Final Project

-> Here ya go! <-

You may notice that the final version of this project is kinda different from the WIP one. Just kinda. Just a little bit. All that is missing is the music, and the animation. No big deal. :(

Actually, it's kind of sad. I would have loved to turn in an animation for the final project. But as I found out, an animation would probably take a quarter, not two weeks. So I had to take a different approach. Something that wouldn't take as long. I thought of doing flip book animation. But since I am absolutely no good at hand drawing, that probably would take as long as the Flash animation. So let's try something else. I don't even know what to call this. It's not exactly comic book. More like storyboarding I guess.

Now to the content. I got the idea when I was walking to Math class. Math's been hard on me this quarter. After the first midterm, I thought that maybe I should drop the class. Maybe even change major, because you need a lot of math in CSE. Lots of depressing thoughts pass my mind at the time. But I didn't drop the class. I bounced back, and got 96 in my second midterm. Now there's a chance that I might not fail the class after all. So I thought that was a cool story, fitting for the last project of the year.

The project took me nearly four hours. Never knew it took that long to draw stick figures. In the end I think it turned out okay. I can't tell if it is understandable to other people. Perhaps if I double the amount of pictures, it may be clearer. Still, I'd have like for it to be animated, though. Perhaps I will make that my summer project.

The one hard thing that I encounter while doing this is actually how to convey more emotions. While I was drawing this, I can feel it. But when I look at it afterward, I guess it seems a little bland. Or maybe that is just because I look at it too much. I don't know. We'll see how it goes it class.

Final WIP

Linky!!!

Micro-assignment 6

My action word is swirl.

intransitive verb
1. a : to move with an eddying or whirling motion ; b : to pass in whirling confusion
2. : to have a twist or convolution

The word swirl causes me to think of spinning things, like spinning pencils and Ferris wheel, as well as the spinning motion. My first thought was that I could stick some glow in the dark material to my pencil and spin it. But I didn't have any of the stuff, so that idea quickly went out the window. Then I remember something that I used to do when I was younger. Back then, my family went visit our relatives every year in a very rural area. At night, it was complete darkness, compared to the light polluted city where I lived. We would burn incense so that the tip glows orange, and then went out into the dark and swirl them around to see the streaks of light for a split second. It was fun at first, but all we got was very short light streaks that gets boring quickly.

So now I had a new idea. I would tie a piece of paper to the tips of a pencil, burn it, and take long exposure shots of me swirling it around. But then, my mom didn't want me to burn things inside the house, and I didn't think that the paper would burn long enough for me to take pictures of it, especiall when it is outdoor. However, after some research on light painting, I found out a better idea: use a flash light. It wouldn't be as exciting as fire, but it is a lot safer and easier to work with. Finally, the idea evolved from just simple swirls to swirly letters, to my name in swirly letters, to the word swirl in swirly letter.

An unlikely brush

The problem was that I had no clue how to do long exposure/light painting. Fortunately, I found the "advanced manual" for the camera, which shows that, apparently, my camera can do quite a bunch of stuff.

I also had to research light painting. The process was actually quite simple. Someone have hold down the shutter button while I draw in front of the camera, making sure that the flashlight is pointed toward, but not directly at the camera

Freddiew!

I didn't have a tripod, so I had to ask my sister to take the pictures for me. She was reluctant at first, but then she loved it when she see the pictures. Even my mom got involved. She did a whole bunch of L's, though none of them actually made it to the final composition. This really was the most fun project I did this quarter.

Here's my sister trying out the "magic."

After 77 shots and compositing in Photoshop, here's the final result:

Blog Entry 9

I have to wonder if being blind makes Robert a better listener. Perhaps the reason that the wife liked him so much is because he always listens to what she says. Maybe being blind, he has a whole new perspective on things that she would never think of. I think that is what happens in those tapes. She knows that he would listen, and that he would offer her something totally enlightening. I think that is how the husband feels at the end, too. He didn’t know much about blind people, so he felt uncomfortable around one. He didn’t know what to say, or how to act. Robert then offered him his company, which apparently people don’t usually do. They smoked together, watch TV together. Then they draw together. At first I thought that was the weird part, or the supposedly-inspirational part in these kinds of story. But it wasn’t weird at all. The husband, in the end, learned something from the blind man. I think he had learned a lot more about being blind that he would ever have without meeting this blind man.

Micro-assignment 5

As shown in the image, my super power is invisibility, and I can use it to escape from doing icebreakers. Honestly, by October last year, I had gotten pretty sick of icebreakers. We did at orientation, did it at the beginning of a program that I was in last summer, did it when a speakers comes talk to us, did it at the beginning of my Scholars program, etc. I don't like speaking in front of a large group, especially when I have to answer the question, "What would your name be if you were a pirate?" Now with my invisibility power, I can just disappear until they're done.

When brainstorming, I wrote down all possible superpowers that I can think of. Then I look up Wikipedia, where there is actually a whole list of superpowers divided into categories. Then I pick a few that I like the most, and wrote down what I could do with them. After choosing "invisibility to escape from awkward situation", I needed to find ways to depict an awkward situation. I was thinking of doing fairly generic scene, using facial expression to convey the awkwardness. This turns out to be very hard, because there really isn't any universal expression that can show that the person is in an awkward situaion. So I need something more specific, which is why I turns to Socially Awkward Penguin for help. There are a few interesting ones, but they are harder to depict. Icebreakers is one of the few that is feasible.

I wish I had brought my camera with me last Wednesday. That is one of the thing that I'd change. The webcam has a fairly low resolution and is of lower quality, which make it a little inflexible when it comes to editing the image. Also when taking the pictures, I was smiling, which is inappropriate for the situation. I use liquify to pull the corners of my mouth down. It turned out to be a little bit exaggerated, but since I was invisible anyway, it is not too noticeable. I think the concept could be improved, too. I'd have like to have a larger group of people sitting in a circle at the Oval, but that would not be quite feasible. I think I like the humorous note using the speech bubble. It really pull the pictures to the cartoon/comic territory. I also think the picture is understandable, which is always a good thing.

Blog Entry 8

I talked to my mom when I was younger about how an adult life seems terribly boring. Wake up, go to work, go home, and go to bed. If seems a lot more boring than a kid’s life, because we got to play different things and stuff. So she told me, “Well, there are other things that you have to think about that really make it not boring at all.”

He said that the real value of education is to teach people to control how they think about things. Which is true, I guess. A lot of general education courses are meant to show us different perspectives, so that we know how to think from other people’s standpoint. For example, I took a political science class last quarter. They literally taught us about “perspectives,” such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism. It really shows that different people with different perspective will think differently, thus act different and result in different outcomes. It is entirely not about how I think or feel. To other people, how I think and feel, in fact, holds no importance at all. But by paying attention to others, I can see that life is way more than just waking up, do stuff, and go to bed. There are other, well, stuff in life that may make it worth living.

So I probably should start paying attention from now on. Probably should make sure that I make good use of the real value of education.