Audio Process

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      We were inspired by the clip we watched in class about the man that was preparing food. We both really liked this because there were so many different and unique sounds. Every item had a different sound that was audio descriptive of whatever food he was preparing and it was so interesting that you could close your eyes and tell what he was chopping. It was also very interesting how some of the sounds made the food sound extremely desirable while other sounds made the food seem unappealing.

            We came across a really appetizing looking recipe on none other than Pinterest for a vegetable soup (that was served in a pumpkin although we were unable to obtain a pumpkin to carve out and serve the soup in). There were things in it like carrots, other vegetables, and a spice mix that seemed like they would make cool sounds either being chopped or poured. We also thought it would be interesting to do something food related because there is an entire television network devoted to food. On the television you are obviously watching it; and we thought it would be cool to make a process where you just listen to it as a sort of guessing game of what we were making. Sometimes Libby likes to watch cooking shows and close her eyes and listen to all the different foods being created. We really wanted to put part of this cooking show element into our own project.

            For our audio process we decided to document the process of making and eating soup. To execute this we chopped up vegetables, prepared soup seasonings and had someone take a sip of the soup. We wanted to capture some of these intriguing elements and use them for our own process. We tried to get a mix of different sounds to make the process appealing so this might be something that sparked your interest and that you would want to try yourself, either cooking it or eating it.

            Overall, the soup did not turn out as perfect as it looked on the internet, put luckily we felt the sounds still make the soup sound desirable. It was interesting to us that you could create something that sounded good, but in its actual state, turned out not as appetizing as it sounded. This just goes to show that sounds can have a huge impact on narratives, and that sounds can also be deceiving.

Tiny Stories

"Just a minute," he said, as they waited to sing him Happy Birthday. The photo had 12 likes by the time the fire truck made it to the house. 

Little did her boyfriend know that on the other end was the man that was giving her the attention that he deprived her of. 

Years later her patients weren't appreciative of her I'll-finish-it-later method. 

Anna never knew irony until she read "drive safe," moments before she found herself face to face with an oncoming Ford Taurus. 

When the clock struck twelve no one knew how they had missed the ball drop. 

For my tiny stories I was influenced by a few different things, firstly I’ve been into taking these sort of pictures for a while, which was first influenced by a tweet by someone who made fun of people that take pictures of their food before they eat it. This combined with watching my little brother be on a laptop, iPad, and phone all at the same time started my obsession with catching people on technology either at a weird or funny time or when it is totally inappropriate which is fairly easy to find these days. Secondly, I was influenced by the commercials where they have those people telling stories about texting and driving where they end up killing a car load of cute little kids on the way to a petting zoo or something and the text that killed them read something like, ‘yeah bro, on my way.’ These commercials are really powerful to me because it hits close to home for pretty much anyone that has a phone because 99%* of texters that can drive do both at the same time (*made up statistic).

Technology is something that we are all so wrapped up in so I thought this would be a really interesting topic to cover. Most of the stories (since they are stories) are gross exaggerations of whatever was actually happening in the photo, which I think drives home the point more than something boring like, ‘they had to wait for him to finish the text to his girlfriend before they could sing him Happy Birthday’. And it is interesting to note that only one of the pictures that I took for this was actually posed (the one in Five Guys) because I thought it would be a good one for a story, but other than that they are all organic which is really depressing. 

I really tried to mimic the reading that we had by Dillard where she was so great with imagery, and I wanted to do the same but with way fewer words to be able to work with it was a little difficult to be as descriptive as she was, but I think I was at least semi decent at creating good visuals besides the ones that you were able to see within the picture. I also feel like I was drawn to morbidity because of the Tim Burton tiny stories that we read that were basically child horror stories. But like I said, I think that sometimes its important to maybe be more on the darker side like that because it makes more of an impact on the reader and will hopefully influence for good in the future.

