Repost MP5

The two of my action words were “knot” and “tighten”. The first word, “knot” means tie something together tightly, it can also mean something difficult. But the word “tighten” means make something more tightly. The sounds similar but there are actually a bit different, “knot” can be a noun and a verb, but “tighten” can only be a verb. These two words limit my picture need to be something tight or something we might find difficult to solve. But they also give me an opportunity by letting me use object from different shapes or even some event which don’t even have a shape.

The item I use almost a day-to-day basis that I don’t give much thought to is my calculator. It helps me a lot for doing my mathematics and solving problems. I choose this object because I bring it with me every day even I was in holiday. I pick it also because it is closely related to the two action words “knot” and “tighten”. When we saw some difficult mathematic problems, we might find it difficult and struggle with them. At this situation, a calculator could help us a lot by solving the problem with entering the complicate equation in it. Then we just simply press a single button and the result will show. It clears a lot of difficulty for us, release us form the tightness and knot of the problem.

In the video, the calculator was trying to solve some very different equations but an error had happened, which reflects while people were trying to handle a lot of things together their brain will be knotted. No matter machine or human, either one should do a large amount of works which they couldn't handle. I take pictures of the whole process and put them into a video. Then I use Photoshop to add some special effect of the error image. For example surround the calculator by different equations and made the calculator looks like being tighten by the equation. I also blur the surrounding area to highlight the error part of the image and made viewer more concern on it. For the last part in the video, I rub a piece of paper and take a picture of it. For this picture, I was trying to show the struggle I had with the problem and I gave it up by rubbing the homework into a ball. By putting these pictures together and connect them in series, it’s just like solving a complicate problem, I had to think how I should order them so that I could get a better effect I want. This process was similar as doing math homework, both of them knot my brain up and tighten my mind. But after I had done with this video, just like after doing the math problem, I feel I was free again from the knot of the problem. My brain wasn’t tightening by anything anymore. Besides, I feel success also because I had pass through such a long process and it finally comes to an end and I could see the final product I had done. This feeling is wonderful, you will feel your hard work had been proved by the final product. I like this video very much and I think it had done a great job on representing how people feel when their brain is tighten and knotted while they were facing problems, also how people feel after they get rid of the problem and being set free from them.

Final Project

Before I start working on this project, the professor told us that this project could be anything we want, it could be anything we think of. I was confused at that moment because there were too many ideas in my mind and I don’t know which one I should pick. But then, professor told me to put 2 things side by side and see if there were any inspirations. At that point, the Mac in front of me was showing a baseball game and next to it there were a piece of news talking about stress. I immediately got an idea about this project, “why don’t we add this two component into a story?” Different ideas came into my mind and I start working on this project.

At the beginning of time, I want to make a video showing the stress batter feel while they are trying to hit the ball and get points for their team. But no matter how hard I had tried, I couldn’t express the excitement of a baseball game with a video of batter hitting the ball, because the impact wasn’t large enough to show by a video. Then I decided to convert the style of this video to separate pictures. And this idea works perfectly fine! As the professor said, if we were wondering if we should try our new idea, the answer is probably yes. But after I change the video to separate pictures, the second problem had come. How could I show the feeling of the batter? No matter pictures or videos, the batter won’t speak or talk about their feeling. Then there were two choices came into my mind, either I record my own voice and paste it to the video, or express the batter’s feeling by words. I struggle between these two ideas for a while and I decided to pick the second choice. It is because I am not a baseball player, things I say might be a slightly different to a real baseball player. Besides, I think words can also leave some space for viewer to imagine, people could apply what their own definition of “stress” into my video. After I decided using words to express the batter’s feeling, I want to enlarge the feeling of stress to viewers. I tried to zoom the word every time the screen changed. So the word “stress” is getting bigger and bigger every second. This also reflects the stress the batter feeling.

After I had done all the works with this video, I review it again and I think it had shown what I want to express with it. The ending might seem unexpectedly to a lot of people but this is what I want to show in this video. In a real baseball game, anything could happened, you might be winning in the first half of the game, but in the second half, the score could be totally different. No one can predict the flow of a baseball game, this is also why baseball is so exciting to watch and to play. For the process of making this video, since I was still learning how to make a video, there may be still some feature lacking in my video, but I really learn a lot from it. Such as the how important the background music is. Through the process, I had changed the background music a few times. Every time I change the music, the feeling of the whole video changed. For example, if we use a soft background music, the phase of the video will slow down, similarly, if use a fast background, the phase of the video will become too fast, which won’t be able to show the mood of a baseball game. Last but not least, by comparing this video to the video I had done in MP5, I feel the improvement of my skills on editing the video, which I really appreciated because I could continue aiming a higher level when I make my next video!

