Reflecting on this Film

It's done.

To say we didn't run into problems with filming would be a lie. To say we fucked the whole thing up would also be a lie. I don't want to lie in this blog post, so I'll say the truth; we didn't focus enough when we should of. Really it's my fault, since I signed up to be the leader of the project.

The first two days of filming went really smoothly. We had a schedule and we knew exactly what we were doing. I think that's where we ran into problems later.

What I liked:
Vika's house is a perfect place to film. It's has so many parts and angles that we made her one space feel like three separate houses. It fits the film tonally and gave the film personality. I also really liked Jzabelle's acting. It was surprising how good she was from having little experience. The camera doesn't love a lot of people, but it loves Jzabelle. I tell her to do act bigger and she actually does it. She does her best work when she's comfortable and I think she loved all the parts she had in the movie. She had to be distinctively different with each of her appearances to really justify having her play all the smaller parts. I was talking to her about how she should go about doing her police officer part, and she really bought into it. I used a trick I had learned a couple years ago in STAC to get people to act for the camera, I told to practice the movements and lines so I could see how it looked on the camera without actually filming it, but I would be filming it. It worked. But it didn't need to, because she did great without it in the next shot too. Really everyone's acting was pretty good, apart from mine. I had a problem with it, but by the time I was editing, I decided to let it go. I would normally take many shots so that I could get the acting totally right, but when I'm not filming, I don't know if what I had just done was okay or not. I should have looked back after every take to see if I was good or not, but I didn't, and now I know that I should. I had never really been in a group where I was the most experienced filmmaker, so if I ever needed to play a part in other films, I could rely that everyone else would note my acting, like in Shiana's film last year, I was constantly having to redo everything because Shiana was extremely picky, which was a trait I tried to reflect in this film, but even here I should have done more.

What I didn't:
After editing the first bit of what we had filmed on the first day, I came back and realized that there was a plot hole in my script. I had it that Vika and Grace went straight from the hospital to the sperm daddy's house. When they leave the hospital, and are in the car, you do not know where they are going. This problem is solved within a couple of seconds because of a line Vika has that explains why they're there and who my character was. I tried to fix it, but I didn't write anything to fill that gap, I just asked Vika and Grace to improvise, which I found out was a mistake. We spent a good half an hour trying to do that, and almost everything we got to fix the plot hole was useless because it either looked bad, or the fix would have changed more than that specific scene, and I didn't want to go and refilm the hospital scene because I had edited it already and I realized that adding any more dialog would have ruined the fast paced feeling that the scene needed. The other problem was the last scene. I wrote a scene that was way too out there. It would have taken another day entirely to film that one part, and the chances of it being confusing were extremely high. Especially because it takes place in Vika's tiny bathroom, where not only is it hard to get a good angle, but also because I had to make sure that we never actually saw the baby in the bathtub, because it wasn't actually there because we don't have a baby, real or fake, that we can get wet. Also, we had to film that entire sequence in 25 minutes because we were running out of time and I couldn't stay after even for a second. If there was one thing I could fix, it would have been that. We spent far too much time fooling around that day, because we didn't have much to film, and we had started late because we were waiting for Emily to finish her musical preview thing.

Overall, I like the film. It's funny and it was fun to make. You feel more comfortable when you're making something that's supposed to be ridiculous. Buddy films are just that normally, two people going on an adventure doing silly things, and that's exactly what it feels like.

