Part One

Bob Bryant – His first introduction into what would later become his career was that of the pinball machine. He especially loved the pinball version called “Fireball”, and only partly because of the graphics involved. The first game console Bryant ever used was called “Pong”, and the first computer game he ever played was a text-version of Star Trek. After Fireball, Bryant’s next favorite game was Space Invaders. Bryant first owned a PC Clone for his business job, while his views changed, and he got into movies which Bryant pursued by going to film school. While there, he still kept up with Nintendo, and eventually got passes from an ex-girlfriend to E3. While there, he was completely “blown away” by how big the game industry actually was. From there, Bryant got into World of Warcraft, and wanted to join the gaming industry rather than continuing with film. Once in the gaming industry, he became the lead tester for Mattel (new games they would come up with). The first game he helped design and worked on was that of Barbie’s Race and Ride, which sold for a lot of money as a console game. Finally, Bryant began publicizing pinball games he helped design. This was interesting, because as Bryant started out, he was initially interested in pinball — the grandfather of video games — and as such moved to consoles and such, yet when he acquired a new passion for something, he left video games (not quite behind, just to the side) and focused on his new aspirations. However, he eventually went back to it the moment he found out more about it and learned how closely it met with what he truly wanted to do.

Alexandra Robinson – With two daughters, the eldest being Gillian and the youngest Marisol, Robinson’s art career had been profoundly impacted, and as such she had to stop working and sell her studio. While at first thinking of this as a curse, she later realized it to be a blessing, as with the newfound responsibilities and time management tying her hands together, she was able to explore a new art style and see the way her children viewed the world through their own images. With Robinson’s presentation, she showed the many images they took using even the most fundamental aspects. There was much repetition among the images, and then a brief disruption would occur, and then the images would continue in a repetitive tone, much mirroring the acts of life. Every image Robinson’s daughters took was instinctual, and of things they enjoyed. Their images contained no balance, simply changing what was in focus. With this new knowledge, Robinson realized that as her daughters played and simply took pictures to have fun, approaching any school assignment similarly would be akin to failing. As an artist, she wishes other artists to take away from this that it is always important to remember to play.

Joe Vitone – Based off of 1998 black-and-white images of families and individual people in photographs — representing the general population of different places within America — Vitone took colored images of his own family in Ohio, along with other people he knew. As Ohio is a very blue-collared area, Vitone wanted to capture the aspect of the people who lived there, and tell their story through their backdrop and who they were. He wanted to find the purpose of the pain within growing old, and portray that through his photographs. Vitone wanted to convey the importance in valuing ourselves and others, emphasizing the sizes of his photographs as the size has a definite impact on how people view the image and what traces it leaves in their minds. As these were pictures of everyday good working-class people, many children photographed were illegitimate, some mothers were seen as extremely young in age, and after the images had been completely finished, many people within the images had died — most due to old age.

Part Two

Throughout this semester, this I would rank as one of the top classes in which I felt most helped long-term in where and how I wish to accomplish my end goals. By learning about all the presentational speakers; hearing their stories and giving my own feedback when they spoke, I was able to learn more about what it is that I want to do and how it is I can go about doing it. It shone truth on the real struggles of gaining an artistic, graphic career, and how to maintain such a job. With the past mistakes of others, I was able to glean their knowledge of things and thus learn more about the “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”. The only critique I could think of would be that of possibly having more of a variety of presentational speakers. Many of them were either graphic designers/illustrators or game designers, and though this profoundly helped me, students studying in other fields would have been more hurt by this course of action, as they weren’t disposed nearly as much knowledge from adultier adults as other students were. Along with this would be to make requirements for the course and assignments more clear, as the first notes we had been supposed to take no one had clear knowledge of (yet I am pretty sure you already know this).