Brainwashed

Read Brainwashed first, and then come back and read this.

Acknowledge The Lizard: The part of your brain that doesn't want you to fail. But as soon as you get over the fear or failure, acknowledge the lizard and then ignore it, you can reinvent yourself.

Fail: Once you understand that you are going to fail at some things you do, lets you take risks. And risks are a much-needed action in today's world.

Learn: You need to learn something from everything you do. Every experience you have. Every day of your life. This will give you the opportunity to get so much farther down the path you are on.

The three layers I summarized for you are important; not only to this blog but to the life of a creative person as well because over the quarter, I am learning new and great ways to be more creative and then apply them. I’ll know when I get my grades on the posts if I am doing them right, and if not, I’ll change the way I do them. I’ll learn from failure. But the most important is knowing that I can’t let “The fear of striking out, keep [me] from playing the game.” I can’t let fear keep me from creating something or doing what I want. Connecting that with this blog, I can say that I will post what I want, even if I don’t think anyone will want to read it. It’s about getting my voice heard, even if no one cares enough to listen.  

Doing these exercises are good for me, or any creative person. They help me understand the creative process better. I can apply the lessons in my everyday life as well. Learning how to be more creative is something that I will never get tired of, and I can always use the information. For example, before I took this class I didn’t know how to write a proper script with sounds and the correct format. I also learned that I am a horrible artist – I cannot draw a simple person even if you gave me $1,000. But I think I could have gone a little while longer without figuring that out.

Each blog has taught me something -- which I am guessing was the point. Each blog was about different parts of the creative process, so I learned how to look at the process from different angles. Be it creating a character or using sound design or being creative. They have each taught me important things that I cannot only use in future projects, but in my daily life as well.

I don’t think these blogs are a waste of time. People that do think that are doing the blogs wrong. If you do the blogs right, you will learn from them and be able to apply that knowledge to your future projects. The only problem I have with them is getting them done on time – I’m a procrastinator. But there’s not really anything you can do about that – weekly deadlines will make it worse, and end of the quarter deadlines will make it more stressful. It’s a lose, lose situation. 

Finding Your Howl

Read Find Your Howl and then continue reading this post.

Reading Find Your Howl opened my eyes. The whole thing is basically a metaphor but it makes you think and you can interpret it any way you want. The story about his fifth grade classmate gave me goose bumps. The main point Flaum was trying to get across was that you can't escape your situation easily. In order to gain freedom you have to take a walk through a very dark and dense forest with no path; you're alone in the journey. Hopefully you make it out alive, and when you do, it will be the best feeling.


"Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself."

My brother gave me a necklace with a pendent on it that had this quote surrounding it. I didn’t really think much of it for a while though. I went to Belgium as an exchange student and wore the necklace everyday. So naturally, people started asking me questions about it or wanted to know what it said. I usually had someone to translate it to them, but once I understood how to translate it myself, I got to answer them. And once I started to repeat it myself, the words began to gain more and more meaning.

Each word’s meaning really made sense because I had to think about what they meant in English, and then figure out the meaning in French. Learning a different language and learning to speak it well enough to communicate can really open up your mind. You learn how to connect with others and understand how they think. They can also teach you so many things that you probably wouldn’t have thought of.

Having an open mind is the first step to creating something.

Like the quote says, you aren’t just going to wake up one day and have the perfect life. You have to work at it everyday. And sometimes you are going to fail or find out the path you’re on isn’t the one you thought you wanted to be on. But you’re allowed to change your mind; you’re allowed to have a different opinion on something.

Once you learn that you are allowed to fail or change your mind, you can learn how to make something that you think is bad, into something that could be the best thing in the world. And there is the second step in creating.

Not everyone will take the same path. Some people are born ready to create – they don’t need to go step by step. I call these people ‘lucky’. Very few people are that lucky, most of us have to work at it. And again, most of us will fail a few times before we find the best way to make it work.

When you find out you don’t have to be the same as everyone else, it gives you a sense of freedom. Most people want to show off their differences and embrace them. That’s where creating comes into play. People create things to show them off; to let others see things the way they do.

Even then, when you create something, not everyone is going to understand it or like it. But again, you learn what they like or understand, from the things you fail at. For example, you make a painting that you think is amazing so you show it to your friend. But they don’t like it, so you ask them why. That’s another key, you have to find out what you did wrong to make something better. When they tell you what they don’t like, you make another painting and use their advice. You show it to them again and they like it. This makes you feel good, like you are doing something right. 