Recently I purchased a standing mirror, because Egon Schiele had one and I thought that it would be a good investment. Honestly, it was. I've realized recently that there are different moods to when I create art, and I make different products in those different moods. Whenever I am in Ganes' class, and in most cases drawing from imagination, I am not focused, and the work I make is shows that. Because these pieces are worked on for for weeks, but only for about half and hour a day, they seem all over the place, and there is a lot more detail on the mindless work that I hate. Like for a piece I'm working on now,  I am using reflective paper and attaching it to my piece to look like a broken mirror. It's work I would never do at home, and it's very time consuming. The feeling I get with the mirror is very different. I start something and then I have to finish it. My mind goes to a place that it doesn't in a classroom, and the work I make, I like more. Really, I don't like working anyplace besides my room. I need a certain environment to get that feeling that creates work I like. And I need time. Just because I have an hour of free time, doesn't mean I can just spent it drawing. I realize that I don't start actually getting good, and getting that feeling I like unless I've been working for at least an hour or two. It's complicated to explain, but it's like a spectrum. I can only create a certain type of work at the beginning of my drawing, and only after that can I really get focused and do the work I like.
I've been working a lot on my portfolio lately. I hate all the bullshit besides that. There is so much I have to do besides my art to go to school which really doesn't make sense to me. I wish I could run away and work on art for a month without anyone bothering me. There are things I want to learn but it always feels like there is something in my way that is preventing me from learning those things. What's the point of being a student if you have that problem. My job is to learn, but right now, it feels like my job is to fill out forms and sit through useless classes. Even this year, I spent so much time trying to create a perfect schedule, but I still find the same problems. I'm not learning French and Spanish at the speed I want to, art class is basically a lunch period without food, and english, economics and health are things to fill time. It doesn't feel like I'm learning anything, and that makes me angry. That's why I'm excited for college. No matter where I end up going, all the schools I'm applying to have foundation years. Spending a year just drawing and designing is what I long for. My average day is waking up at six, sit through classes all day, spend four hours a work, and then come home and do my homework for two hours. I can't learn if my life feels like a wheel turing the same way everyday. Weekends save me. I can paint and draw, while I listen to french and spanish music and that teaches me more than everything else I do.

Tent Project

Tents are confusing. Don't deny it, because you know they are. Why? That's the question the drives me into this project. Why does a tent need to be confusing? You should be able set it up and be chilling in your habitation within ten minutes.

So I started thinking. When I was little, I had a tent that would bend up and fit into a bag. It required no set up and the most difficult part of the process was putting the tent away. Starting from that point, it can become difficult to expand the idea. The tent itself wasn't sturdy. The poles that would hold it up were far to weak to withstand a night outdoors, so I was stuck. I don't know much about materials, in fact, figuring out what materials to use is still something that I find problems with now. That was the first block I had, so I decided to change the approach that I had. I was still looking at a tent through the old fashion idea of what a tent is. I took a step back and started to approach this like a designer. 

First I looked at what would be the easiest way to make a shelter. Legos. Legos inspired this whole project because they're easy. A three year old child can create a house out of legos. I translated that into the image of a tent and ended up with three boards that clicked together and created a pyramid. Immediately I encountered problems. Large boards aren't portable and even with conservative material usage, they'd be heavy. But that didn't stop me. The idea of pieces that just clicked together would work. So then I took a look at actual tents again. Fabric and poles are what normal tents are made out of, so I found my solution there. Rather than build a tent, the fabric and poles would build the triangular boards, which would then be assembled into a tent. Using the same materials as a normal tent meant that you had the same ease of portability. The best thing about modern-day tents is their portability, so my tent would have that same advantage in addition to it's ease of assembly. 

I spent a variety of days playing around with proportions with paper.

And on google sketchup 

Now I've reached the most difficult part so far of the project, and that's physically creating it. 

Connection is the hardest part. How will the fabric connect to the poles? How will the boards that are made connect with each other? These are the questions that I'm facing now.

In addition, I'm using other design idea I've been reading about to finish this project. For example, color coded poles. Using similar colors to signify what goes together means that the confusion of what pole is used for what goes away, and many of the poles are interchangeable because two of the three walls are the exactly the same. 

What is Industrial Design?

Within the next few weeks I'm going to be blogging a lot about Industrial Design, so I thought that I'd introduce the ideas and my views in a blog post before I get right into what I'm working on.

