(7) 3 Big Ideas

Consumption

When I think of consumption, many things come to minds. It could be something as simple as literal as eating. But then there's a less literal philosophy, of one person overtaking another. This can be a good or bad thing, but the word has a negative connotation. It sounds funny to say someone consumed someone else, and they liked it. It's more so associated with someone being consumed, and therefore destroyed by someone else. Like someone has taken something from them. Playing on the different shades of gray of this word will be a challenge, and an interesting artistic exploration.

Voice

As Dale Carnegie once said, the thing people love to hear the most, is their own name. Voice is extremely important to people's lives, whether it be communicating or self expression. Without voice, one is defenseless, without a way to say what they think. They have been robbed of their own thoughts.

Sex

Ahh, the ever so difficult topic, yet all encompassing topic of sex. Such a broad topic, with so many directions to fall into. Where to start? In visual imagery, sex is everywhere, because sex sells. But not only does sex sell, but the appeal of sex. The notion that "You must look like this if you want to have sex with someone who looks like this!" is constantly bombarding our minds with every commercial, ad, and billboard we see.

However, my focus will not be on exploiting these subliminal messages (I feel that's overdone, and not particularly interesting to me). For me, I will use sex in the sense of one person VERSUS another. The control aspect, the respect aspect, the love aspect, and the hate aspect.

(6) My Latest Project

I've recently discovered the band Crystal Castles.

It's more or less a guy who programs crazy techno/electronica music while an awesome chick sings with it.

That "chick" is Alice Glass.

With most of my favorite artist, they look nothing like how I'd imagine them. Yet Alice looks just as crazy as she sounds. So I've decided to do a little creative photoshop with her images.

Original Image

Filtered Image

Final Image

I really like it, and it didn't take me 4 hours like most of my projects ha.

(5) Blog Assignment #1

1) My artist of choice is James White. I actually just found out about him when I recently reinstalled Google Chrome, a web browser. There is a feature on the browser that allows you to select different types of "themes" which more or less just adds a little style to the browser by adding a background image on the borders of the browser.

Examples of Google Chrome Themes:

Just google it.

Here's the gallery.

Here's a cloud example.

And here's a Mariah Carey example.

And here's the one I'm currently using (James White).

And here's even an advertisement about their themes:

Pretty nifty.

Anyway, that's where I found him.

In the bottom right corner of themes are the artist's name, so I looked him up.

Here's his website, Signalnoise.

And his online gallery.




To say that James White is incredibly talented at photoshop, is an understatement.

2) But now to actually select a few images of his and to analyze them:

Image 1: Network

Analysis:

This piece was designed as a poster for the 1976 film, Network (you can even buy it as such on his website).

Overview:

The movie is most simply about an anchorman who loses his job because his network blames him for their poor ratings. The most famous line of the movie is when the protaginist, Howard Beale, yells, "I'm mad as hell, and I can't take it anymore!". This sort of expression of anger and built-up emotion is notably seen on White's image, with a colorful explosion of the rainbow.

Denotations:

The title of the movie, and a slogan underneath.

Connotations:

The old age of the television seems to indicate that the movie was from the 70s, the choice of having a single, bland color as the background, and using a contrasting rainbow in the foreground emphasises a bland, cruel world outside of the tv world, and that the only joy and color is inside the tv(i.e. watch tv to be happy). The gold plate of the movie title and font further indicates the time period. The choice of the title being under the tv, rather than across the top of the poster, seems to indicate nothing is above the power of television. And lastly, the rainbow leaving the black and white television creates the impression that the color is leaving the tv, being sucked out of it, further proving Howard's point that:

"Everything is going crazy, so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house, and the worid we live in gets smaller. All we say is "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone." Well, I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest or riot. I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depressión, the inflation and the crime. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad! You’ve gotta say "I’m a human being, goddammit! My life has value!" So... I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell "I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this any more!"

Image 2: Reckless Love

This is a CD cover for the Finnish "glam metal" band, Reckless Love. The band named themselves as such as a tribute to the band Guns and Roses. The image definitely shows the theme of a hardcore Rock n Roll type of genre.

Denotation:

The only words on the image is the name of the band, which is also the name of their third album (their most recent and most successful).

Connotation:

The font of the band's name reminds me of the band Kiss.


The end of the word "Reckless" is in the similar style of Kiss.

Also, the chrome effect of the font makes the band seem new age, ahead of it's time, brand new. Yet the use of lightning in the background is a long used symbol of rock. This combination of old and new, gives the consumer a sense of "It sounds as good as the classics, yet it's new and worth buying". The title of the band is square in the middle of the image, right in your face.

The faces of the members of the band are all looking at the viewer, with different tones and moods.

The upper left seems to be more serious, with the sides of his head hidden with his hair, as if he has something to hide.

Upper Left

The upper right has his head tilted back a bit, in a more relaxed tone and more accepting gesture. Less serious, more openness. With his tattoo showing, as if to reveal a part of who he is, unashamed.

