Reflection on the self portrait

I really enjoyed the experience of working with stop motion for my self portrait.

There was a lot of frustration involved in getting enough material and, in the end, I didn’t pull together enough for quite 2 minutes, but I ended up feeling proud of what I did make.

I worked a lot with storyboarding ideas for this project, sketching out different scenes that I could piece together to make a complete product.

I think I could have done a better job of making my specific subject more apparent. I do think hat the overall look of it turned out great, though. I was worried it might look bad or not feel smooth once I placed all the photographs next to each other simply because I’ve never worked with stop motion before, but it was pretty easy to get the hang of everything.

After finishing the portrait, I definitely think I’d like to work with stop motion more in the future.

The Cucalorus Experience

My first Cucalorus experience was a fun one.

I mostly stuck to my screening plan, besides having to skip out on Dancealorus. I was still able to get in my five screenings.

I ended up going to see Slash, Tower, Olympic Pride, We Are the Flesh and the secret screening which was a drama film titled The Levelling.

My favorite out of what I saw was, by far, Tower. It was a documentary that combined archive footage, interviews and rotoscope animation in order to recreate the story of the first mass shooting in a public place that happened at the University of Texas in 1966.

Going into the film, I was really excited to see how the animation and live footage would work together. The result was no disappointing. Afterwards, one of the producers answered some questions. One of the points of discussion was the choice to focus on the stories of victims and witnesses rather than the story of the sniper. I really appreciated that they chose this route.

Olympic Pride was also a documentary. This one was done in a traditional way, but I still really enjoyed the entire thing. It focused on the Olympics in Nazi Germany and the decision to send African American athletes to the event. It’s a point in history that I wasn’t at all aware of and it was incredible to see the story unfold and discuss with the audience about the ramifications of the decision to still participate in the games. I also felt that it was an especially poignant film to watch after the recent election and the events surrounding it.

Overall, I think the entire festival was a great experience. I got to pick films to watch that I probably wouldn’t have looked at twice before and while all of them weren’t my favorite, I got to experience some really amazing films that quickly became some of my favorites.

Cucalorus Screening Plan

While my week is extremely busy, I've made a mostly solid screening plan for Cucalorus. For my first event, I plan on attending Dance-alorus tonight at 7pm. Other than this, the majority of my events will happen on Saturday which is the only day so far that I'm sure I can make time between work and projects to attend. I'll be going to see Slash, Raising Bertie and We Are the Flesh.
For my final event, I hope to attend a showing on Sunday once I know my work schedule on Thursday. I'm most interested in seeing Tower at 1pm or Love song at 4:45pm. But I'm open to seeing whichever event I'm able to attend.

Photograph About Me

Self Portrait Plan

For my self portrait project, I plan to try putting together a stop motion video. I anticipate this being an extremely challenging undertaking for me, because I’ve never done anything stop motion before. I’ll have to research different methods before I begin so that I can make myself a little more comfortable with the idea. I’ll also try to experiment a little beforehand in order to catch my bearings and establish an idea of how to take my photographs and at what intervals in order to get the effect I want.

The choice to use stop motion is inspired by my interest in animation techniques.

For the specific subject of the project, I want to explore art in my life and the influence it’s had on me. One of the most important aspects of my life has been the constant presence of art and creativity in my life, varying from writing to visual. I hope to be able to portray both writing and visual art in the project, though I’m not completely sure yet how to represent writing.

The visual idea I have now is to first create an image of myself. This will most likely be something extremely simplified such as a felt cutout of a person. Then I plan to take different colored embroidery thread which I own a plethora of from my own cross stitch projects and sew, wrap and otherwise combine these with the person cutout. I hope to move these around in different ways to represent the beginning and build up of creativity. I may also bring in other representations of people in my life such as my grandma who has always encouraged my art and different teachers that have helped to inspire me and move me along with my creations.

I know this is going to be an extremely time consuming project considering the medium, but I’m also extremely excited about how it will turn out.