A Photographic Solution_essay_and_image

The first video, “My bloody Valentine”, used light in a way that I had not really seen before. It reminded me of stop motion, because it was like seeing the motion flashes where the girl on screen was before. While this was interesting and showed it being pretty fluid, I would be lying if I said that it felt good on my eyes. I am not really used to looking at such a bright white with that kind of movement, and the blue light contributed to this as well. I did think the music was very appropriate with it, watching it was a very trance-like experience.

My first reaction to Cocteau Twins was that I thought it was displayed with a very low resolution on purpose. I think that it was made that way so that the lights would blend more together as they seemed almost layered. A time I saw when I really thought it was blending was when the woman’s face was the exact same color or light as the background, so it felt like her face was extending into the background. It seems like they use this non-geometric free form almost as a transitional background, it made me think of a power point presentation transition a little bit, but it was so much more fluid and it almost felt like everything was one form but just transitioning to different forms as the video went on.

Lush had a very interesting take on form and light, as it seemed to also be a very fluid video with forms transitioning to other things entirely, but it all happened very fast to me. One part that I really enjoyed was how they used the fire a light. The first thing I usually think of fire being associated with is heat, not really light, but as it transitions from the red to the blue and into water, I really enjoyed it. I thought this was a very visually appealing video, more so than the other 2 as the colors and lights were not so contrasted in a way that hurt my eyes.

Blog Post #11

Being in Bob’s class, it was very interesting to hear him talk to a non-games related class. It is always funny to hear him talk about Barbie games, and reminding me that I probably will have to work on a lot of games that I am not really crazy about at all.

This class has been an interesting one. I am really glad that there ended up being people that came and talked about video games, but I also enjoyed a lot of the visual design and art people’s speeches. I think that this was a valuable class for me to be in, along with the other visual studies class I am taking. It taught me a lot about art, and for not considering myself that artistic of a person, I feel like these classes have helped to bring out some of my latent potential.

Blog Post #10

  1. Nate and Anne Austin, a couple making the game Wildermyth, a 2.5D tactical RPG. The development was in Alpha, but it was interesting to see how they worked together and explained the ideas and trade offs of teams for making your game. I thought it was pretty cool how they were a couple working on a team, and he handled the coding aspects, while she handled the art direction. They seemed like they had a good partnership, and mentioned other members of their team who helped, like the writer. 

    They reminded us these 5 important things

    Scope

    Revenue model

    Game design

    Art direction

    World building

  2. What made you want to be a professor?

Blog Post #9

Anthony Zubia: This definitely stuck out to me because he was the first person I have seen in real life that was a real advocate for testicular cancer. I thought all of his work was really interesting, and he demonstrated how from freelance work you can really leave your mark and get in to a certain business or industry.

Alejandro Ura: This one stuck out to me as well, because I am an Interactive Games Studies Major, and I have been to SXSW, or South by Southwest, and to the SXSW Gaming sections. It was cool to meet somebody that is in charge of those kinds of things and get to see their perspective.

Edith Valle: As someone also of Mexican descent, I was intrigued by her artwork that focused on artwork in Mexico and how it influenced her work. However, I would consider myself more Tex-Mex, haha. Her other work was interesting too, focusing on body positivity for women.

https://job-openings.monster.com/Software-Engineer-Internship-Summer-2018-Austin-TX-US-Mellanox-Technologies/31/b7e4446a-8c35-42ce-a4e1-dde3b1d78ca6

https://careers.blizzard.com/en-us/openings/oDf75fwO

http://subvrsive.applytojob.com/apply/job_20170828225539_UUCGN24ZDQHNFRFE/Intern-Gameplay-Engineer?source=INDE

 

Blog Post #8

Tuan Phan: It was interesting to see out very own Professor Tuan speaking at us from the perspective of one of the speakers/artists there instead of a teacher. I think it was cool how he is the one that provides a lot of the graphic design for the posters that we see around the school.

Bill Kennedy: The first thing that I noticed about this presentation was that he was silent while giving it. The word spoke for itself in a literal sense. I enjoyed his responses to questioning, how he said why people choose to become professors so that they can get lots of uninterrupted time to work on projects over the summer. It makes sense, especially when he said that when he works on a project he likes to work on it for days at a time.

Jimmy Lou: It was interesting to hear him talk about using Risograph and the Lab. It made me think more about the advertising world.

Kimberly Garza: The three words that she focused on were curiosity, passion and wonder, and I feel like these 3 words summed up the presentation pretty well. The curiosity showed with her trying out multiple jobs, the passion with her going through even with the grueling animation process, and the wonder being how she felt so into the work.

My 5 year plan is to finish college with a lot of connections and internships completed (hopefully at Blizzard inc.), with a major in Interactive Games Studies and a minor in Computer Science, or maybe a major in that, I’m not sure. I think that these two will help mold me into a valuable asset to a game-making team, as well as prepare me for creating games on my own. I want to make a great game that I am really proud of, but I still have a lot to learn before I can do that. I will get an apartment, acquire insurance, and hopefully go from there with game design.

Creativity and Making_RadioLab

The first project is really interesting because this is truly a project bigger than any person, but at the same time it is one person leaving their impact on the world. In three thousand five hundred years, the clock will ring and maybe somebody will still remember his name, if it is still there, if humans are still alive at that time, who knows, it is crazy to think about. Maybe an evolved form of humans will exist, or maybe aliens will see it, figure it out, and realize that intelligent life existed on Earth (assuming that humans are not still here). Maybe nobody will hear it.

