Phishpatch's Blog

First Assignment Reflection

phishpatch — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 11:23:18 +0000

Having handed in the assignment on friday I am still unsure of what I am supposed to do. Seems a bit late for that now. Thinking back on the whole process of the video production I think my practical side is getting the better of me. In my reflection on inspiration cluster 1 I spoke about how the functionality and practicality of the Wabi Sabi design philosphy fits me really well. The only trouble is maybe too well. I struggle to allow myself to do things that I cannot rationalize a reason for.I have seen a couple of other students videos and have been wondering if I did enough to justify my points and my objective. I have to keep reminding myself that we are probably hardest on ourselves and so I shouldn’t worry too much about it. Oh well, we shall see when the comments come back. One thing which really threw me off about the brief was the inclusion of an alternate edit. Having spent a good deal of time working out how I was going to present my original idea I wasn’t at a loss as to how to conceptualize another cut. After considering my options, I realized that I should do something that will benefit me in the long run, both for the collaborative project but also for my aspirations. In the end because I aim to do sound as well I added some fast paced music put together in garage band to see how it changed the mood and my, did it ever! Now I am really keen to see how sound can completely change the mood and emotion of a video.

Wabi Sabi: My Inspiration

phishpatch — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 22:48:28 +0000

Wabi Sabi and the Principles of Japanese Design
What has inspired me about Cluster 1 is the practical and functional mindset behind the entire concept. The constant allowance for variance and change is indicative of the momentary flashes of genius that often accompany the greatest ideas. One of the driving forces behind the movement is the idea that each design or piece captures an instance, a moment in time. This freedom is something that I have struggled to find in my own life and so to use this opportunity as a segway into exploration of both myself and production techniques afford me a unique opportunity. I foresee a challenge of choosing this cluster to be working out a way to display this momentary and often random philosophy into the video medium. This challenge arises from the moving and often story like qualities associated with video. The singular and seemingly disjointed nature of Wabi Sabi composition thus may result in an incoherent form. The one aspect of Japanese design that ties it all
together is its functionality. Again, my interest in this aspect of Japanese design has a personal resonance. Personally I believe that art for art’s sake has its place however I believe more strongly that everything we do should have a purpose behind it or rather that we should focus our time doing things that will have a positive influence.

My initial thoughts on composing my 30 second video trailer are to use a sequence of unlinked still images to create a story line. These images are to be randomly selected, most likely through a keyword search of the Flickr.com creative commons archive or shots that I have taken myself. Forcing myself to develop a thread through the photographs will allow me to embed myself in the idea of using the beauty of a individual moments to construct a bigger whole. This view can be seen in Toyo Ito’s description of Tokyo, “it is an image that is incomplete… I think that as a city [it] is further advanced than the individual pieces of architecture which comprise it and that it is in a perpetual state of revision. “Ito’s intentions as a designer correlate with the approach of a Haiku poet, who is not trying to isolate the object of study from its context, but conceive it as part of a momentary totality.”

The key term used to consolidate the ideas of the Wabi Sabi design philosophy is ‘makeshift’ Ito’s work takes this term and appropriates it into works that use layering by building a composite of materials and seeing how they react with each other. This is a topical issue for both my personal projects and the final collaborative display. For me personally, it is of importance because I will be learning how to use many new parts of Final Cut Pro and will need to think about how to apply and layer them successfully. It is important for the group to understand how each of our mediums interacts with the others so that not only can we conceptualize how our individual pieces will fit together but also be able to assist our group members with their ideas.

One of the other parts of Japanese design that interests me is the idea that parts can come together as a whole, break apart and then come together as an entirely new whole. That these parts maintain a sense of themselves is an important factor in this. The notion that this practice conjures is an image of the “Swiss army knife” of design.” One of my favorite exercises in high school art was turning something into something completely different. For example in one project I turned an umbrella into a lionfish by re- appropriating the materials provided. This forces you to both think outside the box as well as creatively about the charicteristics of the medium, how they can be utilized and how to escape their restrictions. I am really looking forward to working on this project.

CSS Design Reflections and Screenshots: Consistency & Simplicity

phishpatch — Wed, 20 May 2009 01:18:53 +0000

Reflecting on my design for the CSS assignment I have tried to keep things as simple as possible. What I have done to achieve this is that I have kept each page basically the same layout. This makes it easy and intuitive to navigate. In conjunction with this I have kept many of my boxes the same size and positioning. This made coding for the arrangement of the site much simpler. This also meant that I by keeping the layout the same all the angles that created would remain the same. Consistency! consistency! consistency! is what I was aiming for here in terms of the layout as well as the colors. All the # tags for the color have been matched so they are exactly the same color. I attempted to use several of the free to separate content and make it more flexible in terms of the possible arrangements. This did however result in editing some the HTML which I know we were not supposed to do but in the end these changes are not visible and do not impact the server version of the file. All of these changes are noted in my CSS so I know what I have changed. Included along with this post are a number of screen shots (7 app.) that display the original vision for my site. I was planning on using a columnar list in order to deal with the #metalist in order to differ it from my use of a scrollbar on my credits page. I did however come to the conclusion after several failures at entering the code that columns wouldn’t work as well as a scroll box because they force your eye to jump from bar to bar rather than simply being able to scan down a list.

