A sound in Motion - Spiral Jetty

This film more so then others just really took me by surprise. I don't know if it was the length, the content, or maybe just the narrators voice, but I was quite interested. More importantly I was really interested in one aspect more then others... the overall randomness of the films cuts were what really got me. You would see this working with tools and machines with the dirt and lake and rocks, then randomly it would cut audio and would cut to an image of a horned lizard. I tried to think of this for the entire film on why he would choose to do something like this. He also cut to images of dinosaurs among other things. One thing I did deduce from this is something I brought up and not a lot of my peers seemed to have the same idea. When watching this film I felt the overall look/feel of the design and final product felt very prehistoric. This would actually explain the dinosaur reference, and even the lizard and larger lizards such as the one shown are often talked about as descendants of the dinosaurs. I really do not know if this was his intention whats so ever but it made me think this, and I really could not see any other connection between the things shown. This being said it seemed to go well with the narrative he included with the "rocks,sand, salt to the west" that whole statement was very similar to the whole prehistoric feel and helped strengthen this idea even more.

Table Tops Galore

I would like to be 100% honest with my artist statement as at this point in my college career I am getting tired of writing for what people want to hear and what I actually mean. This being said I would like to state I really had a tough time with this project. First off the over all Idea I had for mine was a little more elaborate, it was more of showing the differences in the deep sub genres of electronic music, by playing clips of songs of those genres made by myself but I was having issues with projecting some kind of visual, not to mention having to write a bunch of different pieces of music within a small time frame with so much else on my plate. This being said I looked towards my second joy in this world and that is illustration. My concept was that it would be an artist drawing a character that was interacting with the camera and the artist by saying things he didn't mean to write. I tried to capture that feel that artists share when drawing a character of theirs. After two semesters of animation I was so used to drawing the same character that he happens to find his way into all my pages of my notebooks and sketchbooks. I cant tell if others know this feeling that I am referring to but this feel that I express when I draw a character so much it seems to grow on you. That being said, I feel my performance of this was a tad poor. I got the idea across but it is really a lot harder then it looks to cram this into 2:30 of footage, I saw so many students killing time near the end and I saw this nearly impossible on mine. The drawings were executed a tad sloppy and there wasn't much time to move the paper to the camera for a zoom in, which took away from my "live animation" effect. Building off time management I realized you really have to think out every detail of the shot or you will just be losing time near the end when you want that buffer for screw ups. Granted I would probably prefer to edit things like this, it is a god practice to get into performing something right the first time or learning from your mistakes. Overall I feel that was the most important part of this exercise was that, it is easy to edit film and make everything look nice but it all boils down to the raw footage and capturing that one great thing, and I feel that this is the true essence of experimental film.