in reality, I was:

• Trying to carry it while riding a motorcycle home
• I could try to hold it while piloting the motorcycle through traffic until my left hand cramped and I accidentally squished it against the clutch lever.  I could then spend half an hour after arriving home cleaning chicken egg off of the handlebars.

~TomBob

Class Recap: Day One

I didn't know what to expect from this class.  I'm still not exactly sure what to expect.  It reminds me of those college classes in cheesy movies where the professor dramatically throws apples or something.

I enjoy being creative.  Most people would say I'm pretty good at it, even.  But for me, creativity and art needs a purpose.  Creativity and art need to make the end product better.  Not just "different."

Case in point: the syllabus.  

On the one hand, there WAS a point to making it a "musical syllabus."  The idea was to get us thinking in new ways about old things.  On the other hand, it was different merely for the sake of being different.  The end result was much less effective than a traditional syllabus at doing what syllabi do: communicate information.  Does this make it a bad design choice?  Probably so.

I don't know if that makes me one of the "I'm just going to get an easy A in this class" students or not.  I look forward to the class regardless.  I know this class is about challenging the way we think.  I hope to be challenged, and I hope to challenge the way Beth thinks and the way my classmates think too; not only the other way around.

~TomBob

Written and posted while sitting in my pajamas in front of Stargate SG-1