Adventures, Projects, and Final Thoughts: A Work in Progress

Projects:

Although I’m proud of all the work I’ve done in this course, I have two that I’m especially fond of. After watching Right Footed at the CAAM Fest, we created a blog post that included artwork that was IMG_9393inspired by the movie. Two of the projects I wanted to display in this blog post comes from this project. I spent a long time doing research for this post and am proud of the perspective of the piece. You can visit the blog here. The artwork can be seen at left. This piece was created with regular Dixon Ticonderoga No.2 yellow pencils. The plane is the Ercoupe that was featured in the movie. The “clouds” are shaped like right feet as an homage to the name of the film. The stamp on the fuselage reads “ABLE” and the stabilizers are shaped like peace signs in commemoration of the CRPD.

Favorite F2F Adventures:
I absolutely loved visiting the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (aka the BAMPFA), looking at the art, and watching Kiki’s Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki. Below are a few pictures of the art we saw.

Another one of my favorite excursions was our visit to the Exploratorium. The films we saw at the end of our outing were super avant garde and amazing and the film-related exhibits were super interesting. (Unfortunately, most of the photos I took during these adventures are lost to iCloud auto-delete but I’m going to attach videos from the Musee de Mécanique which was also a really fun field trip that we took earlier in the semester. The paintings that James and I replicated (at the BAMPFA) are attached below: Green Patio Door by Georgia O’Keefe and Red Earth by (I don’t remember, sorry ). I also included two zoetropes that we saw at the Exploratorium. )

IMG_3721

IMG_3717

 

I really loved this course, though I wish I had more time for the creative processes and to really get into the film scene. I was also very surprised on how  CAAMFest was labeled as “alternative,” because it featured APA and API creators and stars, which is very left of center. The mainstream film world is still very white and wealthy and I really hope to see greater breakthroughs as the civil rights work in America becomes stronger and grows simultaneously.

In many ways, film is its own art. Visual media is the most aesthetically similar, but the ability to add in an extra sense really heightens the experience. I really enjoy film, although traditional visual art remains my favorite (I’m a sucker for impressionist art). I think that we saw many different types of film during this course, which was a bit of a surprise to me because I (subconsciously) thought of film as more of a 2-dimensional art, but through this course, we really saw politically-directed films, cartoons, animation, etc., which is something I really enjoyed.

We also learned a lot about film production, and it really struck me how every step of the filmmaking process is so time and work-intensive and how innocently the layperson understands the process as “just taking a long time.” I think, from this course, I’ve begun to understand my own film aesthetics. I enjoy documentaries and films with purpose, but my own creations are more whimsical than directive and dreamy rather than purposeful. I think in the future I’m going to lean towards aesthetically-based films that are dependent on sensory engagement. Despite that, I’m still very curious about the planning stages of making documentaries and the exact time breakdown of the production process.

(A huge thank you to Ms. Greer, this course has been extremely worthwhile and fun–although challenging at times–and it’s all due to your light-hearted but productive guidance! Thank you again!)

 

3 thoughts on “Adventures, Projects, and Final Thoughts: A Work in Progress”

  1. I was also thinking about how the mainstream film world is very white and how there are so many amazing films featuring/made by POC that I never really hear about very often. I also hope that over the next years the film world will expand towards other groups and incorporate that perspective into the mainstream!

  2. I definitely agree that it is amazing how intensive every step of the filmmaking process is, especially in some of the early stages. It sounds like you learned about some of the early thoughts and details that go into your work when you replicated some art at the BAMPFA, I know I did.

  3. I also enjoyed how API and other artists of color were incorporated into this course. I thought it reflected the Bay Area well. But, it all makes me wonder if Hollywood will ever change..?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *