IMG_2851As most of you already know, Amanda Miner from the class of 2018, died two months ago, on March 16th to be exact. As many of you may not know, she was a very close friend of mine. She was killed in a car accident while celebrating her 21st birthday. I was in Pine Ridge, South Dakota working on an ASB work project when I got the news. I will never forget the moment I got that text message; this is my first experience with loss.
The use of social media websites has changed the way we interact in many ways. It changes how we communicate, how we remember people and places. Me and many of Amanda’s loved ones have turned to social media to grieve her loss and to remember her. It wouldn’t be right exactly to call this performance art per say, but I’ve used snapchat a lot to share memories of her, and to share how she still comes up in my everyday life. It was interesting to see how people have responded to my grief on snapchat, as the two don’t seem compatible or even appropriate. Sometimes the lack of privacy on social media comes back to bite us, but in this case it was actually helpful in getting support for grief, and for supporting others. So here are some of the snaps I’ve shared.
I love pop culture, I love fantasy and mythology, and I love being a woman of color. For my final project, I decided to try and include all of these into one.
This video is an appropriation of Greek mythological characters, celebrities, and #carefreeBlackgirls. I asked my two friends, Mikai and Imani to model as recreated Perseus and Medusa, and I shot them acting out different poses.
Black people and queerness are pretty much absent (or erased) from these stories, so I thought it would be cool to reimagine these characters as Black women.
Myths are more than just fantasy; they often serve as important social commentary. Reimagining people of color and queer people, or other marginalized communities in these stories is a political act in and of itself. There is political significance in Black women being recognized as cultural influences and in Black women being able to express themselves freely.
Here’s the link: https://youtu.be/jo3Z0vcFkYo
I decided to endure in this video after being influenced by a video I saw “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5-SmngOoaQ“. After speaking with Professor, I decided to make this video have more meaning behind it than just looking asethically pleasing. I wanted to play on this topic of Women’s Body and how it is seen as an over sexualized over indulged subject. I wanted to use cake because it is a dessert and can be seen as a sexual example. I decided to reverse the footage of the dripping cake batter because I wanted the end to be Maggie taking back her body as her own. I have her blow out the cupcake to represent the defiance of this sexualized stereotype and quite literally putting out its flame. I used this music as a counter part to what was happening on the screen. Maggie is taking back her body, as seen on screen, but the music is Rihanna singing about “Cake” as a sexual experience. When Maggie blows out the candle the song ends as well. This is to show Maggie putting an end to this stigma and taking back her body. The long awkward slow parts are done on purpose to show that the awkwardness and uncomfortableness of this sexualized issue and raising awareness/ fight for the end of sexualization of female bodies as indulgences and pure sexual objects.
In this project, I appropriate video clips from movie tailors, movie clips, news, and documentary to create a brand-new story. Protecting our environment seems to be far away from us. But it is not. President Trump even decided to cut the EPA. So, I think it is worthwhile to do a project about it.
Though we have a lot of movies addressing the environment issue, movie tends to tell a story about how a hero saves earth or resolve a crisis. It gives people a sense there will be someone who can save us when we have trouble. However, the truth is no one can save us if don’t start to protect our earth. We need everyone’s effort to preserve a livable space for our next generation.
Works Cited
“The Avengers – Final Battle Scene – Iron Man Saves The World – Movie CLIP HD.” YouTube. YouTube, 21 Feb. 2017. Web. 03 May 2017.
Bbcnews. “China Smog: ‘Sky Dark from Air Pollution’ – BBC News.” YouTube. YouTube, 01 Dec. 2015. Web. 03 May 2017.
BuySomeBeatz. “San Andreas Hoover Dam Scene HD 1080p.” YouTube. YouTube, 02 May 2016. Web. 03 May 2017.
DerRaizer97. “JUSTICE LEAGUE ‘Unite The League – Aquaman’ Trailer (2017) Teaser.” YouTube. YouTube, 23 Mar. 2017. Web. 03 May 2017.
