Course Options & Reflection

My exit interview is in three hours. Talk about last minute.

Courses I took:

TCOM Immersion

Very immersed in some TCOM here. Pretty much dunked in it. Learned to use an $8000 camera (never did find out what it was called, though). Learned about three-point lighting. Did a lot of editing on Final Cut, which I sort of learned as I went. Audio editing for the Audio Tour on Cool Edit. Maintained a YouTube site, if that counts. Oh, and those Animotos. I like those things.

Writing in the Workplace

Did a whole lot of this, too. Every script for that audio tour passed through so many hands and was read and edited by so many people. I imagine this is what it's usually like when you're producing something that's actually going to be used. Although I only actually wrote two one-and-a-half page scripts, an instruction sheet and my Art Exploration page, there were so many revisions of each that I actually typed a lot more words than you see. Or listen to or whatever.

Group Decision Making

I think very few decisions made in this class, about anything, were made by just one person. Everything was run by Beth at the very least, but usually put up in front of several people or the whole class to decide. Even little stupid things. For the one million revisions of the tour scripts, we read them to the group and then got everybody's suggestions for improvements. Made a lot of group decisions this semester.

Scriptwriting

Or script revising. So many revisions. I wrote those damn audio tour scripts like seven times. Option fulfilled!


Reflection


Saturday at work I caught myself writing YouTube videos to promote the store and making a restroom sign on a program I didn't understand. I think I can blame this class for that. I've learned how easy and how much fun it can be to just try doing something that I don't really know how to do. I used to look at not knowing how to do something as an obstacle, and since I'm kind of lazy I would just give up and do something else. Now I look at it as a fun challenge. I don't think Caturday Night Fever would ever really happen if it weren't for this experience.

Also, I'm over my fear of public speaking. Seriously. Talking at the showcase was kind of terrifying, but I did well and, as nervous as I was before and afterwards, I was feeling just fine when I was actually on stage. Now I know that I can do that pretty much anytime. Probably the last thing I expected to take out of this class, or out of anything ever.

This has been a unique, fun experience, and probably some of the best job training possible. School should always be like this. Think of all the websites that would get made.

Week 14

Michelle finished the documentary and it's amazing. It's cool to see all of this footage that's been building up all semester cut together into something that makes sense.

More edits to the audio tour. Somehow I called a painting the entirely wrong name in one of my scripts, so Michelle had to cut the track up and do a bunch of clever stuff to make it work. I made some edits to the track about the East Gallery at home, just removing pauses and trying to make it flow a little better. And then I reloaded the MP3 players again. And then next week we're gonna find out that there's something wrong with the track for the Ethnographic Gallery and Michelle's gonna have to edit it, too. And then the MP3 players will need reloaded again.

I volunteered to speak at the showcase, which was just crazy. I hate public speaking, I have no idea why I would subject myself to it. This is one giant damn leap out of my comfort zone. Crap.

Week 13

I made instructions for the audio tour. I don't know how to use PhotoShop or anything, so I just did it on Word. As with the scripts and everything else, there were several revisions. It's a good thing, too, because that original version probably looks pretty ugly compared to the end product. Katie was awesome and helped me out by creating the MP3 player diagram, and Laura made a compass for the map on the reverse side. We're gonna get them laminated.

I loaded the MP3 players up with the tour. For some reason it took me a really long time to figure out how to get the images to "stick" to MP3 files. Tag editing. Never heard of it, but now I know.

Also, I looked up a bunch of places to drop our fliers off. And I made another slide show:

Stuff I've Done

List of accomplishments so far:

Researched and wrote scripts for the tour. Wrote 'em like seven times.

Researched and wrote a script for the Production section of Art Exploration.

Read, like, four books.

Learned how to use a really difficult looking camera. Taped a bunch of stuff for the documentary with it. Also kind of learned lighting.

Shopped around with Liz for some MP3 players.

Created and maintained a YouTube site for the class. Made a video and some slide shows for it.

