Filed under: my video composition
Please click on the link below to view my remix video part 3, which includes the credits in the end, unlike part 2. Thank you.
Eventually, I’d like to make some changes to this video. I decided it would be more effective if, at each time the narrator says, “pull the string,” the viewer is presented with the puppet holding the sign that says, “Be prepared.” I like this better, because you can see the strings coming from the puppet, reflecting what the narrator is saying. Also, I might include the image of the man on the couch saying, “pull the string,” in the movie, Ed Wood, a few times, because it is a pretty comical and interesting image. Further, it will add to the professed male dominance that flows throughout the video, because it is an image of a male who looks very disturbed and angry. There are other plans I have in the future for this video, for I definitely do not consider it a finished piece. But I got other work to do for now. Thank you.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Here is my works cited page for my remix video, the remix before the prefix: she still picks the apple.
Filed under: my video composition | Tags: Adam and Eve, discrimination, equality, Scott McCloud, the Bible, women
The message of my video composition, “the remix before the prefix: she still picks the apple,” is both simple and abstract. It suggests that at the root of the Bible story of Adam and Eve is the discrimination of women. As Eve was tempted by the snake and picked the apple, she damned humanity, especially because she tempted Adam to eat it. Eve, a symbol of all women, represents the woman as a symbol of mere desire, a tradition that still holds today. She is the apple that Adam, the man, ate. With Eve, the woman becomes a symbol of weakness, a symbol that will take man down with her. Intertextuality, in relationship to this story, flows throughout my video. There are many symbolic icons presented that represent something in this story, thereby allowing the story in a nontraditional format to unfold before the viewer. First, the male saying, “I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast,” represents Adam’s choice to eat the apple. Yet, because the fruit serves as a symbolic icon of woman, he also decides to eat the woman, thereby presenting woman as both an object of male desire and an object of male control. Man will decide what he will do with her as he decides what he will have for breakfast. In order to reinforce this idea, the symbolic icon of the apple is repeated several times throughout the remix, forcing the viewer to question its significance.
The viewer is then presented with the image of a white male and a snake, along with the voice of the narrator that says, “The gods have a plan for you,” which quickly transitions to a different narrating voice instructing a puppet to, “Plan now.” The back to back clips of this word “plan” is important, illustrating in their juxtaposition that the male puppet must plan, thereby revealing that the male is the god who has a plan for “you,” the woman. The puppet, as a symbolic icon, signifies the falsity that rings from this belief that man is superior to woman. The men who believe and live as superior to woman also live in falsehood. They are puppets living in material worlds, and as Mr. Bungle goes to the boys room, he goes with a message for the young boys of our future. He passes on this message of falsehood and discrimination of women. A male voice is then introduced over the words, “Be prepared,” which says, “Pull the string,” signifying what man should do to keep his puppet world from perishing. He must pull the string of his woman, control her, and force her to live as a puppet in his puppet world. This is why he is told, halfway through the video, that he must, “Find a nice girl to say I do.” In this line, she becomes his puppet, his object of control.
Later in the video, woman chooses not to be the male’s object of control when she says, while in an office setting, “Someday I am going to run this place,” which begins a montage of images that represent her long and difficult journey to fight discrimination. Her words are then quickly backed up with a strange puppet figure that rolls a bowling ball down an alley, not only knocking down, but smashing the last pin standing. There is so much going on here. First, the puppet figure is of an unknown gender, a symbolic icon of woman’s choice to break free of her gender identity as a label, as a form of imprisonment. She might still be puppet, if she choose, but she is not his puppet. Second, as she smashes down the last pin standing, she is taking her final step, her final punch against the discrimination she is battling. Next, the words, “Undercover Boss,” appear momentarily, suggesting that woman has already achieved the title of boss in the working world of society today, but that men have not yet fully accepted her title and still discriminate against her newly found strength. Then the viewer is presented with a quick image of a woman in her underwear in an office setting with a male boss directing her to hurry up, ended with the image of a male with pants on and a voice stating, “It’s time to wear the pants.” The juxtaposition of female with no pants and male with pants, along with this demand of the narrator, suggests it is time for the woman to take control, not of man, but of her identity. In fact, the next image is a woman in a dress, suggesting woman, in the end, will wear what she wants. She will not even take demands from the male narrator who tells her to wear pants. Further, the woman in the dress, from the Alice in Wonderland preview, is a very powerful woman, confident and content in wearing a dress, even as she places her aching feet on a pig, an expression of her choice to take a stand against the piggy choices of discrimination expressed towards women. The pig is a symbolic icon of male as discriminatory.
