Process Piece

Process Piece

Artist Statement

This was a bit overwhelming trying to figure out what I was going to do. I wanted to do something really settle so that the build is strong. I think that by confusing the audience it makes the ending even better. Kind of like Perks of Being a Wallflower, in that movie you are unaware of what is really happening right until the end. I like this idea because in some cases it keeps the audience intrigued. The whole time people are listening to my process piece they will be trying to figure out what the process is.

My process is about writing an essay. I think that a lot of students will get what it is like to do an essay and how hard it is to concentrate. After people have listened to it once, I feel like it will make people laugh and giggle a little. I know from experience, that when I sit down to write an essay, only to write essays, I have trouble even writing a sentence.  My brain becomes a big pile of mush and I have to do it in increments. I always procrastinate by eating, Facebook, texting, or even mustering up the power to go to the bathroom. That’s right, I don’t want to write essays so bad, I fake having to go to the bathroom. I also recorded the clock noise because I feel like, as a student, that we are always under pressure of getting things done in a timely manner because we have the next assignment to do. It is a hard situation to be in.

It was really fun creating something from a process that is something that I do in everyday life. I think that all these things that I recorded are the sounds of writing an essay. I stayed to true to what most college students do in the process of writing an essay.

Tiny Stories

Tiny Stories

Artist Statement 

My tiny stories relation to one another is types of death. I turned something really morbid into comical. I did this because I thought I could create two dynamics at once, which I think I did. I think I did this by choosing death as a topic and the way that I animated it. Every single one of those types of deaths are really morbid in real life, but in these it kind of makes you chuckle.

The animals don’t give it a personal feel, and also I did real life situations for those animals. If you talk about what is happening in each picture it would be very sad and gross. It reminds me of Family Guy and how they use really morbid situations and make them into funny situations. To some people, even if it is funny, they still think it is in bad taste. I, on the other hand, think animated violence is very comical.

All in all it was a very fun project and I took a lot from what I learned in class. I tried to show rather than tell. I feel like I have a great median in what my pictures show and what my words show. I used less than 15 words on each one, but I am still trying to decide if it conveyed enough of what I wanted to show. I think that it did, but I know the stories in my head and I don’t know what other people are thinking. This project taught me that I can’t rely on a single characteristic in a film. It has to be well rounded and sometimes, less is more. If I can tell a story in less than 15 words then I can SHOW more in a film than TELL. 

Music Mosaic

RJD2- Her Majesty's Socialist Request

These pictures represent the song I chose, “Your Majesty’s Socialist Request” by showing that everything is connected, but each thing serves it’s own purpose. Uniformity is throughout the song, which is represented through my pictures by showing that all my pieces are connected. The overlay in the song is constantly changing, but all those different parts make up the song. My pictures show this in each picture by having the item or subject something that is as a whole, but each of the parts has its own purpose.

Here are some explanations for my examples:

·    A human being is a complex creature. Humans are made in God’s image and he created one of the most complicated works of art. Walking around in a body, people take for granted of simple tasks. They think bodies are as a whole, but with out their spine, their liver or their bladder the body would not work the same. The body is a whole, but there are pieces that make up that whole.

·    A tree is a tree and yet many things go into making a tree. The picture I have captured shows a canopy tree.  These are trees that branch out wide to cover more surface area. As a whole the tree functions as a tree, but the leaves functions as leaves. The leaves help the tree cover more surface area and gain more light for the tree to grow, while also letting enough light in and moisture for the trunk of the tree.

·    Stories tell many things with the help of words. A book is a great example of what I am trying to get across. For example, one of my favorite books is Ender’s Game and in this book one of the most well known lines is, “The enemy’s gate is down.” Now if I took each of those words and said them by themselves, they would not make a story. Altogether though, the words can make a glamorous tale. Words are words until they are put together to make a story.

These are just a few examples of what I did. I took things that seem to mean nothing together and made them connect, even though they didn’t seem to have any connections. However, they act as separate pieces to show people examples. “Your Majesty’s Socialist Request” is a very interesting song that combines many things that I would have never thought worked. It made me think in a whole new way.

Thinking and Writing Essay

Aralie Hoskins

Fall 2013

Thinking and Writing Essay

The Art of Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is one of the most violent TV shows on right now. It shows everything right down to the guts. It is a gruesome story of drug dealers and the blood bath that this career makes. This is one of the few examples in media where the show actually makes violence look how gross and ugly it really is. The writers do this to show that going bad is easier than it seems, but it is not as glorified as other shows make it. It shows this by the reality of drugs, the realness of the violence, and also what it does to a family. All these attributes are portrayed in one episode called “Peekaboo.”

In this episode Jesse goes to a drug addicts house to get back the meth that the addicts stole. It was gross inside the house. The two addicts looked like they were 60 years old, but they were supposed to be around 30. The filmmakers made it that way because they want this show to be as real as possible. This is a real effect that is seldom used in media because they want to glorify the life of partying. They used it in here to show what drug addicts really look like and not those hot boys and girls they show. The writers want people to be afraid of going off the deep end or as they refer to it: breaking bad.

The violence in the episode “Peekaboo” would make anybody cringe. The addict wants the meth from her husband so bad, that she drops a full metal ATM on his head. People then proceed to see his face smashed under it and the blood gushing out. It is almost too real to process for some. For me I had to look away and try not to gag. Jesse then gets up and holds her at gunpoint. Except he is not confident in his abilities, it is more the opposite where his hand is shaking and he is whimpering. He cannot handle the violence he has seen or what he might do to her. Again, the writers want to show that even if someone has gone bad, it is hard for them to deal with such things. Shooting a person is not easy, and they don’t want to make it look easy.

While all this was happening in the addict’s home, there was also a little boy in there about the age of five. Jesse still feels things like a normal human being. He sees the little boy and knows that he has been neglected. He knows that this boy is not fit to live here anymore.  It is apparent that writers wanted to show the horrors for kids and families when they are either drug dealers or drug addicts. NACOA reports, “Three of four child welfare professionals (75.7%) say that children of addicted parents are more likely to enter foster care.” Breaking Bad does a good job of representing what a little kid of drug addict parents would act like. He was reclusive and didn’t talk at all. They showed that this was not the kind of home a child would want to grow up in.

            Now, people often say that if you watch major violence or drug abuse that it desensitizes them, but I beg-to-differ. I think that people get a thrill out of watching things like that, but with Breaking Bad it shows how real it is to be desensitized to it. People like watching it because it is an unexpected story of how someone, who no one would have thought, turns bad. Most people like an unexpected story and that is what Breaking Bad gives to people.

            Breaking Bad is a wonderful show, not only because of the great cinematic skills, but also the underlying theme of the show. In “Peekaboo” the theme is almost identical to the whole show itself: “breaking bad is easier than it seems.” They also instill in people that breaking bad is more gross and ugly than anyone would have ever thought. Not like in other movies where they commend it and people end up experimenting because they think it looks fun. Breaking Bad does everything but that. It makes you rethink your morals. It asks people what should they do in life and how to prevent getting into trouble because it is so easy to go off the deep end.