Now let’s say you create a painting that is a little abstract and you show it to another friend. You ask them what they think of it and they tell you something you never thought of before. All because everyone thinks different, so different people will interrupt your painting in different ways. You like what your friend tells you about your painting, so you make another one; this time it’s even more abstract. Your friend sees it and tells you something again. This process keeps going and going. You might not have started off wanting to be a painter, but because of the feedback you got, you continue.

Being creative is addictive. As soon as someone gives you some positive feedback, you want to make more. And even more powerful is negative feedback – it can either make you want to create something better to prove them wrong, or it can crush you and make you not want to create anything again.

The only way to get through life it to be creative, at least for me.

Reflections on Sound Desgin

Space

Movement: If you listen to the scene without watching it, you will be able to tell where the sounds are coming from. They are either getting closer or farther away as the camera moves. It gives you the feeling like you are the camera. When the door is closed, you hear muffled sounds, but as soon as it opens you can hear the sounds clearly. 

Subjective/Emotional: The music is being played in the background of most of the scene. At the beginning it is soft, but as the scene moves along it gets faster and more suspenseful till the end, where it is at its loudest. It also goes from being very suspenseful to a very happy kind of music at the very end. 

Listening Modes 

Casual: The literal sounds you hear in the scene are the monkey, footsteps, doors, and voices. They show you the reality of the scene. 

The Semantic sounds you hear represent the fear of Sara and confusion of Captain Crewe. The thunder represents fear -- every time it gets loud she gets a little more scared. The Captain's confusion is represented by the music -- it gets louder every time the Captain is confused. The more confused he is the more suspense you get when watching the scene because the audience knows he is Sara's father, but they don't know how he will remember it. 

Deconstructing Characters

I chose a saturation of purple for my character because like the colors red and blue, there are different things that bring my character to life. Before she became a hero, she was supposed to be a CEO but missed her promotion meeting because of the villain. The purple shows what she could have been, 'royalty' or in a 'higher power'. She has the darker shades of purple to show a kind of dark or angry side because she lost her normal life at the hands of the villain. Like the colors used in construction zones, her accents are orange to represent caution. 

There are not many shadows on the hero, and you can barely see any. That is because she likes to be on the move and not in the spotlight. She is always going somewhere so no one can ever see her long enough to 'shine a light' on her. She is lit in a natural light, which shows her as a 'normal' person and throws off the 'superhero' status. There is no complex lighting around her; she is simple. The searching spotlights shown above show that she is hard to find standing around. 

I chose a zig zag pattern pared with straight edges for this character because the zig zags show speed and the straight edges show that she is also conserved and professional. Or she tries to be. Her straight shape is more aerodynamic than lots of twists and turns; which comes in handy when she wants to be on time. Though the two don't seem to go together, both zig zag and straight edges work together to form a working character that looks like she could be a normal person by day and a hero by night. 

This is Convenient Girl.

(the hero)

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The villain's color scheme is kind of a bland, boring blend of colors. That represents the way he goes about inconveniencing things for everyone -- he never puts in any real effort into his 'evil' doings. Like the company, UPS, that uses brown as their main color, it is easy to keep clean -- he doesn't want to do any work if he doesn't have to. The color brown, referring to auras, is said to be when businessmen are in it only for greed and money, like the villain who just wants to be mean to people. 

There is a hard light coming from the right corner of the picture, shining on the villain. His hair is sticking out a little, which casts a shadow across his face. This offsets the thought that he is an evil villain, where in reality he is a mediocre one.  The hero had no 'spotlight', so she had no shadows, like she didn't have anything to hide. While this villain has shadows cast on him, which makes you think he has something to hide. Like in the picture above, you can't really tell if a person standing under the light would be a good guy, or a bad guy -- it could go either way.

I chose this awkward shape because, again like the villain, he is an awkward man. He doesn't fit into the stereotype of a 'normal' villain. He tries his hardest to be an evil-doer but all he does is make himself look foolish. There is no real threat to anyone at the hands of him, even though he may look a little menacing, it's all a show; a facade. A quadrilateral can be many different shapes, but really they are just trying to fool you into thinking they are something else than what they really are -- they're the same. 

This is Minor Inconvenience Man 

(the villain)