THIS is why I wasn't doing my homework :/

So I don't quite have my priorities straight and I was kinda spending too much time on my most recent costume project.  I started in May, then stopped, then started again at the perfect time: the beginning of school!! yay! But it is going pretty good now and i'm no longer scared that I won't finish it :D  Hopefully Now I can spend more time on working!

2001: A Space Odyssey "Star Gate" sequence

I am not quite sure if this is officially "Avant Garde," but I think it qualifies.  It is very experimental in the way it is shot, with almost gratuitous amounts of distortion and saturation.  There is also a great deal of repetition, seeing how each shot is seen in at least four difrent colors throughout the video.  Lastly, I consider this Avant Garde because the first time I saw it I had no idea what the heck was going on.  The movie is relatively linear up until this point, when physical contact was made with the Monolith.  Everything seemed straight forward, and all of a sudden... BAM! its like a rave party on steroids.  to say that I was lost is a tremendous understatement.  Of course, the director was probably trying to recreate something that defies explanation, like enlightenment or something.  So... I guess he did a good job?  To make a film of something you can't describe or fully understand, just make the video the same way! its that simple!  But I actually do like this video.  There is something extremely eerie and unsettling about it, especially when put together with the music.  The fact that in alot of the shots there is nothing that is recognizable, not even stars, makes this sequence almost scary for me.  The unnatural colors and the drone that is the "music" enhance the unnaturalness of this movie.  Too bad for Dave. He had to go through it for real.

AAAAAARRRRRTT

I don't think I am an artsy person.  I understand what art can mean to people, and I never disregard a piece that doesn't seem like "art" to me.  I don't really know what art is to me, and I certainly don't know what it is to other people.  When I look at the exhibitions in this little magazinette, I see art and sculptures and a good deal of creativity.  Some people who see these sculptures may just see a bunch of trash just mashed together, but I understand that whoever made that "pile of junk" sees a whole lot more.  I mean, its in a gallery for some reason.  What separates the artists from the "non-believers" in cases like these is experience and background, in my opinion.  The art means more to the artist just like how "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" is much more significant to a Harry Potter fan, as opposed to one who is not familiar with the series.
I did like the video art section, though.  The different exhibits described all seemed much more creative than I had imagined a Video Art Gallery.  The Description of "Submerged" was particularly interesting, with its interactive faces projected on those ceramic rock things.  The work of Nam Jun Paik was also quite innovative.  I did not expect video art to be so sculptural, as this article portrays it.  I think that incorporating video with sculpture could be the beginning of my transition to the wild world of ARTSY.   D:

Assignment 1 (a.k.a. friggin' awesome dancing car)

This is why I make stop-motion animations.  Not that what I have done is in any way comparable to this video, but one might say I aspire to greatness such as this.  The creator of this video, Patrick Boivin, is obviously a professional, and he has directed commercials in stop motion and other forms of animation (I'm not sure about live action).  When I first saw his transformers stop motion videos, I was in awe of the smooth, complex ways in which he made these toys move.  I can hardly get a lego person with 7 points of articulation to walk right, while this guy can get a transformer with like, 30 ball joints to breakdance so effortlessly, it looks like motion capture cgi.  Patrick Boivin certainly does have much more experience and better resources than I do, but still I doubt that I will ever be his equal.  I would say that Patrick Boivin is my filmmaking role model.  He does a little bit of everything, makes money by making commercials, and makes mind-blowing animations just for fun.

interpreting how Mr. Boivin made this is kind of cheating for me, since I have seen how he has made some of his other videos, but I will "analyze" it anyway.  First off, he probably made this film primarily with Dragon Stop-motion, since that is what he used for his other videos, and it is a widely used professional grade stop-motion filming application.  It is also likely that he filmed the figure in front of a green screen and filmed the background separately, since animating takes a lot of time and if he took the frames "on location," the natural lighting might have changed.  I would not doubt that he used photoshop to minimize the "cracks" on the transformer toy in the beginning frames to make it more realistic.  On another note, the toy it the video is almost entirely custom.  From experience, I know that Transformers toys are not nearly as limber or poseable as this toy.  In shots from the video, one well trained in the lego arts can identify that Mr. Boivin has replaced many of BumbleBee's joints with Lego Bionicle pieces, allowing the toy to bend its legs and waste more realistically, and to give it better proportions.

Thanks To Monsieur Boivin's mad animation and toy modification skillz, this little yellow car can throw down with our very own Sean Whang in a b-boy dance off.  Patrick Boivin's totally amazing and kick-butt videos can be found on his youtube channel right--here.