What Does Reality Mean to You?

What does Reality Mean to You? is a short piece that I created as a precursor to my thesis. In this piece, I use various styles of graphics in 2 dimensions and 3 dimensions to showcase answers to the survey question “What Does Reality Mean to You?” For this animation, I collected 25 anonymous participants’ written responses to a six-question survey I created and distributed online. I wrote about it in my planning stages in a prior post: Project II Proposal - What Does Reality Mean to You? For this piece, I focused on the answer to the question “What does reality mean to you? Define the word “reality” – what it means to you in simple terms” and encouraged survey takers to respond with an explanation that is as short or as long as they would like. I devised a short script from the responses to this question and created images to accompany it, as well as got help from several ACCADians for voice acting. This is a Wordle I created to depict the most frequently used words in the essay responses:

When I create my thesis film, I would like to include more opinions about reality, reality as it pertains to current films and changing expectations and general perceptions of reality. This is important because graphics have improved so much nowadays that films can create alternative forms of believable reality, and enhanced realities or "hyperrealities," possibly changing viewers perceptions on what reality means and what technologies can do for us. I decided to use a modeling style that was simple, low-poly, and geometric, which is similar to the modeling style in a video I liked on Vimeo called “Let’s Talk About Soil.” This modeling style allowed me to create simple forms and to keep the project achievable given our time frame of half of a semester to complete the work. As a takeaway, I would like the viewer to know that reality is a subject with no agreed-upon definition by philosophers and social theorists. The only thing that is agreed-upon is that reality is perceived. This video was meant to assert that every person perceives reality differently. I really enjoyed working on this project. Thanks to all my voice actors and survey participants! It would have not been possible without the amazing ideas of the survey-takers and my colleagues at ACCAD, who despite their disdain for hearing their own voices, sound lovely!

Oz the Mediocre and Not-Really that Powerful

Oz the Mediocre and Not-Really that Powerful

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Oz the Great and Powerful. It might have been a great movie for children, because as a Disney film it was visually brilliant. It was, however, hard to pay attention to the movie. It was long, drawn out - the story became lifeless and lackluster. The protagonist (Oz, played by James Franco) was not reliable as an identifiable, honest character who grows throughout the story. He was sometimes nice, sometimes not - he seemed like a player who just womanized in the beginning and then didn't really care about Oz until the end when he tried to save it with his parlor tricks. Mila Kunis was over-dramatic and I think better suited for comedy roles. Her costume makeup was awful, (I know she is supposed to be the hideous Wicked Witch) but they could have updated the look for this movie - it looked like cheap green Halloween makeup with prosthetic chin and cheeks. Some of the animation in the set was cool... the jewel-like foliage was interesting. I might have liked the jewel-like foliage because I like shiny things.

Whatever the case, I think the visual effects and style of the film was its strong point, but the overall plot was terrible. I think the movie could have been shortened and the script could have been funnier as well as written to appeal to an older audience in addition to the usual family-friendly crowd. The overblown talk of fairy tales and greatness of the land of Oz was just terribly uninteresting. This movie has no soul, a story with no real development. I think this speaks to the fact that Hollywood can deliver us a beautiful film, but if the story is blasé, the movie is too. Story is king and in this case the story failed to deliver. Lovely set design and animation - I am not going to knock Disney for trying.

Jessica Hische: Should I work for Free?

Kindness: The only thing thing that should be free when it comes to creative work

Several years ago, I went to a Design Madison event at Hiebing. Jessica Hische was the guest speaker. She is engaging and quirky, and has a wonderful sense of humor. She is also AMAZING at type design. AND, she can make a mean web site and has an established web presence. I have been furiously revamping my portfolio web site because I have been searching for summer internships (Check it out at Biesboerdesigns.com). I know it is not perfect, but I had to get some of my works out there in a more appealing way than with my old Flash layout (flash, as we know is a dying technology). I used some great free tools such as highslide.js because I am not so keen on javascript, and a simple semi-responsive layout built to fit on screens of all sides (perfect fluid width layout).

Anyway, during my search for internships, I recently re-encountered Jessica's Should I work for free? chart because I had been noticing again all the companies that host unpaid internships. Jessica is so wise! And intelligent! I think that it's blasphemous that designers and creatives have to put up with this in our field. I completed an unpaid internship in one of the most expensive cities in the United States (New York City) when I was 21 soon after the collapse on Wall Street and I don't think I would work for free for that length of time again. I hold a bachelor's degree and designers and artists have also paid lots of money to complete school in addition to the rest of the world, so I think that just because work is creative does not mean it should be unpaid. It is also work and requires skills and hours and hours of work. I am not wrong to say this or being egocentric about my work. People in the design field are required to have years of experience just like everyone else. We need the basic means to sustain ourselves such as food, water, and shelter. I am in the process of completing a master's degree, and I think that to work for free at this point would be to devalue my work. I think the bottom line is: if you value your work, you should NOT work for free. Thanks for the cute chart Jessica! Her piece is also available as a fancy letterpress print here

Digi-EYE

On Friday I went to a festival compilation of digital film works by undergraduate film studies students at OSU, with several DAIM (graduate digital animation students) pieces thrown in. I was blown away by the films by the undergrads - their pieces were amazing. I loved the humor in the pieces, and the compositions they have created. I thought they all paid really great attention to sound as well. I recognize some of the students from a film studies class I took as well. I loved the music and the beat of Cotter's piece All Your Light (Times Like These). I also loved that everyone LOLed at Renee's Buried Unicorn. I think her film is universally identifiable because tuition debt is something that can weigh on a person and kill their spirit. I also loved Seth Radley's Cinemagraphs: An Experiment. I thought it was very creative. All of Tom Heban's pieces (Heblog) were great, although I have seen most of them before as he is a fellow graduate student in our department. Katherine Stevenson's Good Deeds was absolutely hilarious. I also really liked David Goodwin's pieces, Absence and Interstice as they were serious and reflective.

I was, however, disappointed with the politics involved with this exhibition. I think that the DAIM students' works were thrown in last minute. I was a little disappointed considering my pieces were thrown out of the lineup, even though my name and picture were present in the title sequence for the event. This is fine, but some of the animated works that were REALLY GREAT were also left out, like Sheri's piece. I also thought that Janet Parrott threw her work in to the mix with Ordinal 5, which was a little out of place considering it was a students' film festival. I thought her piece, about dance and the number 5, could be improved. The math didn't line up to what the dancers were doing (there were 7 dancers?). That piece was long and drawn out compared to the students work. The students utilized things like suspense, dialog, composition, tempo and all sorts of other devices to get the viewer engaged. Her piece, did not engage at all. It was academic-sounding and not engaging. There was no hook, no climax. The dancers were wearing weird leotards and were kind of creepy - they looked like extremely tight black and white spandex parachutes. I also thought it was discourteous that her piece was 8 minutes long, the longest film in the festival, whereas one of the works I submitted were ten seconds long. I think that some more digital animators pieces could have been used in the showcase instead of hers, like Sheri's Cinderella piece. Also, Ann Sofie Clemmensen's work The Laws of Jante utilized dance just like Ordinal 5 and was engaging. She utilized timing, repetition, intertitles and an old-timey black and white silent film style that worked with her subjects. Overall it was a great event, I just think that parts of it were pieced together last minute and that the DAIM submissions were widely underrepresented.