Reponse to Edward Burtynsky Film

In class, we are now starting on our photography unit and the first thing we had to do was watch a movie on Edward Burtynsky. The reason for this is because the theme of this unit is to go out and take photos in industrial setting and put together a presentation of some sort around it. Edward Burtynsky's photography is about how industrial landscapes can effect surrounding areas. We watched a documentary on his work which included the places he went to shoot his pictures.

Personally, I thought the movie was boring as a whole. I thought it was boring because there didn't seem like there was much going on. Most of the movie was just the context of some of his photography shoots and then the finished products themselves. Because this was all the movie was to me, it made it very hard to pay attention. Imagine, sitting through an hour and a half of the same boring thing. The movie was 90 minutes long so we had break it up between two periods. I will admit however, that two things in that movie did capture my interest for a bit and that was when I was watching how fast the assembly line workers assembled small machinery and when there was a picture that he shot of many many cars that look almost identical lined up in rows. I can explain why that interested me but it did. Maybe it was the weird repetition of grey that sort of captivated me.

Anyway now for the part that all of my regular readers likely enjoy the most. I was watching Sxephil yesterday and as part of a new show that he and other ppl(if I'm not mistaken) do on youtube called Sourcefed, he did a segment on Mike Relm who created audio/video remixes of videos like the Old Spice commercial for example. I looked him up on Youtube soon after and found a Scott Pilgrim vs The World remixed with How Low Can You Go by Ludacris. I thought it was cool so I am now directing it to my reader :). Side note: For those of you who don't know who sxephil is. He has a channel where he just talks about stuff that matter to him like pop culture, current events etc etc. He funny, check him out. Also check out Mike Relm and his other remixes. Enjoy the last of your long weekend and see you next week.

I've been pulling out my hair :P

Last week had been a very busy and very stressful week. The Yearbook deadline was due last friday so needless to say, my head was everywhere. I skipped like 3.5 days of 4th period to work on it and I stayed after school late all week. Friday in particular I stayed until 11 oclock :P. Most things were FTP'd on saturday morning by our other teacher, Ms.Johnson to Scantex ( our yearbook publisher). The only thing left is to tie up any and all loose ends so the entire Yearbook can be sent off to be printed by the end of this week. All in all. It's been a very busy and stressful week but I think we're almost in the clear. Hopefully, assuming nothing goes wrong between now and the YB delivery date, LCI should be seeing their yearbooks on Contact Day June 26th.

So I have been behind on my blog post. I have an outstanding blog post for both of my CyberARTS teacher. They didn't get done for two reasons: 1) I was busy with work for other classes so I sort of forgot. 2) Most likely laziness. Anyway, I been doing the Shazaam Project which I may have gotten into in an earlier blog post but is a project in which art students make things depending on that years theme. Last year we did T-Shirts and this year we're doing murals about the perception of our school. I won't show what I have so far( I want it to be a surprise) however today I spent six hours on this part of my project which is a vector tracing of my school in Adobe Illustrator CS4. This took six hours and consist of 51 layer excluding the picture I traced this from.

Presenting...The Rib Chair

My class and I did a project where we had to make a chair that exudes our personality in someway. I made The Rib Chair.

Conceptually, I wanted to make the Rib Chair resemble the human ribcage a bit to kind of give it the weird gothic look to it. Part of it's design was originally based upon an earlier design that I was thinking of in the beginning which was meant to be reminiscent of Dr. Evil's chair from Austin Powers. I think this exudes my personality because I like creepy, gothic stuff, I like office chairs with wheels that spin and of coarse chairs sooo comfortable that you could fall sound asleep in them.

I was really behind in this project so I was one of the last ones to finish it however I put in a lot of time after school to finish. Piece of advice, if you're going to use the glue gun, any mistake in terms of placement need to be corrected immediately. I found this out the hard way when one of the chairs legs were slightly off. Something else that went a bit wrong with this was the seamless white tape didn't work out too well for me. It started to peel and it didn't bend as well as I'd hoped it would. What I did like with this project though was that I got to work with the circle cutter and the straight cutter. The straight cutter took a bit of practice before I could make perfect circles that weren't dented. I also got to work with foamcore which was a medium that I never used before. Overall, my one regrete for this project is that I wish I had more time to make it better.

Video on Trial 2: Back with a Vengeance

I have returned with a new video to punish and a new video to reward with my admiration(because that is worth soooooo much). Anyway, the 2 videos on trial today is Change by Deftones and Saint Veronica by Billy Talent.

Case#1: Let's start with the good video today. Saint Veronica by Billy Talent was a good video. The song was about a girl named Veronica who found her mother's pills and went into a coma. I like this video because although it doesn't match word-for-word with the song, it's still relevant because the events of the video could be what she's experiencing in her coma, like it's just a really messed up dream that she's having where she and her family are living rag-dolls. At the end of the video, one Veronica's threads get caught on a nail as she was running away from her family. She then unravels and possibly dies. I liked the look of this video because for whatever reason, it reminded my of the Village or Strangers...even though The Plot of the Village had so much more potential to be a seriously awesome move but failed because it was an M. Night Shyamalan film. Anyway, I find this innocent of being a well executed video with a REAL story behind it *cough* Drake *cough*. 8/10

Case#2: The the bad video :/. This video made me sad because I had high hopes for this video because I thought the song was awesome..however I was clearly wrong. Change by Deftones was an awesome song before the video however watching this video ruined the song a little for me. In this video the shots are mundaine and don't look like they have at all..anything to with the song. In the song its self was good. How I imagined it, I thought of someone changing before your eyes and becoming a much colder person than from when you met them. In the video, it was the band playing at some party with lots of booze and hardcore drugs and animal masks for whatever reason. This video was a huge disapointment and I find it guilty of being a poorly executed mess. 4/10.

Anyway that's if for now. If you want to feel what an eye seizure feels like, go to Burningmeh's blog and look at his video on trial blog post where he review Bon Jovi's Have a Nice Day. *sigh* Honestly Bon Jovi, nobody likes you that much. >.<

Trip to the Tim Burton Exibit

Last Thursday, my class and I visited the Tim Burton Exhibit. We saw lots of his early work as well as authentic props and costumes from movies like Nightmare Before Christmas, Batman, Mars Attack. Unfortunately, I was unable to take any photos of the exhibit but I saw some really interesting stuff like the Martians from Mars Attack, the Catwoman costume from Batman Returns and the Batman cowl from Batman, a prototype model of Oogie Boogie. It was very fun. From there we spent like 2 hours walking around downtown doing absolutely nothing.

How to Zombie-fy yourself on Photoshop

I found a cool tutorial on how to Zombie-fy yourself in photoshop. I just wanted to share it with you guys. I thought it looked kind of cool :)