C’mon everybody and do the scroll bar

phishpatch — Sun, 17 May 2009 00:17:24 +0000

insert under # metalist

position:absolute;
left:85px;
top:440px;
display:block;
border-width: 1px;
border-style: solid;
border-color: 000;
padding:5px;
margin-top:5px;
width:280px;
height:200px;
overflow:scroll;

You can resize and position all you want.

48 Hour AD MAKING CONTEST

phishpatch — Sat, 09 May 2009 23:24:15 +0000

Yes, I do know my caps are on. I wanted to alert you all to something I found on youtube that I am sure some of you already know about. Cannes film festival is hosting an ad making contest for a viral ad campaign. the brief comes out midnight GMT on may 15. This would be an awesome chance to show what you’ve got. Here’s the catch, it has to be made within 48hrs of the brief being released. check out this URL http://www.youtube.com/canneslions

NEW PROJECT DISCUSSION FORUM COMING SOON

phishpatch — Tue, 05 May 2009 22:02:54 +0000

For those of you who missed my last blog entry, hopefully this has caught your attention. I will be starting a new blog to which you will thanks to Matt should be able to post to as well. This will be going up as a forum for students to discuss their independent projects and also recruit help on them be it in acting or with the technology. Keep your eyes peeled, it is coming soon.

House Of Cards: Where do we go from here?

phishpatch — Sat, 02 May 2009 12:54:04 +0000

I have not posted to this forum in a while so I think it is time I made my return. In a conversation with a classmate we came upon the topic of whether or not the CSS exercise would prove useful in the future. This brought us to a discussion on our plans for the future, where we planned to take our degree’s and such. This reminded me of the manifestos that we made at the beginning of this semester and how we planned to change the media scape. In addition to this, a suggestion of Kuo Wei (David’s) that we should create a forum for discussion on personal projects we are working on. I want to take a poll of my fellow bloggers and find out about the projects they are working on. Perhaps this forum could allow students to enlist help on their projects etc. I hope that this will encourage us to not only work more outside of classes but also to work collaboratively across disciplines. I will be the first to take the plunge and declare that I am an English major.

Rooms

phishpatch — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 09:59:45 +0000

This week we missed our tutorial due to Good Friday, could have been a blessing in disguise. I am very interested to see how this room experiment of ours turns out. Tomorrow I will be in the lab working on the tutorial exercise so I will have a better grasp of how the whole system links together. Perhaps I will see you there.

Vox Pop Video: Reflections

phishpatch — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 01:43:30 +0000

Looking back now on the first assignment the creative process takes more time than first thought. I turned in my assignment this morning but I think that it is not a fair representation of my creative industry. Personally I don’t like the way that my video turned out. It is in this spirit that I turn to the public to discover methods in which we can use the technology to really demonstrate our creative abilities. What affordances does Final Cut Pro allow us to have? Another difficulty that I encountered in editing the video was ensuring that it was exactly one minute long. I wonder if there is any way you can mark the timeline so as to indicate to you when you have reached the time limit. In order to cut small sections of the film i had to stretch the view of the timeline and thus could not see the end point of film. Is there any way to overcome this and view both the piece you are cutting and the end of the film at the same time?

Production Diary: Loose Ends

phishpatch — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:16:50 +0000

We are now in the middle of week 5 and almost halfway through the semester. This means that the VOX POP assignment is due. I wish everyone the best of luck with completing the assignment on time, though let’s be honest you would have to try pretty hard not to submit by the deadline. As a reminder, that is by 2pm tomorrow afternoon. As of right now I have completed the cutting and i need to run the video through the compressor then submit it into the drop box. One of the things I discovered while working on the editing of this video was that there were numerous ways to cut the video together. The Razor Tool, Crop Tool etc. My main interest this week stems from the reasons behind having so many tools to perform the same function. I am sure that these tools have implications and uses outside of simple cutting. Does anyone know what each one is useful for? Say, why Crop rather than Razor?… Being in week 5 also means that we have begun learning code. I was very surprised to see that there wasn’t anyone in our tutorial who had done coding before, perhaps this was because there were a large number of people who knew enough to teach me more than I could possibly use during the semester. I am beginning to enjoy code as I can now see what everything is doing, where is it going and where it came from.

Thanks everyone! and best of luck!