Re-post MP1 10 Photos

Final Project: Brainstorm and 50% Critique

I love watching baseball since I was a little kid. Baseball game was so exciting and it always amuse with different types of tactics and skills. So I had an idea to make this blog with the main theme as baseball.

While I was watching a baseball game, the most exciting thing to see is when there are full people on base with two out and the batter is on two strike three ball. The batter will feel a lot of stress because he is carrying the whole team’s fate. Taking this situation as my initial idea, my final project will be mainly concern on focusing the emotion of the batter. By showing what he feels and how other people feel when they are in the same situation or seeing the same situation.

First of all, I am going to do this project by a video with pictures only. It is very hard to express people’s feeling with a video of the batter hitting the ball, so I will use separate pictures with words instead. By inserting words between pictures, the video could show things normally you cannot see such as thinking process of a person.

The video will begin with a pitcher pitching the ball and shows how the batter will hit the ball. The batter may success but he might fail. I am at the same situation as the batter because I didn’t decide if he is going to fail or not. I don’t want to decide the ending now because I think there is more things I could do if I leave the ending blank for now. I will decide the ending through the process while I am editing the video, so that I can have more idea about how this video should end.

50% Critique:

I had found some pictures related to baseball and I was trying to make them into a narrative describing how a batter hit the ball when he is under stress. There were possibility he could success and probability he could failed, the batter struggle under this kind of stress and I am going to express them with a video contain pictures and words. I am now working on connecting those pictures together and adding sound effect.

Failure Paper

In this semester, I had learned a lot of things from this class, such as how to define art, how to create an art, and how to view an art. There was some success through the process but also some failure. The biggest failure in this semester was MP5. While I was working on this project, I had a lot of ideas wanted to add onto it, such as made it as a video instead of a jpeg file. Because there will be much more effects and ideas to play with in the form of video. But due to the lack of time, I could only finish this micro project as a jpeg file. From this failure, I learn that time management is a very important role while we working on the project. No matter how many idea you have, if you don’t have enough time, you cannot apply them to your work. You have to know when your project due is and what percentage you’re at so that you can handle the project without panic when it is due.

The biggest success in this semester was MP4. It was the video project and I think I have a lot of fun when I was working on it. When I was working on editing the video, I tried different sound effects provided by iMovie and I found some of them works perfectly for my video! Some of them did much better than I expect and they made the video more entertaining than it was. From this experience, I understand that sometimes pop-up ideas work even better than ideas you looking for. It is because you don’t have to look for specific thing in your brain but you just need to use what you’ve just thought of.

If I could redo one project, I would probably redo MP5. This time I will made it as a video or PowerPoint instead of a jpeg file. I would also add some sound effects and animations to it, so that it could do more interaction with viewer. I want to make these changes because the original MP5 I had made was too boring and it couldn’t express what I really want to express.

MP5

The item I use almost a day-to-day basis that I don’t give much thought to is my calculator. It helps me a lot for doing my mathematics and solving problems. I choose this object because I bring it with me every day even I was in holiday. I pick it also because it is closely related to the two action words “knot” and “tighten”. The calculator can solve problem which makes our brain tight. When we solve a problem, we can feel the freedom and my brain is not knot and tightens.
In this picture, the calculator was trying to solve different equations together but it got an error, which reflect while people were trying to handle a lot of things together their brain will be knotted. No matter machine or human, either one should do a large amount of works which they couldn't handle. I think this picture had did a grate job on representing how people feel when their brain is tighten and knotted.

MP4

MP4

After completing this micro project, I was amused by my own video. I couldn’t imagine how could my video changed that much after processing it with iMovie. It was a sunny day when I took the video outside the Ohio Stadium, but through the process, I changed it to night time and add some sound of rain and storm. With the sound of barking dogs and roar of the wild animals combine with the sound of people running, the video shows people being chasing by animals. The video also use a first person view so that it could show the horror of the person trying to escape from the building. Making this video was fun because I could add a lot of my ideas to it and made it unique from any other video I had seen before. It is also exciting when you try to add some sound effect and it may sometimes surprise you when they match with what happened in the video. The only thing I don’t like while processing the video is those noise behind the audio. For example, there were some people having a conversation while I was recording people walking. I had to use some other sound effect to cover it so that it won’t sounds strange while playing the video.