Made a video for Art Exploration.


People who helped me accomplish stuff:

There would be no Art Exploration video without Katie. She totally saved the day. Also, she shot a lot of the stuff in that video.

Michelle is a TCOM badass and has totally held my little hand with all of the video and editing stuff.

Loretta and Laura always PhotoShop stuff for me. I think Maddy did too. And David.

John Dalton taught me some editing fundamentals. And he showed me Animoto.

Liz went shopping with me.

Cara and Amy proofread and edited my scripts.

Beth helped me with revisions a lot. Tania, too.

Anybody I left out put up with me.

Art to Go, Week 11

Michelle and I began recording the audio tour today. Or, rather, Michelle recorded it while I videotaped her and tried to soak up as much ProTools knowledge as possible. She wasn't kidding when she said that isn't a very user-friendly program. There are all of these buttons you have to press just to get started, and a bunch of other stuff that just seemed unnecessary. I'm used to using Cool Edit Pro, where you just press record and do your thing. Cool Edit can get a little difficult to learn when you get around to adding effects and doing other weird stuff, but it's nothing like this. I dunno, maybe it just looked harder than it is. I'll find out next semester.

We recorded both Laura and Michelle's friend Austin. It went a lot faster than we thought it would, as Beth has told us horror stories about the time she recorded some podcasts and it ended up taking a million takes. Michelle had the idea to just leave the tape running and every time a line gets flubbed to wait a few seconds and re-read it from that point, to be all edited together later. I think this saved us a lot of time, and I heard some of her edited tracks and it sounds seamless.

Because we had so much extra time, I decided to mess with Laura while she was recording for the benefit of a future YouTube video about the Audio Tour recording. I'd wait until she was having a good take and blow my nose or eat a bag of chips. One time I fell down and Michelle beat me up.

And I made another slide show:

Art to Go, Week 10

Cool, I got a new video assignment. Beth wants me to tape a bunch of people making art in art classes for a video that's going to be in the How Was It Made? section of the Art Exploration page. Katie was a total champ and gave me the names of a bunch of art teachers that I could get a hold of. A few actually got back to me, so I set up some times to go visit their classes.

Since some of this stuff went down during week twelve, which is reserved for talking about all of the awesome stuff that I've done, and since I'm seriously writing this nine hours before my exit interview, I'll just skip ahead a couple weeks and write about what ended up happening. I went to a photography class with Loretta and got some shots of enlargers and people in the darkroom, and I also went to this class where people just got to do whatever they wanted, so I got people doing several different types of art in there. I went to a sculpting class, too. But that was it. Not really enough for the whole video. So then Katie was awesome again and went to the art building with me to weasel us into a bunch of classes. She also used the camera and got a bunch of good shots, many of which ended up in the video.

And then, some other week, I went to the drawing pictures of naked people class. Luckily, the instructor had the dude keep his clothes on while I was there. I don't have my hard drive for some reason so I can't post the video right now, but here's a link:
http://bsu.edu/artinsight/art_exploration/How_Is_It_Made/production.html

Also, we had lunch with Judd Fisher of the Edmond and Virginia Ball Foundation. He was a nice guy. The salad was really weird, though.

Art to Go, Week 9

John Dalton came in today to talk to the documentary group about editing and stuff. It was awesome, because I've never taken a video class so this was all new information for me. For example, I didn't know I was supposed to fade in at the beginning of a video, or that a dissolve indicates time passing.

Also, he showed us Animoto, a website that makes little slide shows for you. They're really easy to create and should be good for keeping the YouTube site updated regularly. Here's the first one:



The tour group met this week. More revisions. But I love revisions. I'm fulfilling my Scriptwriting credit like crazy. And Writing in the Workplace.

