Monday, March 17, 2008

"What The Bleep Do We Know" Comments

I thought it was interesting.  I am not a student nor have I ever looked into quantum physics, so most, if not all of this video was new information for me.  There were a few parts that I though were pretty cool.  Namely, the part that focused on our dreams, and how they were making the argument that there is nothing that can enter our mind/being without us having seen or experienced it somehow.  So somehow we must be seeing or experience these things without us knowing.  I thought this was kinda cool, even though I don't agree.  

As far as the rest of it, I was a little disappointed.  Mainly with the dissertations of God (or god I should put?).  I thought the arguments of God were unclear very weak.  Especially the guy who studied theology who was saying that we all are gods.  I felt that by the end of the movie, there was no clear definition of what they thought about God and it left me wading in the waters, even though they tried.  Overall though, it was an interesting film to watch.

2 Midterm Questions

  1. I think the single best aspect of this course so far is its unconventionality.  I love the fact that I have no clue what we will be doing coming into class each day of, which causes me to anticipate what we will be doing.  Everything we’ve done in class so far has been fun and/or interesting, which I cannot say the same for my other courses.  Even though I may not agree with everything discussed in class, I have enjoyed it so far
  2. The single most important thing I want to walk away with from this class is how to apply the things taught/discussed in class to my future working field (if I am in the New Media field).  It’s cool to learn about a lot of new concepts and ideas and discuss them, but I want to walk away with tangible application for the future wherever it may apply.

Monday, March 3, 2008

"What's the Sense of it all?"

The first thing that came to mind when reading this assignment description was doing something with the sense of hearing. I enjoy working with audio the most, so I thought it would be cool to do something different with audio. I wanted to do something that people would find interesting and that would also make them think. I also wanted to do something with the sense of sight since basically it is what we are all driven by.

I decided to take scenes from two movies that are totally opposite of each other and switch the sound in them. What came to mind when thinking up this concept was the idea of writing the word "red" on a board using a green marker. What someone is seeing is being contradicted by what is in their mind. I feel like that same principle applies with this exercise.

The two movies I used were Elf and 300. I took a scene of Elf where he was being raised and learning the ways of an elf, and put it to intense music from 300 that is played when King Leonidus is being given Kingship towards the beginning of the movie. The music totally contradicts what is being seen as the music is very intense, and the movies scene is comical and innocent. On the flip side, I took a scene from 300 in the middle of the first main combat scene. The scene is very intense with violence and war. Again, the music playing totally contradicts this as it is joyful, happy Christmas music. To me, the 300 scene is hilarious with this music to it. I laughed a few times when editing it.

I guess the reason did this was to do something different that would make people think for a second. While it's not the most original concept, I think it just shows even how important music is in movies in general.