This was the final rendition for commlab. It was a short video Jill and I made. we added and improved the sound. hopefully it works better.

Click To Play

just wanted to share this link with the blog.  it is a photo of jee in her great role as mirror girl for the short film in commlab.  It was a great experience, working with two great allies.

http://www.wunderbloc.com/neighborhood/fashionista.php?personId=866&neighborhoodId=all

Video  created in after effects.  for the communications lab course. 

This was created by jill and myself. over the course of one day. 

this short video was made for Comm lab course .

It shows the life of a girl with a reflective face walking around the city.

Perhaps people have seen it all…. but themselves.

this video was made with Ariel Nervaez Jeeyhun Moon and myself.
[music by bjork] [soundtrack from drawing restraint]

Here goes a piece of sound.
DAYS IN A LOOP

The film for stop motion lessons in comm lab class

Click To Play

It was really very interesting to read Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”. I read through it in barely two hours. I liked comics and at some point studied their history. I have never been a declared fan of comics, but now I find them very fascinating as a narrative form. I loved the way the author explained the whole issue regarding abstraction, and how to represent time. I had studied how time was represented in film, painting and music but never in comics. It really set the pace for many other mediums.

The book was realy inspiring especially, the way the japanese use of the panels. I really loved how they use the panels and drawing in a very subtle way. We experimented with our comic, hopefully it can come to an understanding.

When setting out to start the comic, we established what we liked about comics and what we wanted to work on. It was a very organical way of working, since we both decided to work on mexican and spanish adult romance and sex comics. They are very popular and the graphics, narrative and language is very particular. They are very sexually and violently charged. So we wanted to play with the grpahics, but we wanted to tell a whole different story, discharged of the violence ans sex as much as possible. The dialogues are shameful and often double what is being “said” in images. So we decided to make the comic without words, we would only use symbols. I still had in mind all the language that is used with autistic children.

So we started with that, we got 4 comics, sliced them open and started selecting the panels we liked. Afterwards, we started telling a story setting out our pages in the table. Then we scanned the images (after experimenting and losing many battles to the scanner and its settings) we got image files to work over in photoshop. We cut, cropped, pasted, added, removed and assembled the pictures to tell the story we wanted.

After wards Ariel assembled the 6 panels in a vertical way, to make it look like an ancient scroll. Then we had on my computer to continue working on it and try to make it webaccesible (it was ONLY 54MB).

With a little help of my friends, (Juri and emeri)

the file was compressed, flattened, and webready at 500KB. impressive.

and then it was on the blog.

This lab ws a bit easier, in the sense that it helped reaffirm some of the knowldege we had.

I  learned how to use a multimeter,  learned how to do plug, soldering lessons were reaffirmed. I did not quite grasp how to measure amps.

I did a short video, kind of a love o meter, showing my new found relationship with electricity, I am beginning to understand her and perhaps being friends with her.

Click To Play

Walter ONG,

I found this book to be very interesting, although very complicated in its narrative. It brought to mind many ideas and projects and thoughts and ramblings I’ve had for some time.

Although, I still need time to wrap my head around the concepts that Ong proposes.

But some of the connections I could make with it are these.

Repetion the same joke.

In rural Mexico, and perhaps in many other places I can now see, people tell the same stories over and over. They sit down on the sidewalk with big chairs and stay telling the stories of the people, not in a storytelling fashion but more in a news, gossip and commentary fashion. I thing I have found very interesting is how for a joke, the punchline gets repeated a minimum three times.

I just read in Daniel Shiffman’s book, “What is the key to comedy? Repetition What is the key to comedy? Repetition” Anonymous.

These jokes told in rural mexico are usually tied in with a character in the town, or a to a story. By laughing off them, people learn things.

Sayings, Music and Albures

We have lots of sayings and other recipes for life that have never and will never be recorded or written.

I was talking with a musician before coming to NYC, and he had been comissioned to make music for a prehispanic audiovisual presentation. He was working on them, trying to get original sounds and music, but he posed some interesting questions. How do we know how did the music sound in pre hispanic days, if there is not a single music sheet saying how they measured time, how they kept beat.

and lastly I need to talk about albures, perhaps not something I am very proud of regarding mexican culture, however they play a role in communication.
SO what is albur
Usually, the game of albures is a subtle, verbal competition in which the players try to show superiority by using albures attempting to leave the opponent without a comeback.
In Mexico, an albur is a pun or a double entendre in which one of the possible meanings carries sexual undertones. It is very common among groups of predominately male friends, however, its use is considered rude or distasteful when not amongst friends, especially when in the presence of women.
Brozo (mexican parody of Bozo) has been known for having albureado several prominent political figures in Mexican television such as Mexico’s current president, Felipe Calderon (2006-2012).(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albur)

And I remember reading or hearing about how Alejo Carpentier, cuban novelist, attended a voodoo session and put to writing all the sounds that were generated, creating this really musical written word. He was the precursor of Magic Realism.

Also I want to comment more on these articles.

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/node/862

http://www.moreintelligentlife.com/archive/being-there-the-washington-alphabet

These ideas all came to mind, while I was reading walter ong and I am still trying to connect, if it is actually possible to connect them.