At the beginning of the school year I got two books. Actually one book and one was given to me; Vision In Motion and The Design of Everyday Things. Industrial Design feels new, even though it's been around for a while. Basically, all the modern ideas of design came with the industrial revolution. Before then there was no way to get your product to an entire population of people, so there was no need for people to collect and think about how things should be made. The Bauhaus is something that has come up in my art studies a lot, and now that I'm studying industrial design I can really see how important that school was. The Bauhaus was the first time that people collected and thought intelligently about design, and that's where industrial design was born. One of the most memorable things I read in Vision in Motion was that design for Americans isn't focused on quality because we are so rich that we buy new models and versions before the old one's are broken. Vision in Motion was written in the fifties, but that idea is still very true today. The Bauhaus look at design through their lens, a war-torn country that needed basics to survive. Buildings became boxes because that was the most functional thing at the time. Functionality is the idea that I'm trying to introduce here. Without functionality, whatever you're designing is useless. It doesn't matter how pretty or expensive the thing is, if it doesn't work well, then you as a designer has failed. Now, you can continue to dissect what is and isn't functional for different groups of people. To a designer in America in the 1950s, it makes sense to replace some parts with cheaper plastic because the user would buy a new one soon, but for Europe in the 1950s, cheaper materials would be bad design. Functionality is everything.
Form and functionality is actually everything. If you buy a knife and you can't figure our how to hold it, then it's bad design, even if that knife is the sharpest knife in the world. Form and function together is what creates great design. The product's physical shape should signify what it does. There are two big words that Don Norman stresses in The Design of Everyday Things, and they are affordances and signifiers. It's much easier to talk design if you understand these two words. An affordance is an action that the product does. A knife affords cutting and holding. Signifiers tell you what the affordances are. In many cases, an affordance is a signifier. A knife affords cutting and the blade signify's that. True good design is able to mix affordances and signifiers without signs, while a bad design needs signifiers to counteract the signifiers that the affordance has. A door that looks like it should be pulled, but really should be pushed, is an example of bad design. You need a sign to tell people the door should be pushed rather than pulled, and that's bad design.
Now, the examples I'm giving make it seems like I'm upset with the things that are badly designed in the world, and one might think, why would I care? The reason is that we as humans aren't supposed to be worried with simple tasks. The reason one needs to design things to make them easy to use is because most people aren't experts in that object. The controls to an airplane are difficult to manage because the people who use them are experts. You shouldn't need to be an expert with computers to write your school paper. I look at design like this, engineers create new things, designers let you use those things. So much of our human stress is caused by bad design. Your entire day could be ruined by a printer that keeps jamming. Many people dismiss the product for their stress but in reality, if you don't know what all those buttons are for on your dishwasher, or which way to plug in a USB cable, it's not your fault. Your job isn't to know how to handle these things, that's the designers' job, and we translate it so you can use it. If you need to read instructions to set up your coffee machine, that machine was designed badly (unless you're like my dad and have a thousand dollar espresso machine for the coffee purists). It's not too much to ask for a reliable product for something as simple as coffee.
The project I'm working on is a tent. Tents are some of the most confusing products out there. Most people who go camping aren't wilderness experts, so why do tents come with pages and pages of instructions if all I want to do is go out for a night? I'm trying to fix that with my tent project, and I'll explain in depth, using the theory I've discussed in this blog post.

Books

I have hit a very interesting artistic block in the past few days. Recently, I wrote an artistic statement about why art is important to me, I'll copy it on here:
_______________________________________________________________________________

Asking an artist why art is important to them is like asking a sailor why his ship is important to him. Without it, we do not exist. Without art, the person who I am today could not physically exist just as a sailor could not exist without his vessel to travel in. To some, my reasoning may sound less aesthetic than what they might imagine. I don’t need art to convey the deep complexities of my emotions or to try and bring a positive message to the world. I need art to be me. It’s selfish and shallow but that’s the way it should be. Art is important because it is the idea that I sail on everyday, and without it I’d drown.

