Music Video Critique

The music video I chose to comment on is Nikki Smiths, and can be found here. It is drawn in After Effects using the Vector Paint tool we used in class. It is a pretty long music video – so I know she must have spent a long time on this particular project. The ‘folky’ sound of the song compliments the hand-drawn style she has used for the video which gives the overall video a personalized feel. At one point, the animation falters critically though, as it is not finished. The image of God, at one point in the video, sits and stares at a city for what must be 30 seconds. However, she knows it is a problem and even says she wants to fix it at some point in her post. I forgive her for this as I know animating something like that and it is a painstaking process. it takes time. So Nikki, just finish it up and you will have an excellent animation.

music video hell

Yeah

No homework this week – just tighten everything else up. I can live with that.

I’m hungry, so I’m going to talk shit on Domino’s pizza until they decide to show up at my house with a free pizza to change my mind, like in their new commercials.

Bah….since that isn’t working, I guess I need to go make food. I need a break from Flash anyway.

Speaking of Flash, heres the updated video. It’s a tad longer. I thought about the edits proposed in class. I did try to spend some time building some sense of personality into the mushroom guy. The color palette of the foreground/background layers, I agree is flawed – but will have to wait until later to be fixed.

Make-up Blog: Class 9. Infinite Library

A pretty funny site I found made mostly of flash is monoface.com. The site mimics the old ‘Mr. PotatoeHead’, taking the facial features of the staff of mono.com and scrambling them into weird configurations. You can then assemble them into any way you want. The creators of this site have made this happen in such a way that each facial feature is placed seamlessly onto the face, creating a mostly feasible appearance. This leads to often hilarious or deeply disturbing looking people. Check it out.

Also….Physics games done in flash….Cool. Gotta learn how they do that. Insane.

Make-up Blog: Class 8, Medium

This weeks blog is for us to describe a beautiful, well-designed object. I shall choose, because I am a freaking gaming addict, an xbox 360 controller. The sleek, rounded form is meant to slip into the users hand easily and comfortably. It’s  just the right size – all of the buttons are easy to find and within easy reach (a far cry from the controllers of old…the hard boxed edges of an NES controller, the infuriatingly strange design of the N64 controller, the outrageously bulky XBOX original controller……it’s more like the sensibly designed playstation controllers). The controller’s body is a plain white color which offsets the brightly colored A,B,X,Y buttons. The shoulder and trigger buttons are easy to find and are responsive. The whole configuration of the controller is really built to fit the hands.

Groovy.

Post…who knows?

Heres the next music video. It is nice to work alone for a change. Don’t get me wrong, it’s different working in a group since, theoretically, more can get done in less time. Theoretically is one thing, though…with a lot of minds working at once, it’s far more common for less work to get done. Although it is nice to be in a group because it breaks you of that comfort zone of having ‘your’ ideas – it’s great to let other ideas in once and a while. Heres the video.

Project 7 and Kevin Kelly

I found Kevin Kelly’s post enlightening. I have long since realized that the internet is more or less a copy machine – capable of producing anything ad nausem. This fact has been a source of some level of stress for me, though because I know if you can’t control where your ideas go or who has them, you can’t control your own income.  But, Kelly raises excellent points on what an artist or business can do to increase and control their income in a digital world of infinite information.

Immediacy: People are certainly willing to pay a premium for immediacy. People want to be the first on their block to experience the new and interesting. People will pay so much to have the newest and latest gadgetry before their friends. That Halo:Reach Beta which comes out next month will be a huge draw for halo fans…and it’s not even a full game…its just a taste. But people want that experience…they need it.

Personalization: is perfect for the artist. Paying someone to personalize your cars, houses, movies, games, food, computers, skin….it is something that you will usually have to pay an artist or someone trained in a craft to do.

Interpretation: It’s a clever move on the part of these companies that release their software for free and charge for the training. It’s harder to control the hard bits of data of a program than it is to control the cognitive information needed to use that data.

Authenticity: I saw on CNN.com that an original Superman comic sold for about 15 million dollars or something (don’t quote me on the price). If people know your name, they will be willing to pay more for an original. Doesn’t work so well for art students though. I also know many people who’ve used ripped versions of popular programs….full of bugs and constant loss of data. Another reason to pay more for an authentic program.

Accessibility: Being able to access your info at any time is becoming more common and necessary. It’s expected that we get things on-demand now. Blockbuster is too inconvenient — I want to rent the movie from my own couch. Not so much a selling point as a growing necessity.

