Empire by Matthew Mead

“Empire” is a piece that uses a combination of video, stop motion animation, and mainstream media film. The video begins with drips of oil onto a white page, symbolic for the catalyst and sustaining element of our society. Transitioning into a George W. Bush film, the soundtrack audibly states, “there is no such thing as real monsters.” Immediately following this is a montage of horrifying media clips portraying prisoners in Guantanamo Bay Prison, an unconstitutional US Military base in Cuba. Recent press reports, as a result of a document leak to anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, have highlighted the inhumane detainment of prisoners without due process of law. George Bush, responsible for bringing Guantanamo Bay to precedence following the events of September 11th, 2001, incarcerated hundreds of people from around the world. When Barack Obama ran for president, he vowed to close Guantanamo Bay. However, this has yet to happen. This false promise highlights the lack of change promised from administration to administration. Ultimately, The President must maintain the American empire, and to do so, America must have its stake in oil. As a country founded on the idea of Suburbia, America will go to great lengths to protect it’s interests, even if it means unconstitutionally incarcerating Middle-Eastern prisoners who are viewed as subversive to the American agenda.

leland final 4

Seeking, Searching, Examining

My final project entitled "Seeking, Searching, Examining" incorporates both video and sound. My goal of this project was to create a simple but strong visual piece that would not compete with the tense and layered sound scape I created.I found the simplicity and strength of each individual looking into the camera to be compelling seen against the sound of breath and body rhythms. The incorporation of the continuously turning foot gives the piece a feeling of suspended time, indirectly alluding to the sound score. The combination of these elements interested me. My hope is to stimulate the viewers senses in an unexpected way.

Tyler's Final Film Project

Statement:

The fact is that ideas are funny things. They are weightless and invisible with no material substance, yet ideas have the power to change the course of history. Human history is a complex whole of essential ideas, for ideas are the very substance of history. An idea can be many different things.

This piece portrays many forms of powerful ideas. Whether it be Buddha’s idea of establishing a lasting philosophy, or Copernicus defining the Cosmos, or whether it be the development of Romanticism, all were derived from the human mind.

The movement of ant like razorblades portrays the fluid motions of the immaterial idea. Some ideas grow into inventions and some ideas develop theories, either way it is amazing that something so undefined has the capability to write the course of time. Some of the ideas depicted in this film are ideas of joy, yet some are ideas of hatred. Both of which have the capability of spreading like a disease.

Sara's Final Video Project- Freedom

For my final project I created a piece about freedom that included stop motion, video and sound. I was inspired by a previous video I had created of someone dancing as well as a speech by David Foster Wallace. A particular segment of Wallace’s commencement speech regarding freedom and the idea of noticing and appreciating your surroundings or “water” of life caught my attention. I decided to revolve my piece around three different images that in some way illustrated freedom from my point of view. I chose pieces of Wallace’s speech based on what spoke most to me while reading it. Jamar dancing represents a freedom through movement, while the fish swimming in the confined bag represent the exact opposite of freedom. The shot of the girl standing on the dock represents freedom in a different sort of way. The water is moving freely underneath and around her and yet she is very still. She has the ability to move, and yet she does not. The final images of these three subjects are meant to cause the viewer to question the existence of freedom. Can freedom exist? How does it exist? How do you appreciate your own everyday freedom? Finally, I chose to end the piece with a rush of pictures of details that I took from my own everyday life. The images represent my freedom and choice to appreciate the details of nature.

Amy Final

For my final project I chose to work with a variety of kitchen appliances and objects that have seemingly no connection with the kitchen or any utilitarian uses in general. Everything we do in the kitchen has some end goal, some purpose, a use. I wanted to toy with the concept of usefulness and play. In this video, objects such as a skillet, a mixing bowl, a serving spoon, and a cheese grater are taken and played with in ways that are meant to seem either contrary or simply useless. Almost all of the footage shows some manipulation of the materials by an unknown outside performer, this is at once an attempt to give the objects a life of their own and remove at least some of the control that is implied when one manipulates objects. The use of rain on a windshield and the sound of water being played in are used to show the lack of control and purpose that I have attempted to portray with the kitchen related objects. Though rain itself obviously has a purpose, the movement of the rain on the windshield and the sound of playing in a puddle are meant to show how very useful things can be. at times, simply for play.