Oh yeah, Kelly, Maddy, Loretta and I all went to the museum to take some pictures for the etiquette PowerPoint. Maddy and I dressed up as "Bob and Sue," a coupla fifties dudes that always try to eat pizza and take naps on the stairs at the art museum. I didn't really understand what we were doing until we got there. I was just told to dress up like a fifties dude. So now there's gonna be a bunch of pictures of me on this educational website that's marketed to high school students with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in my sleeve.

Art to Go, Week 8

More revisions. I don't mind revisions, 'cause I think they're easy. Way easier than writing that first draft. Really, you just have to go through and plug in all of the suggestions you've been given, and then wait a week for some new suggestions. That isn't so bad. I revised both my Audio Tour scripts and my VTS page for Art Exploration, and lemme tell ya, they're lookin' good. We're making an effort to connect our tour scripts by referencing the other rooms (like, "How has art changed in the years between the Renaissance and what you see here in Bay 5?"). Oh yeah, I finally wrote the Bay 5 script, thank God. It's gonna need some revising, as I'm still not quite sure what the hell I'm talking about, but at least I've got something on paper. And the painting we're featuring for the room, Heater and Tub - Pentimenti, is awesome. A pentimento is the visible trace of a part of the painting that has been altered. The artist here intentionally leaves this evidence to show the process of making the painting. Neat stuff.

With my wife's help, I put together our first YouTube video. Somehow, I never learned how to use Photoshop, so she was a big help in putting together the text slides. We found some sweet horror movie fonts (including a Shaun of the Dead font that we used for the Art to Go logo), which she then manipulated to look even better. We were gonna splatter some blood on them, but decided that might be a little too much. The music is from the defunct Indianapolis hardcore band Angelville, whom I got to sign a pretty hilarious, hand-written release form. I'm glad I'm finally getting to do some editing and put all of that Final Cut knowledge I gained this summer to work. Through much trouble-shooting and Google searching, I managed to learn a bunch of other Final Cut stuff in the process of making the video.

Midterm Questions

How am I addressing course options?

TCOM Immersion:

I'm completely immersed in TCOM stuff. I've learned how to use the $8000 fancy camera, gained a basic understanding of lighting, and have spent many hours on Final Cut. Totally immersed in some Final Cut here. Just last night I learned how to do text on that thing for the class' first YouTube video. Oh yeah, we're making YouTube videos now. I'm going to try to do one every week. I'll probably spend some time shooting new stuff, like maybe following a person around for a day, or a certain group that's up to something.

Script Writing:

I've written a couple of scripts for the podcasts we're making for the tour group. They pretty closely resemble the radio scripts we wrote in that five-week pre-TCOM course. I think I'll have a lot more experience in this as the documentary becomes more of a priority. I guess it won't necessarily be script writing, but the organizational element will definitely be there. We're gonna have to sift through a bunch of footage and try to pick some sort of story arc or something out of it, with a beginning, middle, and end. Kind of like sorting through all of your crazy ideas about what a giant shark could do for your giant shark script, except our ideas are committed to tape and can't be changed.

Group Decision Making:

Nearly every decision made in this class is made by some sort of vote or group discussion. Major things, like the name of the site, are put up for the whole class to decide. Smaller details, such as the way a sentence is constructed in a podcast script, are made by our smaller groups within the class. Unlike decisions we might make in a classroom, the stuff we decide on here will be used by the museum for the next decade. So yeah, no pressure.

Writing in the Workplace:

This semester has seemed more like a job than school, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I feel like I'm having board meetings or something. As I said under group decision making, everything we write we run by other people, which I'm sure is how this sort of thing would work if we were being paid to make a website. Also, there is that pressure of knowing that whatever we write will actually be used for something.

Art to Go: Week 6

I was out sick for most of the week, but that didn't stop me from working on my script revisions for the tour. There I was in my hospital bed, looking like a maniac hovered over my mom's laptop with a microcassette recorder to my ear, which I rewound noisily over and over again as I tried to make out what my buddy from the museum had said about the triptych panels in the West Gallery. That thing squeals like a mouse in a paper shredder when it rewinds, and I bet it drove the whole floor nuts. I got a lot of work done and my nurse looked like a younger Sarah Silverman, so all in all it was a productive stay.

