Extended Image

Since the beginning of this semester, my roommate, Joey Diaz, has been working on his extended image project. Extended Image is a class, where students go through the process of setting up a show/gallery, and then creating the art to go in it. The art is supposed to be photography outside of the standard print and frame, hence the name. Thinking outside of the box, students had a lot of different projects set up.

One guy had weird looking statues in a small room, and handed out flashlights. When you aimed the flashlight at a statue, the shadow of a human figure appeared. Joey's project was a series of short videos. He brought an artist in our living room studio to paint with water, and then drop ink on the water. The effect was a really cool spread of the ink through the water to create imagery. The video was about water deficiencies in different countries, and what organization you could contact to help. (This inspired my Advertizing and Imagery final project's subject [water].)

I think that this was a really good experience for the students, because they had to set everything up, including everything about scouting and acquiring a location, setting everything up, and producing content to fill it with. It was a very practical real world experience, combined with delivering a product that forces photography majors to think outside of the box.





[Right] A picture I took of Joey's father watching his presentation. [Left] A photo that I took of Joey and his friends, who visited from VA.

J. Edgar

My friend, Tim Brooks, and I went to Maryland to get an interview for a video project that we were working on. I've known Tim for 7 years, and a fun fact about us is that we were born on the same day in the same year! We didn't have enough time to do anything fun on our birthday, so we saw a movie, after the interview in Columbia. We looked up trailers, and this seemed to be the best one.

Unfortunately for us, the trailer didn't ruin the story, as most trailers do these days. It seemed, to us, like it may have to do with the assassination of JFK, and some other epic events in history with more insight into what created the events.

The movie started by giving a lot of information about J. Edgar Hoover, and I felt like I was actually enjoying something that was teaching me about history. The movie kind of portrayed Hoover as a hollow shell of a person, which started to get depressing after awhile. Then, about half way through, the movie's focus shifted almost entirely from the historical and event-based story to a fictional story about being lovers with his male assistant. Seeing Leonardo Dicaprio made up like an old man rubbing hands with another younger actor made up like an old man was very awkward for me. It got even more awkward during a scene where they got into a fight, were bleeding from the mouths, and one forcibly made out with the other until it was mutual. It was interesting that at the end of the movie, they had a short disclaimer letting the audience know that they basically didn't have much information to base a lot of the story on (so they took extreme creative liberties).

I tend to like stories that have a lot of believability mixed with what if scenarios. Like, what if WWI was actually started this way, and everything could have happened that way, but with this new twist. I really enjoy movies like that. I didn't really get that from this movie, though. I liked the movie more, before it focused on how shallow and empty of a person he may have been and before the focus shifted entirely to his gay relationship.

It's interesting how, as communicators, we can alter audience's view of the past. This happens all of the time with movies and books (even history books). It really shows how important first impressions are. If a person's first exposure to a story of the past is told one way, and then the person hears of another version of the story, the person will most likely stick with the first story that they heard. This reminds me of Inception. Did I just get incepted?

MACBETH - The Rude Mechanicals

I have really been taking the time to look at props and costume design, recently, and I really enjoyed what they did for this play. The visual theme of this play had to do a lot with color and clothing. All of the living characters wore black. Witches wore red and white, and dead people (ghosts) wore red. This is some pretty obvious symbolism (signifiers and signifieds), but I like the use of it. I would like to incorporate these types of things into my work, in the future. I generally don't think about costume color as a means to communicate ideas.

The end of the play was actually different than the original play. When Malcolm, played by Anna Brammeier, was crowned, everyone converged on her and raised their swords to swing. Then, the lights went out. It's actually an addition to the original, which ends with the crowning of Malcolm.

Our interpretation effects the way that we tell and present stories, and adding something like this onto the end of a story really shows how much creative power people other than a writer have on a writer's work. Through history, things like plays and other works of fiction are used to communicate ideas. Taking creative liberties to create differences between our interpretation and an original CAN BE an essential part of making things relevant to an audience. This may not be the best example of this, but it is certainly an example of a small creative change to serve as a meaning or commentary about something.

The play was well done, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. (Good job Ryan Smith!)

ALEF - Leadership Conference

I belong to an organization called ALEF (Appalachian Leadership Education Foundation), and I attended an event hosted by ALEF at Concord University. The event had speakers ranging from high ranking air force generals to employees with some pretty impressive job titles at some pretty impressive companies. They came to discuss leadership, our state, our country, and where we (the United States) are headed in the future.

One of the presenters gave some extremely good advice for being involved in leadership in a work environment. While discussing business relationships, he told us that "People quit people before people quit jobs." One thing that more than one presenter really stressed was the importance of trust, honesty, integrity, and good character.

One of the other presenters gave us some very insightful information about defense and how our country and other countries operate. He couldn't, of course, divulge any information that civilians and people outside of the government are allowed to know, but what he did present was very interesting.

This was a very important lecture to attend, and I took away a lot of great lessons from it. It is very important to learn from people who have lived longer than ourselves, and to listen to the advice, stories, and mistakes of successful people. It can be an integral part of success in life, to avoid situations and gravitate towards others, based on advice from people older than ourselves, without making the same mistakes yourself.



[Above] Picture of our group with four star general, Robert Foglesong. [Below] Notes from the presentations.

Mountain Media Ministries - Remnant Church

Remnant Church hosted a two day event with Mountain Media Ministries to discuss how to become independent in an "unstable world." Between the inevitable fall of the dollar, oil, the situation with other major world economies, and our extreme amounts of debt, it is a very important time to be in a situation that allows you to have basic necessities, like food, water, energy, and warmth. In preparation for massive inflation, they discussed how to create a living situation that would make these basic necessities available in times of need.

They discussed gardening as well as how many acres one would need to grow trees for warmth in the winter. They also discussed how to prepare for food in the winter. They had a jarring demonstration, and went over some warmth and survival tips for winter months. Basically, we are such a soft generation that we would most likely die if we didn't have power. Even if we have well water, we still need electricity to pump it out, unless we have a manual pump installed. This event was all about advice for getting to a place that would get us off the grid, and help us be independent, and less reliant on big companies and the government. It is an important thing to be discussing, because - whether people want to believe it or not - our country is going to have some dramatic changes in the near future, and people need to be prepared.



[Top] Ad and Description. [Bottom] Notes and program.