Julian's Final

Statement:
We’ve spent the entire semester playing with the dimension of time. We’ve used media that incorporates this fourth dimension in a more literal sense. This is to say that video and sound fill a physical frame of time. Here I am combining these four media into video and audio to convey yet another dimension, that of the greater notion of time. This larger idea of time, similar to fate, is a more abstract and emotional idea. Most of us are confronted with the reality of time as we grow up, reflecting on the life we’ve lived thus far. The most formidable years of my adolescence have been my later teenage years as I face a fork in the road between a foreign and professional world and the familiar innocence of childhood. But I often ask myself where my loyalty really lies.
This video is intended to incorporate all of these ideas into one. A man’s hollow silhouette sporting a sweatshirt, jacket, and Ipod walks up to a mirror but his reflection does not match his silhouette. The naked reflection slowly dresses himself in preppy business clothes as the hooded figure strips down to nothing. This is meant to represent one life giving way to another, childhood being stripped naked by adulthood. In another sense, though, it begs the questions which is more real; a shadow or a reflection? On a further note, the entire piece is nothing more than a projection onto a screen filmed through a camera adding yet another dimension of false reality. Meanwhile we hear the sound of a heartbeat, representing the life and vigor of youth. Toward the middle of the piece a ticking clock meshes with the heartbeat. These two differing rhythms fight with each other, falling in sync and back out again until the clock finally wins. Much like the character in the mirror, the clock represents a rigid mechanized businessman (not to mention time) that consumes both the heartbeat and the more youthful hooded figure.


Changing

Heather's Final Project

My video, “More than passing notes” is a combination of new ideas with elements from two previous projects. I wanted to work with my last video “Passing Notes” because I thought it had a lot of potential, and I decided to mix it with my stop-animation project that used scrabble letters. I chose stop animation with my video because I thought that in this case, it especially helped enhance the mysterious and scary parts. I tried to make my video have a creepy feeling to it, and thought I could achieve this by having allusive scrabble words appear throughout the video. I didn’t want the viewer to form a concrete opinion on what they were watching, but rather to be puzzled and form their own thoughts on what was going on. I watched “Passing Notes” many times in order to pinpoint what worked in it and what I thought had to be changed. I think that this video captures what I was trying to achieve in my previous version and in doing so it became a very different work.

Morgan's Final Video

“Mask, I am” is apiece about identity and the confusion it can bring. I originally started out wanting to create a piece that showed the material aspect of the identity and self and it became something not only about the materialness of identity or the mask in the video many of the hidden truths or “I am”s in the piece. In the sound of the video I am reading the dictionary definition of identity as a part of the materiality or literal understanding of identity, which is not how we always think of it. The “I am”s correspond with the ripping of the masks off of the face in trying to reveal a hidden self, or a true self, which there are many of. For me the piece is also a little dark because, the masks look almost like a second skin so the line between what is “true” identity and what is “fake” are not always clear.

Marika's Final Project "Hands"

--My final project incorporates the use of my hands and how they are used to perform daily tasks. Simple tasks may include braiding hair, to typing on a keyboard. Hands have a unique and almost fluid motion that is very rhythmic. My film is divided into separate segments, each with two distinct tasks of how my hands move. For instance, my first segment: shows me braiding my hair and also doodling on a piece of paper. I thought these hand performances complemented each other because the doodling has a very curvy, unique pattern to it, similar to a French braid when it is done. I chose to use a lot of transparency in my piece, because I not only liked the effect that it gave, but I also thought it brought my concept of hands to life. My sound piece is a combination of rain, the sound of frogs (because they were making noises in the rain), typing on a keyboard, tapping on a desk, creasing paper and doodling. I thought my sound piece incorporated a lot of obvious aspects that my film portrays, but adding the rain added a feeling that was natural. After all, rain is part of nature and our hands are a natural feature that we are given when we are born.--

Sara A's Final Project

This piece incorporates film with sound. It is taking the sounds of a basketball game and turning it into a rhythm, while putting images of a basketball game and a viewer to the beat. This piece incorporates repetition and varied tempos in order to give each action its own beat and emotion. Towards the end of the video, the tempo speeds up and it becomes much more choppy and quick. This was put in in order to capture how it feels to watch the end of a basketball game and the emotion of anxiety we feel when we watch the end of a basketball game. There are certain actions and sounds that are common when we view a basketball game, and this video is highlighting some of those sounds and actions, but through a different perspective. I wanted to turn the sites and sounds of a basketball game into more than just an event. I wanted to summarize what I observed when I watched the basketball game, but instead of explaining it, I put it to sound and images. There are many instances where certain songs remind us of certain events; this piece was an interpretation of that idea.