Embodiment: This touches a little on what the last blog was about…a given work of art is highly subject to the medium it’s portrayed through. If you can tap into this and find a way to display something in a way that people can’t anywhere else – and it’s interesting – then people will have to come to you.

Patronage: I’m at odds with this particular idea…Personally, I like to pay for a CD rather than have someone burn it for me for free just because that’s how I feel it should work. As an artist of sorts, I kinda feel like if I stole someones music, it would be no different than if they stole from me. However, everyone else in the world that I know personally rips music from the web. . . . Radiohead did have a really creative idea to let people pay what they wanted for music.

Findability: get your work out there so that people can see it. As Kelly states: “an unfound masterpiece is worthless”. Simple enough.

Project7: took 8 hours. I’m so tired of sitting in this computer chair. So tired of Flash. But project 7 turned out a little better than I thought it would. It still needs sound, but that can easily be added later. It’s kind of cartoony, but it’s meant to contrast with a sort of dark ‘story’.

Spring Break = Done

Here’s the spring break project.

Groovy.

Anyway, the video I’m making sucks. No joke. I’m feeling the program out a little bit – it’s not too bad actually, just takes some getting used to. It’s no where near as complicated as the Maya program I used last semester.

My response to Walter Benjamin’s take on the reproducibility of art. At first I though Benjamin was trying to say that a work of art’s ‘worth’ is measured only in it’s consumption by the masses – that if something is reproduced infinitely, the worth of the art goes down to nothing. Then I thought, well, in a way, it is true. Take the infamous Mona Lisa as an example – the original is worth a fortune, but each reproduction that is made and slapped onto books, cups, mugs, hats, stationary, shirts, rugs, pets, or children is worth next to nothing. But because of the amount of exposure this painting has recieved to the masses, the painting itself – not the original, nor infinite copies, but the idea of this painting – has actually gained worth in our collective social mind.

But, I though, hasn’t this level of mass consumption of a great painting cheapened it? Subtlety is buried and lost – most don’t see the form or composition of the painting, but a female portrayed in a sickly yellow, vaguely smiling. It’s now seen as a selling point rather than a work of art.

….

Then I read what Benjamin wrote again, and it turns out that that’s not really what he was saying. Obviously, I can lose myself in thought rather quickly. More to what Walter Benjamin was saying is probably that the way a work of art is displayed will affect it’s reception. A painting on a wall will be a more personalized experience where the viewer will contemplate on what’s before him or her. A painting projected onto the moon will be a social experience where a popular opinion will quickly be formed and will effect every opinion of that painting from then on.

It’s like when a teacher asks an opinion in a classroom, taking votes by a show of hands. When asked to raise their hands, the students will, usually, slowly lift their hands up while simultaneously looking around the room to see if their opinion is in the minority. If another student came in late and was asked to vote as well knowing what the majority of the class voted for, he or she will likely cast a vote for whatever the majority voted for regardless of personal feeling. Again, I feel like I’m losing myself in thought. We’ll see what happens in class this week.

Project 5

Here’s the website that I found. It’s called Halfbakery.com and it’s got a lot of random ideas that anyone can post at any time. There’s some original thinking going on there. One person posted an idea for a spring loaded curtain that pops out of your fly when using the restroom – so you don’t have people sneaking peeks at your junk. Pretty weird. Someone else proposes using an army of zombies to power the planet. Simply put them in a power plant, hook them to a harness and hang dinner in front of them (i.e., people) and then we harness their unyielding energy for our own purposes.

Here’s a link HalfBakeryI’m not crazy about the layout of the site though. It’s pretty bland. The design is pretty basic – white space is all over, but it isn’t utilized well. A background color would be a basic addition that could really help, or the page could be organized in a way that would enhance the white space. Plus, most of the type is more or less the same size, which makes it somewhat difficult to navigate the page. So basically, my take on the page is it has interesting content but it is flawed in it’s presentation.

Here’s my project for the week.

The idea being that this would be your first initial…or something. In any case, The black box is the shape, and the white shapes on the inside would be empty and be the same color as the shirt itself. The black space is created using ONLY the letter itself – so it’s all type. This of course, could be used with all letters of the alphabet

Project 4.

I wasn’t sure what to do with myself this time around. So I looked through some old sketches and picked a few weird looking characters to translate into illustrator. I’m not particularly unhappy with the translation, but it’s pretty much just that; they are not designs. So if I were to change anything, it would be that these shirts need to not look like they have a random character slapped on them. Everything should look much more integrated in my opinion.

As for the characters on the T-shirts, they are fairly random, but are possible characters for an animated show a friend of mine has in the works. We shall see.

Links:

My Zazzle Store