Learning Updates

I will try to be updating this blog more frequently now, as I make actual progress on my project.

As seems to be usual, I had a very busy week all the way from Monday through Friday at 5pm, at which point and for the next 3 days I hopefully actually have time to devote to my independent project. This seems to actually be becoming true this weekend, unlike last weekend. Last night I was completely worn out and tired from staying up until 3am researching the Canon 350d which I am seriously considering purchasing, and then I had to wake up at 7:30am to go track down Robyn Herring in order to get her approval on the Campus Production report at 8:00am. At 9:00am I actually managed to make it to COM 346 on time, to use my lab time in the music technology labs for 4 hours. Immediately after that, I rushed down to the Media archive at the library to work for 4 hours, and get some more old 3/4″ tapes of student projects reviewed and cataloged.

Then I came home completely wiped out, and watched the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which surprisingly I had never seen before. Of course, as with most things I watch now, I wrote down ideas about the film as I watched it in my Film Journal. Directly after the intensely invigorating bit of cinematic work was completed, I took a nice refreshing hour-long nap, and then proceeded to research DSLR cameras and possibilities for a new powerful computer that is not a Mac Pro. Then I focused on working through Cinema4D tutorials until I was tired enough to go to sleep again. Up to this point in the quarter, I have been spending most of my “Project Time” reading books and gathering ideas for the implementation of mathematical concepts in the animation I’m planning, and learning new tools to create this animation: namely, Max, VVVV, Processing, and Cinema4D. The capabilities of these tools will help me create some of the imagery I’m thinking would be quite appropriate to segments of my animation. Processing and/or VVVV and Max/Jitter will enable visualization of mathematical processes. I am learning Cinema4D instead of more conventional tools like Maya or 3dSMAX because of its excellent integration in workflow with compositing programs such as After Effects, in addition to its powerful capabilities, and (relatively) intuitive interface.

My goal for the next 2 days is to develop the ideas I have gotten through my reading into a rough draft of a script detailing the content of the voiceover and actions occurring in the animation, and perhaps do some initial storyboards / concept art. Although I also have to prepare my part of the presentation on video compression and web distribution, and refine my presentation on Reaktor for Hybrid music. So much to do!! I will stop typing here and get busy with it. perhaps even jiggy.

Film Journal Entries

For my work in SOS: Media I will be keeping a film journal, detailing reactions and notes and impressions of films that I watch during the quarter. Following is all that I’ve written and watched so far. Please keep in mind that these have not been re-written and cleaned up, and thus consider the text as messy notes written while watching these films.
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A New Era Begins

I have decided to continue posting in this WebLog as I continue my media education at the Evergreen State College in the Student Originated Studies: Media program. The work that I have laid out for myself is multi-faceted. The largest component is an independent animation project, which will attempt to be structured by and contain cloudy references to higher mathematical concepts. These structures and references will affect the project in construction only, meaning that these concepts will be used to construct the events that happen, but will not affect the contents of the events themselves. That is, the structure of events will be separate from the content of the events themselves in the origin of their creation. The semantic content of the piece (of course of lesser importance than the structure of information in the project), will roughly follow the evolution of an artificial intelligence from being a weak AI blindly following its algorithms, to a strong AI capable of independent and autonomous thought, and creativity ex nihilo.
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