_______________________________________________________________________________

I have come to accept art as a key part of my life, but I have also chosen to not make art my career. It's a bit hypocritical for me to say that I need art to survive but then decide that I want to be a designer. It all connects, but somewhere I feel a little guilty that I don't want to be a professional artist when I'm older, especially when I so truly believe art to be a part of me. The block that I've reached is in regards to how can I be successful as a designer/ artist. If art is supposed to be so personal to me, then why am I using the artistic skills I've learned to make something that isn't personal, in fact it's the opposite, design is thinking all about the user, and not about me. I've been reading The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and he describes that one of the biggest flaws in design is the lack of attention on the user, and designing the product for oneself. Isn't that what art is? Is the problem with bad design that it is too artistic and personal? No, I know that's not right because artists are much better designer than engineers. Bad design is bad because it fails to understand the human mentality of approaching an object, making the product too technical and complicated. It's personal because only the person who designed it knows how to use it. That isn't art because as personal as art is, it is still meant to be shared. But at the same time, approaching design as an artist is still wrong because your focus needs to be on the user. Art is personal, bad design is personal. I am an artist and a designer. Is the block clear now?

I'm not really all that worried about it, but that's been the idea rolling around in my head ever since I started really getting into that book. It's fascinating and the more I read about design the more I want to do it. It's just that this love I'm growing for design is coming at a time when I'm just starting to understand art. 

I did get some solace after reading the introduction to An Accidental Masterpiece by Michael Kimmelman when he explained how amateurs are lovers of their craft. I think that I can be content as an amateur of art rather than a professional. Like the herd of people at the piano recital, I can always continue painting. What I really fear is that I might lose the passion for personal art. What if I get so into design, and thinking about the user, that I forget to make art that is personal for me. If I went professional artist then I'd be insuring that I'd make art because that would be my living. As an amateur I rely purely on my own will, and that is scary because I don't know if my will to make art will be as strong as it is now in ten years. I want to be an artist for the rest of my life, but I also want to be a designer, tackling the problems of objects and creating new and creative solutions. I know that they can coexist, but the possibility that they might not is troubling. 

I Am Not Scared

It's ironic how, for the first time in a long time, I'm not scared during what should be a very stressful and scary time in my life. School starts tomorrow, and I've just finished up writing my summer paper and doing some other work for tomorrow and now I feel completely prepared. I'm not scared about the huge amount of work that my college preparation will take, nor am I scared of the difficult classes I'm taking, rather, I look forward to everything I can accomplish this year. There is nothing better than optimism, and this year I have more optimism than I've ever had going into school. I feel that I've reached a point of my life where I can reflect back on and not be disappointed in myself. For the past three years of high school I've been battling trying to discover who I am and that struggle has manifested itself in a lot of disappointing variations of myself. I don't deny that I won't go through more discovery this year, or in the rest of my life, but I think that I have finally chosen a path I can be proud of and I can start to grow in, rather than try and model who I am based on what other people say will make me happy. 

I have decided that I want to go to art school. That decision in itself was one of the most difficult things I ever had to do because of the internal conflict I went through. 

First, I had to accept the idea that I could get into art schools. I've been drawing and painting seriously for less than a year and the idea that I have the ability to get accepted somewhere was hard to grasp for me. Accepting the fact that I'm good enough to get into the schools I want to go to was incredible for my self esteem. 

Second, I had to find something to study. Industrial design was a term that I heard floating around before, but I never thought about it seriously until I started to research what it is industrial designers do. I fell in love with the major after a day of research. As much as I love art, I don't want to spend four years learning how to paint. Finding a major that could fulfill my artistic desires with a more concrete career apart from "artist" after graduation was something I needed if I wanted to pursue art in college 

And thirdly, I had to accept the workload that my decision would entail. The work is enjoyable work, mostly, but that only means that I need to work harder because I'm supposed to like it. I used to want to be like my aunt, spending years in college, getting a doctorate in a very specific category and taking teaching jobs on the side while I travel the world. I abandoned that idea just because I realized that my aunt's career is mostly writing papers, applying for grants and hours of research. I love anything social studies related, but I couldn't accept the workload that a career in that field would entail. I accept the fact that I might have sleepless nights finishing up a project or spend tedious hours trying to draw a live figure model. I understand that it all wont be fun, but I still want to do this. 

