My final. The pictures are a little out of order, the top 3 should be the last three, but the program wont let me move them.

For my final project I am making a bookcase, containing 5 books, and book ends. The story will be a children’s book theme, with a sparrow that gets lost from its family. The sparrow will have to ask different types of birds if they know where his family is. During the story time will elapse chronologically, going from the morning when the bird is lost, to the night, when the bird is found. For a physical act of time the viewer will have to pull out each chapter individually. Each chapter will consist of a different bird, and be a different book altogether. (Totaling five chapters) Inside each individual book will be four images, in an accordion style view. I will also include text, just to help the actual story along. The five books will be in order, and labeled to minimize confusion. The book ends will be childlike drawings/ creations of the sparrow and a peacock. I don’t want the book ends to be read as entirely book ends, but more as just decoration. The end result will hopefully look as if it is something to go in child’s room.

3 Minutes of My Life

Flip Book

The Chronicles of Life and Death

Here is the final version of my visual book. I decided to use the same theme as I had mentioned in class but I changed the materials because I felt that the Conte Crayon colors resembled a cave drawing. I also decided to sew the pages together instead of make the pages flip because the backgrounds seem to flow from one page to the next, and I think the story reads better in this manor.

For my visual book I am going to show a simple story using the Native American god of fertility, Kokopelli. I will use the symbol of him playing the flute, and have him dancing with different poses from page to page. For the convergence, I will show the seasons changing in the background, therefore having two images merged together on a page. Kokopelli being the god of fertility, is by default responsible for the change of seasons as well. The book will be constructed out of various materials such as feathers, beads, fabric, and paper. Ideally I would like the size of my book to be about 16"x20", however I am not sure how well this will work, therefore the size may change during the construction. I want the actual book to look like a wall skin, not necessarily look like skin, but just resemble the shape of the skin. I would like for it to hang on the wall, making the viewer have to lift up the pages.

Conceptual Sketchs

For the conceptual sketches I decided to use what I consider to be the real mythology, old religions. I based all of my drawings on Roman/Greek, Native American, and Egyptian mythology. I also included text in some format in all of my drawings.

For this first image I decided to draw canopic jars out of hieroglyphics and letters. Each jar's words spell out the name of the creature that guarded the organ with in it's jar. The symbolism used here is the images of the jars. The word relationship is inter-medial.
For this image I drew from a well known painting, Venus. The symbol that tells the viewer that this is Venus is mostly the shell. However her beauty is also sometimes referred to as a symbol. At the bottom I added the saying love conquers all in Latin. The word relationship is trans-medial.
This image is a representation of a myth that semi-relates to real life. In this image I abstractly show the battle between Orion and the scorpion. In a not well recorded myth, the scorpion is sent to kill Orion which he does by stinging him. Orion is later set in the sky as a constellation as well as the scorpion. Ironically the scorpion rises in one hemisphere as Orion sets therefore the two are never in the sky at the same time. This image is a mix of the actual sky, a pictorial representation of the story, and a small prose that adds to the image. The symbols here are mostly among the constellations. The word relationship could be either trans-medial or multi-medial.
In this image I showed the symbol of Kokopelli, a Native American god of fertility, also a trouble maker. This symbol is widely known especially in the south. I used words here to make an illusion of music coming from Kokopelli's flute. The words are actually "The Ballad of Kokopelli". The word relationship here can be either mixed-medial or inter-medial.
For my last sketch I drew the image of Poseidon on a hippocamp. The symbol that tells the viewer that this is Poseidon and not just a random merman is the trident. Other symbols that allude to him being Poseidon are the hippocamp, a "sea horse" that is famous for pulling Poseidon's chariot, and the dolphin which is commonly seen in images with Poseidon. In the image is a Hymn that was written for Poseidon. The word relationship could be either trans-medial or multi-medial.

Time Design

This week in class we presented our research about time design within a specific movie. My group used the movie The Life Aquatic to show the six different elements of time design; tempo, intensity, setting, chronology, scope, and duration. As my part of the presentation I provided a clip regarding scope and intensity. I discovered that the scope in this particular movie was similar to the seen in Run Lola Run when she is thinking about who to ask for money, except the difference is that in The Life Aquatic, the images flash slower and show more setting. For intensity I learned that The Life Aquatic was actually very lacking in intensity due to the almost monotone dialog, lack of music, and slow action scenes.

The image used was taken from: http://www.hollywoodjesus.com/movie/life_aquatic/cast.jpg.


For the second half of the class we went to the new ICA museum. There I found one artist that I really enjoyed, his name Jack Goldstein. He was born in 1945, in Montreal, Quebec and died in 2003 in San Bernardino, California. The piece there was called Untitled 1983. It was an acrylic painting on canvas using only three colors that are not adequately represented in the provided photograph. The colors were a bright green, blue, and white. The image struck me because I am fascinated with storms and science. I also know how hard is it to capture a double lightning strike due to the extreme speed. The size of the painting with the intense color and the cropping also made it seem very cinematic. The painting itself captures a small moment in time.

The image used was taken from: http://www.orbit.zkm.de/files/orbit/goldstein4-22-1.jpg. The information provided was taken from the informational plaque at the ICA.