I chose to do two athletes getting ready for their perspective games. I wanted the beginning to show how similar different genders get ready for their games. It breaks off when the female starts to do her make up and hair which causes the most amount of time. The baseball player gets to the field much earlier than the field hockey player because she is making herself feel pretty. I chose the last song because it shows what people think that about girl sports. That they are not as serious and that they should be attractive based on their looks and not their athletic build. Female sports programs are constantly getting overlooked or are not as funded as their counterparts. I tried to show this using the up beat song. Many people and programs think female athletes are not as serious and are merely there for the look and the “fun”. In the beginning, there was a motivational speech in the background. It gets very hyped up but the athletes are just brushing their teeth and moving on about their morning. People have a misconception that all athletes need to be pumped up and excited to play. The juxtaposition between the speech and the visual goes against these assumptions as athletes are just normal people.
Music is always an interesting thing to discuss in media. I went to Coachella music Festival in California. It is a pop music festival, which has a lot of artists coming. I like it very much. Besides those great artists and musicians, I found that audiences are also really interesting to look at. Since this was my first time being in a music festival in the U.S., everything was really exciting and new for me to see.
I noticed that there were various people, listening to a same singer, but reacted totally different. I also noticed that some people were trying to get into that “fans” group, although they may not know the artist very well. Those observations inspired me to make a project about listening music privately and publicly. I got a lot of footage after coming back from the festival, but I really didn’t know how to make them into a video art piece. After talking with Professor, I realized that I need to embrace the “Randomness” of those footages. We figured out a way to make a video of me responding to those festival footages instead of only showing the difference between listening music in private and public spaces.
I chose two really old songs to give a contrast between old classical music and pop modern music. In music festival, most people listen to those pop songs rather some old songs, but for myself, I listen to a lot of old songs from movies privately.
In conclusion, I would say that listening music in public with other people might be exciting and great, but listening music privately gives us more freedom without being judged by others.
In this project, I asked eight people to dub for a short film cut from a Chinese movie called “Raise the Red Lantern“. I asked them to say what they think the character is saying based on all they have seen. All the eight people are from different background (South Korea, America, Germany, Ecuador,Addis Ababa……). Some of them are from Asia country, but not China, some of them are born Chinese but grow up in the United States, some of them are learning Chinese. I choose them because I want to see if there is a culture gap or not. I found it interesting that the emotion is universal but some parts of the culture are not universal at all. It is also interesting that several of them talk about foot binding, which is actually not the case here. It appears that people are tentative to link the scene to things they already known when the scene is not familiar. I did not put the “right answer” here in the video in order to give the space for the audience to have their own understanding of this single cut. If they are interested, it is a really great film to watch!
At the second part of this video, the bigger screen is the beginning part and ending scene of the movie and the small screen is my friends explaining why they think the character says that and what is happening. It is really interesting to see the culture gap and some similarities here.
I chose to make an appropriation video for the final project. At first, I tried to mix the footage and the soundtrack that come from two separate films. Then, I came up with the idea of using the paintings of Roy Lichtenstein. I’m fascinated by the narrative in his artwork, and these pop arts are also appropriation work, as many of his paintings were adapted from the comic book. Besides, the paintings used in this video all depict anonymous women who are blonde, beautiful and often become miserable because of men. And men are sometimes depicted as dominant and controlling in his paintings. So I feel like they reflect how female are shown in the early artwork as well as films. The soundtrack here is from Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo, in which the female character is objectified by the male gaze. It is clear that the male character is very controlling and dominant, whereas the female character is tragic. Thus I think there are some similarities between Lichtenstein and Hitchcock’s work in the way of them treating female characters, and these works are also from the 1960s. Moreover, through the project, I tried to convey the idea that filmmaking is about creating the illusion of moving images. But it is not easy for my first time editing and transforming the images of paintings into a film. I tried to add more effects to make it interesting to see, and I wish the images and the sound could appear to be related.
IMG_2851As most of you already know, Amanda Miner from the class of 2018, died two months ago, on March 16th to be exact. As many of you may not know, she was a very close friend of mine. She was killed in a car accident while celebrating her 21st birthday. I was in Pine Ridge, South Dakota working on an ASB work project when I got the news. I will never forget the moment I got that text message; this is my first experience with loss.