The project about making a simulation of the start of the universe is pretty interesting, because it deals with the limits of humans. We can see what happened right after the world was created with all of our science, but we still cannot see past when time existed. Time is still our limit, and it will be until time travel is hopefully made in the future.

David, the person who refuses to live in the modern era, the present, honestly, comes off as pretty crazy to me. How he called the past “The place”, how he is known as a time traveller in his town, it was actually pretty cool to listen to his story. However, there are limits here too. Despite how David wants to live in the past, he still is still stuck in the present and is unable to truly go back in the past once he goes outside. The real crazy thing about David that I thought was how he denied human limits in his own way. Particularly how he thought about time in a non-linear sense, and if he convinced his own mind, that is really the most important thing to convince if you are trying to trick yourself into going into the past. This is the time travel he was talking about.

All of these stories really make me feel like I’m having a kind of existential crisis. Mainly like my existence is so tiny and is literally not even a blink in the grand scheme of things, but to me, this life of mine is my entire being, and is 100% of my time even though it is only 0.000001% of the worlds, and that percent is probably being extremely generous.  

Creativity and Making_Blane

David Blane is somebody that I have seen around the internet, and who I definitely have heard of before, but not somebody that I have ever really looked that much into. One thing that I always wondered about though, was how he pulled off these incredible feats. I mean how he pulled it off not just physically, but mentally as well. Trapping yourself for an entire week with nothing to do, nobody to talk to, and nothing to eat sounds like an incredibly insane idea to me, and I’m pretty sure that this was used as torture at least once throughout history.

It was really interesting to hear him talk about his training, and what he had to go through and put himself through to prepare himself for holding his breath for such a crazy amount of time though. It does make sense though, it’s not like just anyone can hold their breath for something like over 14 minutes underwater. I can hold my breath for like 3 minutes max, and that is pushing it, and that is including the after effects of me feeling incredibly winded. Even his training sounds intense though. Sleeping in that simulated Mount Everest Altitude can’t be comfortable, but he did it anyway.

His determination is something that I really admire. I wonder, how many times does he feel like like quitting when he is trapped with nothing to eat and nothing to think about instead of how hungry he is, or what it will be like when he succeeds I suppose. I wish that he would have talked more about what is going through his head whenever he does one of these challenges, because he must have some pseudo-Buddha zen mode to be able to do stuff like this and not go crazy.

Creativity and Making_Ritcher

Being assigned another silent film, I once again assumed that my laptop was broken or something when no sound was coming out. Luckily, that was not the case. I was also confused when it said “music by Sue Harshe, and then I realized that the music that was composed was really the squares popping in and out, sizing up and down in their own unique patterns. I thought it was interesting how it goes from a black background with white circles to a white background with black circles. At first I didn’t realize that it was rhythmic until I watched it a second time, so that was interesting. I really liked when one square would get bigger while one gets smaller. Overall, I wasn’t really sure what to make of this besides the patterns are the music, but I did think it was very interesting to watch.

Tarantino Reflection Pulp Fiction

Frankly, I forgot how much I loved this movie. I mean, I didn’t forget, I remembered how great it was, but there is something special about watching it again with 2 people that had never seen Pulp Fiction before. I get to view all of the twists, turns, and shocking realizations from a 3rd person perspective, while I get to truly enjoy the movie, noticing details I didn’t before, when I was slightly confused about the plot of the movie. The dialogue is so quotable, the characters are so believable, and of course, who can ignore the storytelling Tarantino gives us by not having the movie progress chronologically. Lots of movies may start in the middle of the plot, but there is something so cool about how Pulp Fiction handles this. On my first time around, I remember Vincent dying, then seeing him in the next scene and thinking “huh?” I then remembered the movie did not take place in a linear fashion, and actually knowing that Vincent was going to die made the movie even better, I think.

Jules, throughout his morning conversation with Vincent, is talking about how he wants to retire, and how they are lucky to even be alive. Vincent ignores this, and winds up dead, shot by Butch in a completely different scene. Would Jules have died had he gone along with Vincent? Maybe. We can’t really know for sure, and that’s part of what makes this movie so great. All of the characters have their own arcs and stories that overlap with each others, and their stories are finished in a way that leaves us satisfied, or at least, it left me satisfied. I don’t care about what happens next to Butch, or Jules even. I think it would be interesting to know, sure, but leaving it to the imagination of the viewer is the better option, I think. Butch makes up with Wallace and leaves, Wallace gets his shining briefcase back (was it his a bible, or his soul, why did he have a bandaid? We don’t know and are never told), Vincent meets his end, and he and Jules seemingly go off into the sunset, except instead of the sunset it is walking out of the store, with a guns in their crotches.

Even the characters with less screen time (I don’t want to call them minor, as all of the characters are so memorable) are amazing. Wolfe, Mia Wallace, Fabienne (Butch’s lover), the drug dealer, and Jimmy are all characters that we can understand, and are extremely fun to watch.

Really, this is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I think that after watching it a second time, it may have cemented itself as my favorite.

Blog Post #7

My 4 year degree plan is to major in Interactive Games Studies, and hopefully graduate in 4 years. I don’t want to stay longer than 4 years because it would be way too expensive for my family. I want my major to give me connections to gaming companies in Austin and help me get ahead of the curve in the gaming industry. If this doesn’t work out, I can always become a real estate agent and have my father teach me everything about that.

For a minor, I want to do entrepreneurship. I think that it will help me if I want to create my own gaming company, or if I want to start any other kind of business in the future. If I decide to do something else though, I am sure that St. Edwards has enough options to put me ahead of the game no matter what I choose.