Upper Right

The lower left is more dead on. Almost like a deer caught in headlights. He's looking right at you, eyes wide open, hair cut short. His necklace is easily seen (unlike upper right) and is another sign of "Here's a part of who I am".

Lower Left

The lower right member also has his head tilted back, in a more relaxed pose. The tone though, is different. It's more of a careless, "take me for what I am, I could care less" look.

Lower Right

All these faces and implied attitudes suggest that this band is good as the old stuff, but still brand new and fresh, while at the same time hardcore and relaxed, yet intense. These are all very conflicting implications, and add to the intensity of the image. It's safe to say, there's a lot going on here.

Links & Websites Used:

James White

Website

Gallery

Network:

Wikipedia

IMBD

Movie Clip

Reckless Love

Wikipedia

Live Concert

(4) Egg News!

I made this news image during class as an example of layering. Click it!

(3) My New Gif

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My previous gif was basically taking a large picture of an Asian-esque sunset, and eliminating the erosion in two steps (making three pictures in all).

I used these same images in my latest creation, called Hearts.

It's four slides with different colors and text. The text is a lyric in a Modest Mouse song that I really admire. And I thought that this was an interesting way to portray the text, visually and artistically.

Originally the images I used were 1920 by 1080, and so I reduced them to 800 by 500 to reduce the size for this size. Even after a 40% reduction in size, it's still pretty huge!

The original (larger) gif was only 890kb! That's less than 1mb (a third less the size of my first gif from my earlier post!). And when I reduce the size, it's only 202kb! That's 1/5th of 1mb, meaning it's 1/15th the size of the first gif.

Why such a dramatic change in size? Even though my newer gif is huge with bright colors and text, those factors don't dramatically change the size. The slides do.

Think of it this way. Imagine you have 10 images, all of them are simply numbers 1-10.
Now, to set it up as a gif, imagine you're in Powerpoint, and you're creating slides for a slide show.

How many slides do you need to display the numbers 1 through 10 in a slideshow? Just 10.

But what if you wanted something more? Like say, counting up to 10, then back down to 1. That would require 20 slides.

What about counting up to 10, down to 1, up to 5, down to 1, up to 10, then back to 3? 43 slides.

See how we went from 10 slides, to 43? We just quadrupled our size! That's 400%!

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Now, my first gif used 3 different images, but the slide show was quite long. I repeated images to create a "flash" effect. I ended up with 31 slides.

This new gif with more color? 4.

And so it's appropriately TINY compared to my first one. 31 vs 4. That's quite a difference.

This is why Bluray movies can EASILY be over 10GB in size (that's 10,000mb!). And that's why Bluray costs more. The disc has to be specially formulated to hold that much information. Otherwise High Definition movies would come in pack of 10 DVDs!

(2) Introduction to Gif

A "gif" image is an image that is comprised of multiple images. A sort of image slideshow, if you will. Often used to portray a moving object, a scene, etc.

One common use of gif images is to display a scene from a movie, by using screenshots. Often, text or altered images will be used to make this satirical.

Example 1:



Example 2:



I often attempt to create my own gif images, and photoshop has been a big help in doing so.

Let's see if I am able to successfully upload and post a working gif image onto my blog!

Test 1: Uploading as an image from my desktop...

Fail. It seems that blogger interprets the gif image as a single image, instead of a sequence of different images. Therefore, only the first image is shown.

Test 2: Upload as a video from my desktop...

...Fail?

Just like with youtube, in order to upload a video directly from your desktop, you must select the file and wait for it to fully process. I waited 5 minutes for my 3mb gif file to process (a relatively small size) and it went nowhere.

If I had uploaded a "real" movie clip that was the same size, it would have probably uploaded by then, so I'm going to assume that Blogger doesn't accept gifs as videos.

Test 3: Upload gif to internet, link gif to Blogger...



Success! This seems to be the only way to make a gif work on here. Just upload gif to Tinypic.com as an image, and link it.

(1) My First Post!

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Welcome to my Blog! As you can see, I've put some effort into making my blog stand out from the rest. At the top is a list of links to all the other students blogs in class, organized in alphabetical order of their names.

I know Aaron has posted a pdf in Carmen that shows this, but I figured it would be way more convenient if there was a single place of links to all these blogs.

Also, because Blogger puts the posts in order of Newest Post First, that means a lot of things are out of order. For example, if I talk about my step-brother Bob in post 1, and then talk about my great adventure with Bob in post 2, you won't know who Bob is, because you'll only see post 2 (the newest post).

So, to avoid confusion, I've labeled all my post titles with a number (notice this post is numero uno!) and placed the Blog Archive at the top, so that you, the reader, can easily access earlier posts if anything is confusing or if you want to read my blog in the *correct* order.

Lastly, I will be uploading my own content from time to time. I tend to type a LOT and so I understand the temptation to just skim over everything I talk about, but hopefully you find what I post and what I have to say interesting. If not, at least you have a nice place to find everyone's links ><