Blog 9

In the article written by Carver, it mainly talks about what happened when the writer met a blind man called Robert. At some point of time, Robert asked the writer to draw a picture of a house. When the writer starts drawing, he couldn’t stop. He kept drawing even ignore what his wife ask him. I think this is a normal situation when people were paying a lot of attention on one thing. When people were concern on one thing, if they lost attention, they may forget which part they were up to. That’s why a lot of artist never does anything other than painting when they were doing their work. Although I could understand people want to finish their work without any disturb, but I don’t think it is a good idea to ignore everything except your work. It is because sometimes things happened around will give you inspiration also.

Beside this, from the article we also notice that after the writer had completed his picture, he didn’t look at it with his eyes. He just feels it with his heart. Sometimes feeling something with heart may see more than with our eyes. Because your eyes can only sense the image of an object, while your heart could also feel the emotion of the picture. Which could let you understand what the writer thinking while he was working on this piece of work.

MP3

The five objects I’ve picked were my watch, laptop, iPhone, keys and my USB mouse. I’ve picked these objects because they are the best things which could represent me. First of all, I hate being late and I always want to be on time, so I always bring my watch with me. Second, as I am an engineering major student, I always need to use my laptop for project and notes for class. The third thing I picked is my iPhone, like people nowadays, I brought my phone wherever I go and it had become part of my life. Then for keys, there are a some shopper’s cards attach to it because I like to go supermarket and buy different foods and cook them. Last but not least, my USB mouse shows that I love playing computer games. I sometimes invite my friends and play computer games together. If I would use two words to consolidate it, it will be “Unlimited Technology” because they shows I like electronics a lot!

I think the image shows my identity very well because all of them are items I always carry with. And the background is Scott Lab and Smith Lab in our campus, and I had a lot engineering classes in these two buildings. The items I’ve picked were surrounding them which shows my life on campus is “around” these items and these two places. But this image couldn’t show people what the personality of me is because all items on the image show no emotion. Also, I think these things can represent me because I bring them but it wasn’t these things made my personality.

Blog 8

In the article written by David Foster Wallace, my favorite part is the short story of an atheist got caught away from the camp in a terrible blizzard and get saved. That person thinks it is because a couple Eskimos showed his way back. But his religious friend thinks it was because he had asked God for help. This little story shows us same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people. Which means even two people have the exact same experience, their feeling toward the same thing may still vary. This is also the reason why people have different view or feelings when they look at a same piece of art work.

There is one problem for this, that’s how can we share our feelings? And here is the use of communicating. By communicating, we show our view and share our feelings. People don’t only learn from experience, but also communicating with other. Everyone have limit of time in their daily life, they don’t have enough time to experience everything, by sharing experience with friends, classmates or families, they could learn a lot things even they never experience it before.

Blog 7

In the article “Art Which Can’t Be Art”, written by Allan Kaprow, the writer wonders if things in daily life consider as art, such as brushing teeth. I think this really depend on the person doing it. As Kaprow said, ordinary life performed as art/not art can change the everyday with metaphoric power, if you treat your ordinary life as an art, your life might seems totally different from what you had view before. But if you don’t treat ordinary life as an art, it will just be your daily life, no more beauty and surprise.

The only thing I concern about is when we treat everything in our ordinary life as an art, we might try to think hard to make it better, and this may bring us stressful. In my opinion, I think we don’t need to think too hard on it because sometimes art requires inspiration. No matter how hard we try to think, if there are no ideas, we couldn’t do anything to help. The only think we could do is observed, listen and feel them. These are the only way to help doing better.

The article “The Desert” written by Lawrence Weschler describes the beauty of nature. In the article, Weschler sometimes went to the desert and found it was so amazing. Although he thinks the view is so beautiful, but he never try to capture the view with his camera, paint it on a piece of paper or even invite someone to take a look at this. He thinks that those methods don’t show the real beauty of nature at the moment of time. And I think this is true because no one can have the exact same feeling and the nature is changing every moment. The feeling at this moment might be so different to the feeling next moment. So I think the best way to experience the beauty of nature is to feel what you feel in this moment.

It may sounds strange why not taking a picture when we saw something we like or found interesting, but the answer is picture only show the view of the situation. There is no emotion included in it. But if we keep the picture in our mind, we could always remember what we feel, also the environment around. And I think this is much more better than only taking a picture of it.