Morgan's In Progress Video

Leland's new project

Heather's Scary Movie

In my video, I wanted to create a creepy atmosphere by having the camera constantly moving and I tried to do this by only using a tripod sparingly. My inspiration were the movies I know What You did Last Summer and The Blair Witch Project.

Ann Hamilton- Response Question

Description of "Tropos" from Art 21...

Interview about "Ghost" on Art 21...

In the article on Blackboard, the author discusses the way that Ann Hamilton uses language in a very physical way in her installations. How does this material representation of language invite both symbolism (based in the intellectual and rational mind) and emotion (based on irrational and instinctive human response)?

Tyler's Film:

Encounter

This video explores the psychological experience of a young woman encountering herself in various locations. My inspiration came from a music video where the singer never fully looked at her self in the mirror. I found this relationship between her and herself very interesting and decided to play with someone looking and passing by themselves as if it was another individual.

Marika's Directed Video

--This video incorporates the concept of movement, but more specifically the swift movements usually performed when pickpocketing. When someone pickpockets, it is fast, and usually seems effortless. The swift and discreet movements of stealing a phone from someone's pocket is what I wanted to depict in my film.--

Amy Waddell- Video Project

This video is meant to show how the interactions of everyday life are present in our faces and how how energy drifts in the direction of our inner mental states. I attempted to show this energy in the smoke and its movement through out the frames. Though I filmed the assignment in a very abstract way, I hope the sense of passing and looking back at the other is present even if on just a theoretical plane. I wanted the video to have a sense of quiet and calm yet with many different emotions present, I then wanted the video to move toward a playful and innocent feeling at the end. I interpreted the assignment for this project in showing how two people are in each others lives for a time and they interact and they often break apart from each other and yet the interaction can still hold a lot of significance and can be quite beautiful and calm or very emotional and deep. I used smoke because it moves and reacts to the environment in which it is in with a very beautiful flowing motion and yet can disperse within a second, this shows the idea of the only thing constant in life is change.

Listen. By Sara Wroblewski

This video was inspired by a slow motion video I found of a ballet dancer doing a jump in slow motion. I was especially inspired by the overall simplicity of the video and close attention to detail in each of the shots. For my own work, I wanted to use the script we were given in a way that compared and contrasted fast and slow movements. When I read the script I thought of the way dancers snap their heads back and forth when turning across the floor. My video seeks to create a connection between these two dancers through their movement, gaze, and commitment to their art. I tried to focus on the composition of each shot and made sure to keep the background simple in order to hold the viewer's attention on the dancers. While I was editing this video I subconsciously found myself creating my own music/beat in my head to accompany the dancers. This is why the piece is called "Listen".

Sara A's Video Project

This video incorporates the idea of time as the figures pass and seem to acknowledge each other's presence, even though they are not present at the same time. but they are in the same location.

Sara A's Video

This video incorporates the idea of time as the figures pass and seem to acknowledge each other's presence, even though they are not present at the same time. but they are in the same location.

The Note

The Note explores the notion of the transferability of love. Many people who believe they are in love hold physical reminders of their love, such as a simple note that says "I love you." Thus, the non concrete notion of love is attributed a physical, tangible quality.

The actor, fed up with his current situation, reflects on the note, ultimately deciding that he no longer values it. He crumples it up and discards it on the sidewalk. The actress upon walking on the sidewalk finds the note. Intrigued, she opens it up and reads it. She then looks back at the person who dropped it. What used to be a valuable reminder of a relationship becomes a thought provoking memoir into the life of another person, while the only words in this memoir read "I love you."

Inspired by: Elephant

Directed Video by Morgan

This video incorporates quick cut scenes and different view points, and screen shots of each of the figures to create confrontation and conflicts between the two figures. the blind folded figure stands helpless to the conflict around her.

Final Music Video

Heather, Mattie, Tyler

Music Video

Leland & Julian Music Video

Geneevers Creepers: