Another Day - Assignment 4

I wanted my video to be about the mundane travels of everyday life and how we just go through life without really stopping very long to pay attention to anything. I filmed my drive down I-4 at rush hour with a friend and genuinely enjoyed our surroundings and each other’s company. There are also a lot of social comments, mainly that we're so desensitized to things like ambulance sirens and gun shots. We seem to go about our days in these little bubbles, hence the "Willy Wonka" like music at the end. I used multiple different filming techniques to get the desired effects while filming and other effects during the editing process. I used multiple fade-outs to transition to different scenes. I also used the soft focus and an aged films, as well as black and white look to create the ambiance of time and a softer, almost dream like feel to the surroundings. During filming I used a lot of panning, zooming, both with the zoom tool on the camera and physically moving the camera closer to objects. I also got a constant, unstable, motion throughout the video because of it being handheld. The sounds added to the film are sometimes meant to be contradictory of what the viewer is really seeing, i.e. Heavy rain sounds while there is no rain, and sometimes they are meant to add humor or questions. Anyway I hope you all enjoy my journey with video and life.

Nancy Burson

Nancy Burson works within photography, drawing and computer imaging. Burson has used a wide variety of mediums to get exactly what she wants from her work. Some of those include billboards, photolithographs on silk, daguerreotypes, large format Polaroids, computer generated work, as well as interactive works and other more “classic” types of mediums, such as charcoal and oil paints. She finds all of these mediums necessary so that she can portray her work in the best way possible. Her earlier work on the computer came before her work with “straight” photography.

During the years of 1979 and 1991 Burson worked on creating computer generated images as what she called “fantastical faces”. She made a mix of aged portraits and digitally manipulated facial features. She was part of a team that created the software to help find missing children by aging their photographs. She then went on, during 1991 – 1995, to create photographic portraits of “special faces”. She deemed them special because they were photographs of children and adults that have altered facial structures, some of them were natural and some of them were due to circumstances. During 1996 up to the present day Burson has been working on projects that connect her fascination of the fantastical to her seemingly contradictory relationship she had with science. Burson also has an awareness of the spiritual connections that all living things seem to have with each other.

Burson’s work shows us the ugly, the beautiful, the sick, and the diseased and challenges our traditional views of what all of those things might look like. She wants the viewer to become part of that experience that she captured and to become aware of how we judge each other based on purely appearances. Her work can be hard to look at and even haunting. The first images I saw were the facial composites which I thought were really cool and the more you look at them the more they change and can become ugly or beautiful depending on what features start to stand out. The work that had to deal with the facial disfiguration was really hard for me to look at and I think it may have been because of my own perception of what beautiful and sickness and all those other categories should look like and it definitely challenges my views on those things. So I completely believe that her work is successful not only is her work conveying exactly what she wants to convey, there is also balance and contrast and all these other formal elements that make the pictures so successful.

Assignment 3 - Fantastic/Reality

This is my "fantastic" image. I blew out the colors by changing the exposure and in some parts the hue and saturation. I put things in the environment that don't necessarily look like they go in the abandoned building, such as the roses and the clusters of lollipops. I really played with color in this one to make it seem more fantastic but maybe still believe able, to kind of blur the lines and our reality and fantastic. I also blurred the lines within my cat image below.

This is my "reality" picture. The space is a recognizable one and pretty generic, especially at Rollins College and the subject matter is not shocking at the first look and then the viewer starts to understand that the image contains giant cats as well as regular cats and there are only really two different cats.


Take care!
Maggie B

Assignment 2 - Photoshop Collage

For this project I wanted my theme to be fun and playful. My theme connects the past with the future, there are three girls who are from a different time period. The purpose of this was to show that even though styles have changed we're still doing the same activities at the beach.

What is Digital Media? (Part II)

I found a slide show online that I think really applies to this course. ((Click me))

I also found some really interesting digital media art pieces, that are just really fun and more along the lines of what I find interesting about digital media.

I
Hope
You
Enjoy These.

ART 130 Intro to Digital Media

In this course I expect to use computer programs. Such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and possibly Dreamweaver, as well as a film editing program. I expect that I will be using these programs to learn how to manipulate of digital media, such a digital photographs, as well as completely create new works. I found a definition of digital media that I felt summed it up for me.


"Digital media usually refers to any electronic media that is created and displayed using computer technology, such as digital audio, digital video and anything that you would find online, such as computer games, internet technology, communication (email) & social interaction (Facebook for example)."
www.maddisonmultimedia.co.uk/glossary.htm