The other two things presented in the video that deserve explanation are the drawings of the female and male faces and the wink of the cat. First, the juxtaposition of the drawings from a happy female face to an angry male face suggests that as the woman progresses, as she works toward achieving leadership qualities and happiness, the male grows angrier with her. The cat, a symbolic icon of the female, also suggests some form of sarcasm. As the viewer hears a woman in mourning say, after viewing the angry male drawing, “Well, at least he got his dying wish,” the cat then appears and winks. In other words, the viewer is being asked to challenge these discriminatory beliefs of women, and, especially if he is male, to ask if this is really what he wishes to happen. The sarcasm of the wink lies within the question, “Will any of this really matter once you die?”
Finally, McCloud mentions that, “When you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself,” yet, “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another” (36). Upon reading this for the first time, I felt it was a very profound statement to make. Afterwards, when coming across the videos with the cartoon drawings of the woman and man faces, I instantly considered what McCloud said. In result, I thought it would be really interesting to include them in my video in order for the viewer to recognize, even if subconsciously, which face he or she identifies with, either the happy woman who is progressing or the angry man who is dissatisfied with her progression. Consequently, the viewer is forced to see aspects of the self more deeply, even if these aspects are unwanted. The viewer is forced to see if he or she is discriminatory of women.
Filed under: my video composition | Tags: creative writing, Kathleen Blake Yancey, participatory culture, pluralism, traditional writing, video composition
Creating my first video composition was very exciting. I consider the process to be both similar and dissimilar to the process of traditional writing. I do not feel all writers would feel it is similar, but I feel it is in one specific aspect. In creative writing, unlike academic writing, the writer can still hit an out of the park home run without knocking the ball out of the ball field. In other words, in creative writing, much like in video composition, the composer can be unpredictable, they can compose that which contradicts truth, and in so doing present it as truth. In this way, video composition becomes, not postmodern writing, but rather postmodernism in form. Hence, even if a video composition does not express postmodernist ideas, it is still a work of postmodernism in and of itself for more than one reason. First, as suggested before, video composition demonstrates that traditional writing, in fact, does not really exist. Video composition exposes traditional writing as being a truthless truth, as something that presents writing as a form of specific rules. These rules melt away in video composition. Writers are finally free to write, to create, to shine, without this absolute truth of writing pouncing out their capacities. In video composition, as in postmodernism, truth becomes something different for everyone within a participatory culture that says, “It is okay to be different just like everyone else.”
In her article, Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key, Kathleen Blake Yancey says, “Today, we are witnessing…a writing public made plural” (300). She suggests that internet genres, like video composition, divorce the writer from the once perceived solitary role of the writing tradition, and instead force the writer to become an active participant within his or her culture. Again, video composition challenges our typical notions of traditional writing, thereby revealing its nonexistence. Clearly, to state that traditional writing is nonexistent is a radical statement, but nonetheless true. As Yancey also points out, when quoting T.S. Elliot’s Burnt Norton:
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish.
In quoting these words by T.S. Elliot, Yancey is not suggesting that traditional writing is lousy, and therefore perishes to nonexistence. Rather she is suggesting that traditional writing no longer exists, and as long as writers continue to try to force it to exist, namely linear composition as the only true definition of writing, their words will strain under the burden and perish. Video composition challenges these notions of traditional writing while also revealing Yancey’s “new key in composition.”
Filed under: reflections on class discussions and readings | Tags: Africa, I Live Here, images, Kirshner, statistics
A couple of my favorite lines in Kirshner’s, I Live Here, is, “A statistic is forgettable. It’s never going to move you the way human contact can.” I loved these lines for several reasons, most importantly probably being the fact that they describe why Kirshner developed this book the way she did. The pictures and semiotics used in this book were bringing us closer to that human contact. We didn’t just read about abortion, but we actually saw it as image. We didn’t just read about a child as soldier, but rather we saw a child soldier as image. These images helped us to touch the girl getting an abortion, the child being aborted, and the child soldier. I think when we only read about these occurrences, they always seem to stay “faraway” from us. But when we viewed the images of these occurrences, we couldn’t stay faraway. We were forced to become more deeply engaged in these horrifying circumstances. They no longer seemed far from home in a distant land somewhere, like in the land of statistics.
My favorite book of the four was the Notebook, its setting being Africa. The interconnection of experiences between the people with ”the wasting the disease,” death, coffins, and a new baby on its way was amazingly portrayed. Further, without the images I would have never experienced this interconnection. The image of the mother on the back of the bike, almost about to have her baby, and the son attempting to pedal her to the hospital sent chills down my spine. But most of all, the book would have never worked the same way without the image of the mother holding her newborn child in a graveyard. This image shows more vividly than all of the alphabetic text in the book what is happening. The moment a child is born in Africa is the same moment it is strangled by ”the wasting disease” and death. These children do not have a chance.