In the article “Geroge Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read This Year”, written by Joel Lovell, it talks about a plane accident George Saunders had experienced and he was almost dead. But in the next few days after the accident, he had experience the most beautiful world. It is because he almost lost his life in the accident, he had learned to take life as a treasure. This had made him view the world in a totally different way. Even in the book he wrote afterwards he use a similar topic as his accident, person dying and lives. I believed he was trying to let more people know the importance of taking everything as a treasure.

I think the writer had made a very good point on his topic. Some people might think everything they have or experience is a must and they deserve them. But actually they are not. Things would not belong to you forever. Nowadays, we can always read news saying teenagers taking drugs, smoking and lose their life. This is a very good example to show that we have to take everything seriously, think before you do it.

Blog 6 Cardiff and Miller

From the article “Janet Cardiff, George Bures Miller and the Power of Sound”, written by John Wray, we know that some artists had been working so hard on one piece of art work and some people like it very much while there were still some people might still not be able to accept it. In the article, Cardiff and Bures worked so hard on “The Forty-Part Motet” and some people think it was so great and had listened to the entirety more than 30 times a day. But some people, for example their co-workers, can’t take the piece because they think it’s too much.

This article shows that artworks have their own type of audience. People who like flowers may found a picture of garden beautiful but others might not. Good or bad of the art is depend on the point of view of the one who is reading or listening to it. If the one who is looking at the art already had a negative view on the theme the art was showing, it will be extremely hard for him or her to like the art. So I think if we had create an artwork which people does not like it, the reason may not be your artwork is bad but just your audience couldn’t understand how beautiful it was.

MP2-Way to the Classroom

When I came to the campus in the morning, I used to take the shuttle. It was freezing outside and everywhere is wet because of the snow. On the first day of this class, I checked the schedule of the class, get out of my apartment and take the shuttle to the campus. When I got off the shuttle, I walked to the Ohio Stadium. But then I was confused, it was because the schedule states the classroom was in the stadium. But I couldn’t find the entrance at all. Fortunately, I asked someone passed by and he directed me to the entrance of the stadium. While I was on the way, I like listening to music and look around. I usually pay attention to the vehicles passed by and what kind of vehicles they were driving. Because of this, I always miss out people walk by. I remember once a friend of mine walked by but I couldn’t notice him until he call my name.

I think words are different to a universal map because map could only show direction or the place you want to go. But it could never show what the person is experiencing. But a map could definitely show a better direction than writing could explain. I think both methods did a great job on explaining my way to the class room in different ways.

MP2

This "map" shows my way to the classroom from my apartment, the red line shows the route and the size of the picture display how much attention I paid on them. Those traffic signs shows how was the traffic on that day. Last but not least, I pick a time tunnel for my background because I want to show that it really takes a long time for me to come to my classroom from where I live...

Blog 5

The article written by Nick Hornby is about an artist created a picture of Jesus made up with small pictures of nipples and what happened after people had seen this picture. From this article, I had learned that art isn’t only about how it is shown but also the way how it is created. Sometimes a beautiful art wasn’t created by good material but materials which make people feel sick or make people think it is disgusting. But we have to understand why the artist had chosen this material. There must be a reason for him/ her to do it. In this article, the artist was planning to watch the reaction of people after they see the picture, that’s the reason she choose pictures of nipples to be the material for her art.

From this article, I had understood artist required not only creative but also need to be brave. Because you have to show people your work and they may like it or dislike it. If you are afraid people don’t like your creation, and you keep your work with you, your art had lost its meaning. Because if you keep your art with you forever, it won’t be known by other people and it will never been called as an art. So artist have to be brave enough to show their art works and accept how people think the art was. 

Blog 4

The article “How I Learned to Love Yoko Ono” written by Lisa Carver mainly talks about Yoko’s personality and her art works. In the article, the writer indicates that there are two different schools of art: The one who create arts which is beautiful and the one who make viewer to see or feel what is already beautiful. In my opinion, I think both of them are equally important. We always need artist who create arts, but not all of them could be shown to the public as not all artist have money or power to show their arts. So they need someone who can help them to show their arts to others. And those people have to understand art a lot to determine which art is good and beautiful. The article also states that some people might feel Yoko is weird, but she never cares about how people think and continue create her own works. Which I think is very important to an artist. They shouldn’t concern about what other thinks but only concern on their own work. Because other people’s idea doesn’t mean what you have in your mind.

