Final Project/ Aftereffect

I made an video with about 50 images for this project about Aftereffect of catastrophic event happened in Korea recently.

The plot is about how a survivor of the incident lives her daily life. Her life after the incident is drawn with charcoal, black and white. I thought the emptiness and stress she felt after the incident would make her feel her surrounding sketchy as these charcoal drawings.

Her life before the incident is drawn with pencil and colored with watercolor.

 This is one of the scenes where she goes back to her school, remembering her days with her friends before they are gone. Backgrounds and friends are colored with watercolor, but the girl is drawn with charcoal.

 Lastly the incident is depicted with acrylic paints. One of the factors I like about acrylic is the possibility of painting with colors not perfectly mixed in one brush stroke. I though its unpredicted feature and brushstrokes could somewhat bring the incident into life. 

There are many unsatisfying factors in the project. First, I feel bad for not being about to make perfect art piece. As people mentioned during the critique, the sound is not good. To account for such imperfection, I could say that there were not enough time. Drawing each scenes with different matters did took a lot of time. Second, I think it would have been better if I had refined the story more. Connections betweens the scenes are not as smooth as I wanted them to be. And lastly, I wish I could draw better. Watercolor works for certain scenes are messy and I just thought overall quality would have been better if I could draw better.

It was new and somewhat fun to create this project. Some scenes were satisfying and I am glad about it. But there still are many things that could improve.

Response after watching Memento

I have heard of the movie Memento since I cannot remember. But I had no chance, or more like a will, to watch the movie. People around me would always say its a good movie, but I am more interested in movies like Pride and Prejudice, therefore I had no will to watch it. However after watching the movie, I regretted myself for not watching it. The way narrative is presented is really smart. This was my first response. The way the plots are divided into pieces and narrated in non-linear time perfectly matches the 'condition' Leonard is in. I don't know how to say it but there are so many smart tricks written by the director in the movie.

At first the movie started with Leonard killing a guy. Then the scene changes into black and white film. Leonard wakes up and reads little notes written by himself. He had a condition of not able to make a new memory since the incident which he remembers as the day when his wife got killed. In order to revenge her wife's death he tries to collect evidences that would lead him the the murderer. Due to his condition he tries to make note of every important informations he receives so that himself in the future could remember what happened to him five minutes ago. He believes in the credibility of those notes to be perfect. Well for a person with such mental state, it would be hard to question about it. Without questioning which situations he is putting himself in, he follows what notes says and end up killing four men. During the process he was misled by Natalie, who abused his situation to revenge on her boyfriend's death. However the most serious trap he was trapped was a trap he made for himself. He abused his own condition to kill Teddy, a police who have been helping him since the incident, for Teddy told him the truth he did not wanted to remember.

All these story lines were interwoven through out the movie, therefore, I felt like I am in similar condition as Leonard. I was confused about the story, and started to forget about the scene at the beginning of the movie. I had to look up for the full plot after watching the movie.
Overall I really liked the movie and I do not regret myself for buying the movie from the iTunes.

Response to the short stories by Borges

The readings were very confusing. The idea of labyrinth is suppose to be very confusing, therefore I think the author did a great job in making his short stories into a labyrinth for people's mental.

Between the two short stories I was able to understand more from the first short story, the "Circular Ruins." The labyrinth is the story is the lives of a man created in other men's dream. The idea is 'circular' in a way that a man creates a man in his dream and the created man tries to create another man in his dream. The cycle is eternal and there is the labyrinth in the story. Also the cycle of the man dreaming again and again over and over was another slump. In addition his non seizing passion to create a man was another factor close labyrinth in a way that he cannot let the idea go but stuck in the goal until he make it. 

The second story I read was "The Lottery in Babylon." I later found out that I read the wrong story. Still I read it so I will proceed on writing the response. This story was more about human nature and how it is easily trapped into certain labyrinths. The lottery itself is very addictive and hard to step out, and when there are other people who keep throw in psychological traps it is even harder for poor people to exit. The speaker successfully describe how people's mind work when certain things happen to them during the lottery and how they entangle their lives. 

Fictional Documentary

This was the first and the last group project in this class, and it was interesting. Having two different people with totally different style to work together was not easy.

My partner, Gabriel Marrazzo, and I came up with several ideas for the fictional Documentary, and we chose to film something about Selfies. The fictional part of the documentary is the significant meaning Selfie have in people's daily life.

Response to the Exit through the Gift Shop

I am a big fan of Impressionism. I love the colors and the tranquil feeling it brings to me. Degas, Monet, and Renoir are my favorites. I also like Alponse Mucha, an artist famous for creating a whole new trend of art. I love illustrations with warm and cozy colors and feelings. I generally like an art piece which gives pleasure at the first sight. There are exceptions though. Tim Burton is one. His creepy but cute drawings are a bit far from what I usually like, but still I am fascinated with his works. The other artist I like is Banksy. 

One day in my Studio class this semester, our professor brought Banksy's art works for our topic. That is when I realized that I like his works but I don't remember why and how I started to like him. After watching the very first five minutes of the Documentary "Exit through the Gift Shop," I remembered of an art class I had when I was a middle school student. The teacher showed us some documentaries about Banksy, and one of them was this Documentary. I was somewhat surprised to learn that I knew about Banksy and also MBW for a long time. 

To be honest, I thought the Documentary was not a fictional Documentary. All the clips recorded by MBW was real. Family video, street art videos, police videos, and even the disney land videos were so real I thought the whole Documentary was real. Though I had this uneasy feeling about Thierry and his more like obsession than passion. I thought this character is very unbelievable. Also the narration and even Banksy showing up though hidden under the hood seemed a bit unbelievable. 

My initial response after watching this documentary again was not that pleasant. I felt like MBW and all the buzz about MBW is a result of thorough brainwash saying that this guy and his work means a lot and is important. I am starting to think that the intention for making this video is to accuse how Mr. Brain Wash was successful in making audience to believe he is great even though his art works are collections of copies and comparatively non-serious pieces. 

Proposal for Final Project

On April 16th of 2014, heartbreaking accident happened in Korea.

One Ferry with about 3-400 innocent people were aboard got sunk due to several preventable wrong doings by some people. Among those few hundreds of people, only 176 people survived. The main reason why this incident brought the whole South Korea in deep sadness is because most of the lives that were trapped inside the ship were 17-year-old students. 

Even though I was far away from Korea, I was strongly effected by the tragedy. I've been feeling down for a few days and I wanted to do something about the topic.

For the Final Project, I knew I am going to do something along the line of graphic novel or animation, because of my strong affection toward web comics and animation. Also, I wanted to extend more with the graphic novel assignment we had previously. Though I knew about the method, I had no idea what the story would be until the incident.

Knowing that the topic is very heavy(once again...) I tried to come up with new ideas, but I could not. I strived until last Saturday night trying to force my brain to come up with some bright and happy plots, but I failed. So I chose this heavy and gloomy topic.

The plot is about how the survivor of the incident would face after they go back to their home. I cannot dare to fully understand what kind of emotional torments they would go through, but the image of empty class kept crawl back into my mind so I had to go for this storyline. 

There will be three different series of images in the video. One will be the images of the incidents and they will be drawn with acrylic or with computer and they would have very rough quality with harsh brushstrokes etc...

The other series would be life before the incident. This series would be drawn with pencil and colored with pastel or watercolor.

The last series would be a life after the event. These will be drawn only with black lines.

Those images would come and go through out the video making the video have nonlinear quality.

Storyboard

How I will draw the line drawng

 Vague idea I have for scenes where past and present meets

Story Board for Fictional Documentary