I read through the relevant sections of Annotated Mona Lisa to prepare for my revisions. I learned a lot about the difference between Renaissance art and the stuff before it. Renaissance stuff is rounder and more lifelike, due to a better understanding of human anatomy. Also, they were a lot better at painting perspective. Before this, all I knew about the Renaissance was that it happened a long time ago and that the Ninja Turtles were named after Renaissance artists.

I also went to the museum to take another look at the West Gallery and Bay 5. I'm glad I looked at the West Gallery again, because I somehow had every one of my dates wrong. Also I was able to find some examples of pre-Renaissance art to mention in my script. Bay 5 is going to be difficult to write about. Or maybe not. I think it's all post-modern stuff, so I guess I can talk about post-modernism. Whatever that is. I need to remember to talk to somebody who knows something about this.

Art to Go: Museum Caper

Liz and Maddy like Buddha. I like quarters to buy soda later.

Spent a lot of time at the museum this week. A fella named Jason, whom I had a class with last semester, is one of the red-shirts there. I think he’s a history or religious major or something, because he knew everything about the stuff in the West Gallery, a.k.a. the Creepy Religious Room. He was a lot of help, and gave me all kinds of information on the Marten De Vos panels, pointing out all of the little details that I otherwise probably wouldn’t have picked out. He told me a good story about Saint Catherine that I’m going to include in my tour script. She was sentenced to death on the torture wheel after converting the Roman Emperor’s wife to Christianity. However, Catherine was so damn holy that the wheel itself broke, so they chopped her head off with a sword instead. Apparently she wasn’t too good for that.

Also, we pitched to the museum folks. It went really well, I think, and gave us a much better idea of what they’d like to see on the website. I was happy to hear them say that they’d like to steer away from the production aspect and see more focus on the interesting stories behind the pieces. Like that kid that got painted over. And why is Mao’s face blue :) I don't like messing around with secret codes and trying to figure out what someone's really trying to tell me, so their bluntness about the dislikes was much appreciated. Saw both Carl and Tania the next day, and they told us that we pitched like total champs.

Art to Go, Week 4

Our site has a name! I don't know if we're going to keep it, but for now we're calling it Art In Sight. Not as cool as the Dirty Rick Experience, but I can deal with it.

Our groups have selected the objects we're going to be featuring on the website. A lot of thought went into our selections. For Visual Strategies, we had to come up with pieces that fit the topics covered. So, for the Production aspect, we had to find a sculpture for sculpting, a photo for photography, and so on. For the VTS section, we just had to find stuff that we was interesting enough for us to come up with a bunch of VTS questions. The Tour group had to find works that were not only interesting, but far enough into their respective rooms to make the visitor walk by all of the other rad stuff. Next week, we'll begin researching these things and getting our rough drafts written.

I'm starting to think that maybe the funny voices and such might not really work out for the audio tour. Even if we pull it off really well, I can imagine a lot of people being turned off by it, thinking it's either silly or insulting. Sure would be a lot of fun to make, though.

Also, we went to see the art class that's going to be looking at our website. The teacher--I feel like an ass, I forget his name--was an awesome dude, and his class was a lot of fun. He had the class, and us, draw wrong-handed, eyes closed, and both at the same time. Most of my drawings were pretty crappy, but this one, which I did right-handed, wasn't so bad:

Jawa on Stool by Rick Henry

Art to Go, Week 3

We saw TomKat

Read a book called Getting It, which is mostly about helping uninformed dudes like myself keep from making asses out of ourselves when confronted by art that, at first glance, doesn't make a whole hell of a lot of sense. Despite some Jim Goad-esque lapses into oddball analogy lists, the book was a good read and taught me how to look a whole lot less stupid.

Our groups put together some outlines for the website. We now have a basic idea of how things are going to work, I think. It's good to see a sort of blueprint for what we're doing. The more things come together, the less worried I am about the end result.

We went on our field trip this week. Dammit, that was fun. Kind of like a vacation. The staff at both IMA and Dayton were way cool and had a lot of great questions and advice. At folks at IMA were eager to show us their museum and to get our feedback on the way they had done certain things, as well as expanding our understanding of VTS. Members of the Tour group tried out the cell phone tour at the IMA. I'm glad we were able to experience that, as it gave us an idea of what works and what doesn't on an audio tour. Dayton had a really nice kids' room that sucked us in for a good long time with all of the activities available. And the Jellybean people were awesome.

The documentary is coming along great. The "Too Hot for TV" version is going to be something else.

Art to Go, Week 2

This week we broke into groups. I'm doing Art Interpretation (now called something else that I already forget), Tour, and Documentary. Each group put together a mission statement and a time line for the semester (except for the documentary group--we don't know what the hell we're doing). I feel a lot better about this now that we're making plans. I can't get anything done without a due date to eat at my conscience every time I get distracted by the internet, beer and VH1. I think everyone's freaked out by the amount of work we have ahead of us, but with all the work so spread out our individual responsibilities really aren't too out-of-hand. We're all going to have to spend some time learning new things--computer programs, art terminology--but at least it isn't Spanish. Blessed Baby Jesus, at least it isn't Spanish.

The real fun this week came when we began filming the documentary. I was watching the rival team filming with the fancy-pants camera all last week and worrying about them beating us, but now that we, too, have used the uber-expensive HD camera to film ourselves being cut-ups and goofballs, my confidence is up. Our group has way more angst and substance abuse. We will have the superior reality show.

Michelle showed me how to use both of the cameras available to us and gave me a basic idea of how to light things, which is awesome because I have zero access to this kind of equipment normally and have yet to take a class about this stuff, so I was clueless. The big camera has a lot of buttons, but isn't too complicated. Didn't they make the Revenge of the Sith with one of these things? What this place needs is more green screens.

Proof That I Like Art

Look at this L O S T print I ordered a few days ago:

It's limited to 300, like the Spartans. It was made by this 21-year-old British kid named Olly Moss. His website has more of his stuff. I like the Films In Black and Red.

Welcome, Tom Cruise Fans!

I'm the dummy in the back.

This isn't a Tom Cruise site. However, should any juicy TomKat gossip or Untitled Ronald D. Moore Project spoilers surface, I will report/discuss. I may post some Tom-related fan fiction as well.

I started this course with zero knowledge about art, so the book we read, Understanding the Art Museum, was all new information to me. I like art--I just spent like three minutes staring at the cover of the "Dream Warriors" 12", and we have some killer matador paintings in our house--I've just never taken an art history/appreciation class. The book was awesome: short, easy to read, like a Dummies book in sixty pages. I now know all about art museums, from the stuff on the information cards to the reasoning behind how they hang things. Also, I have a basic idea of how to look at art, and could probably fake my way through a discussion about it with a smart guy.

We went to the museum, where I actually took a good look at a lot of stuff for the first time. The wife and I have a lot of scary Jesus stuff around the house, so I was way into the creepy religious room. That poor dude on the griddle belongs in my front bathroom. I like it how every martyred person is posing with their method of execution. I saw a lot of other stuff I liked throughout the museum, especially the ethnographic room. After having read that book, I was able to appreciate the stuff I didn’t like a little more than I would have before. Like all of that Jackson Pollock, paint sprayed everywhere stuff, or any kind of different colored shapes painting. Now I know to pay attention to the way the colors are balanced, and can appreciate the effort behind that. I'll stick with my matadors, though.

Besides learning about art, we also did some group activities to get to know each other. I’m really worried that everyone is going to get along too well and the documentary is gonna be crappy. I don’t know why I so badly want this to turn into one of those ugly-ass VH1 reality shows, but I do, I really do, and I may just have to poop in somebody’s purse and blame it on somebody else.