Artist Statement

Artist Statement

The goal of my art pieces is to send a message to my viewers. Manipulating photographs and editing video footage using fancy software such as Photoshop and Final Cut Pro helps me to get creative. The topics that I have chosen thus far are underage drinking and cheating. Our culture looks down upon these activities, however many college students disregard the rules. I do not know how many people I can reach with my art, but I would like to create more artwork with the purpose of helping others to make better decisions.

The collaborative video project was my first real experience working with video and editing software. This is a very effective medium for reaching large amounts of people, especially because of YouTube, so my group decided to post the video online. A documentary style video that condemns cheating without preaching against it is most effective because the students that are prone to cheating all have their own reasons (whether valid or not) to cheat. Using a comedic edge to reach those students should represent how ridiculous cheating is.

Thankfully, two members of my group for the collaborative video project were very fluent in Final Cut Pro, so I had the opportunity to learn from them. They were very influential throughout the entire process, from setting up a scene, to capturing the entire shot, and all the way down to editing the bits and pieces into the final product. I have a lot to learn from them, but I am glad that all of our visions for this video came together in the end.

I think we were supposed to link to our video on our blogs, so the link to our video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBdXdh8YWPU

I hope everyone enjoys watching it as much as we enjoyed making it!

Cheating at Bentley: The Surprising Range of Opinions

On Friday my group which included Christina, Kelly and Karl, created a video about cheating at Bentley. It wasn't the original idea I had for a video about a controversial topic, but once they told me about some ideas that they had, I was intrigued and ready to bring some ideas to the table. We decided to call some of our friends and acquaintances at Bentley for some interviews,but not many people that we have seen cheat in various ways were interested in discussing their experiences on video. A few friends were willing to show up and help us out, but I felt that this somewhat skewed the interviews because those people were all anti-cheating. Our next mission was to find people in the library that we could interview. We found a few willing candidates, and they were very amusing to record.

Another element of our video was a skit that showed several well-known methods of cheating that most of us have seen other classmates doing. This classroom simulation included one of our team members wearing a hat that made it easier for her to cheat. We brainstormed other methods and came up with writing up a tiny cheat sheet and tucking it in her sleeve, writing formulas on the inside of a water bottle, using a crackberry to find out information and lastly, the infamous looking over to someone else's exam for answers.

We knew that we wanted to weave the interviews with the skit, but we found that we needed more of a storyboard, so we also shot some scenes of a studious non cheater (Karl) versus a cheater (Kelly) who spent all night playing Gameboy and making her cheat sheet in the last moment. The next scene is of the two walking to class, and Kelly having a smug facial expression when Karl asks her about her level of preparedness.

Once we shot everything that we thought was necessary to show both sides of cheating, we went down to the Mac Lab to start uploading and editing. I think that these Flipcams are absolutely impressive. They are so easy to use and upload, but the quality is still amazing. Once we got everything on the computer, our group got lucky because we had two Final Cut Pro masterminds. I learned a lot about editing, because I have only used Windows Movie Maker in previous small video projects. This was a very enjoyable project because we were having fun with the project. Editing is interesting and I hope I will be able to use my new knowledge one day in the future. I'm also really proud of our video and think I had a really creative group.

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone involved and a special thanks to Christin, Kelly, Karl and also thanks to Liz for all of the help.

So... I finally finished the project. I did not use the angry seagulls even though they were pretty intense because I couldn't exactly figure out how to change the context of some angry seagulls stealing some fish. After perusing all of my pictures, I found some interesting pictures from my experimenting, and then right as I was about to give up, I randomly found a picture of a sign in the Portugal duty-free shop taken on my way back from my European study abroad travelling this summer. The sign was under a Grey Goose bottle and the sign said, "The sale of spirits is prohibited under the age of 16. If necessary photographic identification may be required to prove the age." I was inspired to start working with this sign, but some more googling led me to find a picture of two toddlers drinking, so I played around with the image of the two kids, fixing the color, focusing the picture on the shining alcohol bottles, and I added "If mommy can do it, so can I." Something about two little boys left in the park to be drinking, even if this is a set up, made me think about my niece and how she copies everything that everyone does. She does not understand what she is doing, but if she sees me stick my tongue out, she repeats... And with alcohol, kids can easily rinse and repeat.

Frustration but nonetheless progress

The photoshop project is due at 10 am and I am still having trouble choosing a subject. Photoshop is not cooperating on my computer, but I suppose that is what I get for procrastinating. I am finally about to narrow down my options, but there is so much out there on the Internet that I have become very indecisive over the past few days. No matter how much I google, I am finding that it is easier to use pictures that I have taken or that other friends have taken and just experiment with those pictures. I hope that by the next blog post I will have something to show for all of these hours that I have basically just been playing around. So far, I will probably manipulate a picture of some vicious seagulls and make it into something sarcastic or obnoxious about something else. :-/