Being secure in what I want makes life so much easier. I know what I have to do to get what I want and I'm not scared about failing because right now failure feels impossible.  

Mr. Nobody

I don't know why this film wasn't on my radar for so long. It's such an interesting and beautiful film, and the lack of attention that it gets really surprised me. The movie is about choices. The whole idea of the film is that anything is possible if you don't choose. The film explores the different paths of all of Nemo Nobody's possible lives. While watching the film, it has a sort of Cloud Atlas aspect to it. Cloud Atlas came after this film, but it has the same sci-fi, disconnected storytelling that Mr. Nobody has, but Mr. Nobody is able to tie all of the beautiful paths with a plot that makes you think about the film as a whole, while Cloud Atlas feels separated in my memory.
The main reason I'm blogging about this film is because it feels very STAC. It's one of those films that nobody has heard of but is fantastic. You finish the film with the feeling of "what just happened" which is best feeling to have after experiencing art. What really upsets me is the reviews of this film. It's a general trend that I'm noticing about movie critics, they never analyze the film for what it actually is. Some of the critiques I've read have been nothing but a page of adjectives attached to the single grievance that it's confusing. Yes, it's confusing. It's supposed to be. I hate it when people dismiss a piece of art just because they don't understand it. Imagine if Waiting for Godot was a major motion picture before a play. Imagine how awful it would have been received by critics because "it's confusing". These experts are too focused in it trying to make sense than actually experiencing what is happening. That's how I differentiate the good confusing from the bad. If I'm standing in a museum in front of a piece of wood with nails in it, I try to experience what the piece is conveying, but after a couple of seconds I'm able to dismiss it as stupid and move on. If I stood in front of the piece and started to try and make sense of it, like so many people would, I'd come to the same conclusion, or worse, get caught up in the message of the piece and accept it as good. The ability to experience art is what is missing from the individual.
Take my mother, every so often I accompany her to a film. She get's the satisfaction of spending time with her son, and I get to go to any R-rated movie I want to for free. I try and take her to the best films that I can find or hear about, and sometimes I feel that it's wasted on her. After every film, on the drive home, I try and talk to her about the film, and I notice that most of the movies just fly over her head. I see that her mind focuses on the tiniest details of a film, and overlooks the film itself. For example, last week I went with her to see Lucy. I honestly didn't have high expectations for the film, but that day I was in the mood for some mind numbing sci-fi action so I decided that this film would do fine. I was surprised to actually find some substance in the film, and even though it has its faults in my mind, it still had aspects that could be thought about and discussed. Like first, Lucy as a character. She is the absence of character, which is extremely captivating because it allows the film to take on much more philosophy because there is little need to discuss Lucy's purpose or past, she acts as a vessel for the story to be told, rather than a story told about her. I wish that the filmmakers remembered this and didn't try and Hollywood it up with the French love interest, but the scenes of Lucy losing her humanity were captivating and satisfied more than the creation of a backstory that didn't need to exist. Also, [spoiler] the way Lucy is able to survive after her death in the end. She explains how time is what creates reality, and how without, one cannot exist. The final power Lucy acquires is the ability to control time, and so when Lucy dies in the end, the moment when the consciousness loses time and stops existing, she's able to survive as a sort of ghost, which could be seen when she send the text to the Police officer saying "I am everywhere". Anyway, after all of that, the first comment that I hear from my mother is that she thinks that the movie should have addressed other humans who were able to acquire these super powers, and she specified Jesus. I exploded on the inside when I heard that. First off, the comment makes me think that she wasn't paying attention, or actually, she was paying so much attention on the two minute scene with Morgan Freeman talking about super powered brains that she just decided to check out for the rest of the film. Secondly, the criticism is that an entirely new movie should have been made. That's like asking your friend if she thinks your soup needs salt, and she tells you that the duck would have been better. With a little salt, Lucy would have been amazing. There are honest criticism to be made on the film, like how the car chase scenes and the final break in scene are ridiculous, but people like my mother and movie critics so often ignore what they are looking at to focus on unimportant details.