But it is also a problem if you do not accept other’s ideas. It is because everyone got their own point of view, not everyone could understand what feeling your art is trying to express. To solve this problem, they best way is you first create an art by yourself, then you show it to others, listen to their opinion, than try to apply those opinions to your next art work. Never make any changes to arts you already done. Because this action will definitely change the whole feeling of your art.

New Pictures!!

My favorite photos

Blog 3

The article “Big Ideas and Artmaking” was written by Walker. The article is about how ideas affect the creation of arts. Sometimes we might get big ideas, and we could develop them and made those ideas into arts. The writer even claims that the idea is more important than the subject. Because subject matters the topic of the art while idea matters the concept. So a good idea really changes the quality of an art.

But if we concern too much on idea and ignore subject, we cannot create good art either. It is because we cannot make an art without subject. No matter how brilliant your idea is, it cannot transform to an art. So I think artist should first according to their ideas in their mind to set up the subject and title. Then expend their mind base on that subject and title they had set up.

The article “Interpreting Connotations in Visual Culture” written by Barrett is about the connotations in vision arts. The article states that arts always trying to show us something or want to express something. So it is very important for use to understand what the artist is trying to express and which is hidden behind their art. Sometimes those clues were very difficult to find and we have to look at the art really carefully to find those clues.

In my opinion, expressing emotion with hidden clues sometimes might change the whole feeling of the art we are trying to create. But if the clue is not easy to find, people may just ignore them. So it is really hard to decide how we should set up those clues. I think this is very import for an artist to think about before they are trying to add those things to their arts.

Response to the Kidd, Hickey and Weschler "Uncanny Valley" articles

The very interesting thing the article Kidd taught me is how you could use the difference of large and small to made things shows differently. Besides the size of the object, the essay also suggested overlapping is another method to make one thing in front of another thing in two-dimensional plane. Those methods remind us we shouldn't always look at one thing in same way, sometimes we have to see the same thing from another side and we might get totally different feeling.

This article might find difficult to understand of you are trying to understand it as a three-dimensional world. Because some of the method suggested in the essay were impossible in a 3-D world but only possible in 2-D world. The other thing hard to understand in this essay were the last part. Design a moment in time, it really confuse me when I first saw this phrase. But I think it might means one very special period of time means a lot to our life and it might change our life.

For Hickey’s article told us that the “illegal-defense rule” banned zone defenses, which was one of the ways to defend in basketball, didn’t made the game worse but better. Which also means forbidden something which make the game unbalance will actually improve the game. By applying this to our life, these rules also give us the border line of doing something. For example, if we were creating arts, we shouldn't make something which might hurt others or violate the law, but beside that, we can expend our mind and do whatever we have in our mind.

In the article, it states that some people want to apply a “winning program” to basketball game, assign player to specific “position” within “system”. I think this is totally wrong because no one likes to watch a basketball game run by a program. It will be boring and repeating as the game is following a formula while it had been created. It is an exactly same situation for arts. We don’t want to create art with a program, this will make most of the arts in the world looks similar. So I think people should always be creative and not just following or copying other’s works.

In Weschler's article, while the staffs were creating 3-D characters, they had failed many times but they never give up. Even a very tiny problem they had to use much more time to think how they can solve it. This really encourages me because in our society, there are too many people give up immediately when they face problem. They never try to think of any ways to solve the problem but only think they could never make it and give up.

It’s hard to understand why those said the 3-D characters to be “too real”, in my opinion, I think it will be better to make a 3-D character as real as possible. But why they don’t want those characters looks real? The only reason I could think of might be the character’s skin were too detailed and looks scary. But besides this I couldn't think of any other reason not to make those characters more real. 

Hi Everyone!!

Hi, my name is Clinton. I am from Hong Kong and I've been studying two years in New Jersey before coming to OSU. I am studying engineering and planning to enter ECE major. I want to get a job in the area of electronic engineer. In my spare times, I like surfing the internet, finding interesting videos and pictures. I also love going out with my friends and try out restaurants wherever I seen. The best five restaurant in Columbus were: Joys Village ( a Chinese restaurant and their Joys Village tofu were the best!!), Buckeye Donuts (I used to have them for breakfast), Noodle's Company ( they got different kind of noodles and desserts for you to pick~), Chipolte (they could fill your stomach no matter how hungry you are!!), last but not least, Fortune Chinese restaurant (  their Hui Guorou were the best Chinese food I've ever had in Ohio!!)