Post - Class

I EXIST

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