Filed under: the progression of my research | Tags: art, Bird in Space, Constantin Brancusi, essence, sculpture
I decided to do a sculpture this week instead of a painting in order to observe whether or not I can see the things I have been learning this semester also within a sculpture and not just a painting. Constantin Brancusi, a sculptor of the 2oth century, aimed at capturing the essence of things rather than the things themselves in his art. While other sculptors around him were creating real life sculptures of humans, he was creating sculptures of the essence of flight, namely that of a bird. Here is an image of his sculpture titled, Bird in Space, which he felt captured the essence of the bird when in flight. He created this piece in 1928.
Brancusi is considered to be the creator of abstract sculpture (transmission), a form of sculpture that was not originally considered art (noise). The sender, Brancusi, has a message he is sending in this abstract sculpture. I feel, as the receiver, that he is suggesting that the essence of form can be identified in what the form does. A bird flies. At the essence of a bird is flight. Therefore, the essence of the bird is revealed when it flies. Likewise, I write. At the essence of my being is writing. Therefore, the essence of my being is revealed when I write. The essence of the hockey player is revealed in his or her playing hockey, and the essence of the teacher is revealed in his or her teaching. Others might perceive Brancusi’s sculpture to signify something else, maybe for instance that the complete lack of action within the action itself brings about the form’s essence, essence in this sense being something without form or doing. They might feel he had a different intention, one that is less body-centered and more spirit-centered. Whatever the case, this piece is a wonderful work of art I truly enjoy observing.
Filed under: reflections on class discussions and readings | Tags: intertextuality, John Lennon, juxtaposition, montage, video composition
Last week in class we discussed intertextuality, montage, and juxtaposition in relationship to the videos we watched in class and the video compositions we will be creating. Of the three videos we watched, I must say I enjoyed the imagine video the most. It portrayed the most meaning for me. It was loaded with intertextuality that caused all kinds of schemas of prior knowledge within my brain to start firing from neuron to neuron, retracing and then making meaningful connections between the overlap of John Lennon’s words with the voice of George Bush. I had difficulty with the puppet thing, who I believe was monster, because I am not familiar with the puppets. As a child, I did not like the puppets and never watched them. So the symbolism in the appearance of the puppet, which seemed very important, I was not able to grasp.
I also am looking forward to developing a montage within my own work. I want to create a series of quick images, and in some way I already have, that will describe a longer scene or theme. I think the montage is what will make my video really interesting to observe aesthetically, while also maintaining a powerful feeling of meaning.
Finally, juxtaposition is going to be a lot of fun. I really want to find some majorly contradictory scenes to throw back to back in order to create meaning. I haven’t done this yet, but I am really looking forward to attempting it.
Filed under: my video composition | Tags: linear, nuclear attack video, puppets, superbowl commercials, video composition
Originally, my plans for my story book were quite linear and chronological in nature. Now I will be changing those plans, but for the record here are my original plans. I did not include my pictures, because the pictures I drew were not very good. I am not much of a drawer.
1.) A man is in bed on his back with his arms behind his head and he says, “I will eat some fruit as part of my breakfast.” I retrieved this from a Superbowl commercial.
2.) There is an apple on a table and the voice of the narrator says, “This fruit would be perfectly safe to eat if you just peel it.” I retrieved this from an old ephemeral film about the precautions to take in case of a nuclear attack.
3.) There is a male puppet standing above a globe, looking all around it, and the voice of the narrator says, “No one can predict the future.” I retrieved this from the same nuclear attack film I mentioned above.
4.) Now there is a shot of the globe by itself and the words, “Be prepared,” are written across the globe, also retrieved from the nuclear attack video.
5.) Then the puppet falls down a case of stairs and the narrator’s voice says, “Accidents can happen everywhere to everyone.” Again, this was retrieved from the nuclear attack video.
6.) There is now a scene of a man and woman getting married and the narrator’s voice says, “Find the perfect girl to say,” and the bride then says, “I do.” This was retrieved from a Superbowl commercial.
7.) Then it shoots back to the nuclear attack video. The male puppet is now looking at himself in a mirror and the narrator’s voice says, “Plan now and no matter what happens you will be ready.”
8.) Next is a scene of a beautiful woman from a Superbowl commercial, and the narrator’s voice from another Superbowl commercial says, “Such a treasure. The Gods have a plan for you.”
9.) Next we have three very quick scenes that emerge into one. First, the words, “Undercover Boss,” appear, then a woman dressed in manly clothing on the job says, “Someday I am going to run this place,” and then some freaky looking puppet throws a bowling bowl and knocks down the last pin. All of these scenes were retrieved from Superbowl commercials.
10.) Then there is a scene with a woman in the workplace wearing only her bra and underwear, and the narrator’s voice from another Superbowl commercial says, “It’s time to wear the pants.”
I still really like these plans, but I definitely want to mix it up more and search for more information before creating my video composition. I want to consider intertextuality, montage, and juxtaposition more and apply them to my project, so my plans are no longer so linear. Further, I got some more images I want to add.