Music Mosaic

"Intro" - The XX

            I had a lot of trouble buckling down on a song, because I had a few that I’m in love with and that would have worked (in different sequences) with the millions of pictures that I took in downtown Salt Lake City. In the end I went with “Intro” by The XX because it best went with the feeling that I wanted to portray, which was sort of a chilled out view of the fast paced city. It’s an electronic song, but composed in a way that that’s extremely smooth, I wanted to echo that with my pictures so I chose to focus on lights in the city.

            The song has some fluid sections, which I interpreted as the big city view, lights in the street, and the freeway shot to symbolize movement. Just the way the beat goes, you can just feel the movement in it. Then there is a section of the song where it slows down and sort of pauses on some notes and this is where I have matched the photos of specific light fixtures, the tree with Christmas lights in it, the lit up sign, the lights outside the entrance to a building, and the lights on some stairs (that has really cool patterns on them because of the different light sources shining through the hand railings lining the steps). But if you will notice, the pictures of all of these things are fragmented, you don’t see the whole thing, I did this because when the beats do their pause thing its as if you were driving through the city and just glimpsing these things, it doesn’t wait long enough for you to really get the whole view.

            I really wanted to mirror in both how what could be harsh, can also have a beautiful soft side. Not to say that electronic music or the city is harsh, but they both have the ability to be, but in this instance the music is soft and flowing and just beautiful and that’s really what I wanted to portray with the shots of the city. I didn’t want to show speeding cars everywhere, or people hustling around, or anything that could evoke any feelings of unsettlement, because those would be completely opposite of what was happening with the music. Instead it was flashes of light, which often times is associated with goodness, and at the same time light can be harsh which is why I think it was necessary to have just pieces of it sometimes.

Thinking & Writing Essay

Hailey Robertson

Fall 2013

Thinking & Writing Essay

The New Normal

Silver Linings Playbook is a touching movie that explores the world of mental illness in a refreshing way. Most of the characters in fact have varying degrees of a disorder, but Pat is the main character who is the focus and who has the most severe mental illness and in turn gets the most attention for it. Silver Linings Playbook aims to show the viewer that people with mental illnesses are like anybody else and maybe in some cases more normal, and need not be treated any differently which can be harming.

The film opens with Pat in mental health facility because of the outburst that he had when he found out that his wife was having an affair, and we later learn that he is undiagnosed bi-polar. He comes out of the facility when he does because his mother decides it has been “long enough” and it’s time for him to come home even though the doctors don’t recommend him leaving yet. This is the first of many times we see how uncomfortable both Pats family and friends are with the fact that he was in a mental facility. It goes further to point out first with his friend and then with his own brother that they both make excuses why they couldn’t visit him while he was in the mental facility because it would have been too uncomfortable to see him in that sort of situation.

One of the biggest hot topic issues in our country right now is that of guns. We are seeing a trend of mass shootings all over the country, and nine times out of ten the shooters has a mental disorder which drove them to take the lives of others and usually themselves. If we focused more on getting people psychological help, this wouldn’t be as big of a problem. It would be an easy thing to teach children all through school the signs of these disorders like depression, bi-polar, etc., and that way everyone would know what to look for in people that they are close too. Instead we live in a world where when someone starts acting “weird” or “off” many peoples reaction is to separate themselves from them, which is the worst thing that could be done. Like we see in the movie, Pat does not have any progress because his family is tiptoeing around him or treating him differently, it is when he is with Tiffany, who also had a mental breakdown because of the death of her husband, that is honest to him and really understands what he is going through that he starts to improve. One in four adults in America struggle with a mental disorder, diagnosed or not, and maybe that would be lower if we knew what to look for to get people help. Or maybe if we got rid of the stigma that surrounds it people would feel more confortable coming forward themselves and seek out help.

Honesty is a big theme throughout the movie because both Pat and Tiffany are very honest with everyone else which makes others uncomfortable. At one point the two of them are discussing different medications they had been on and the others that are in the room are visually uncomfortable with the openness with which they are discussing it. Then later when one of Pats family members tries to stop him from being so open, he retorts that maybe he, Tiffany and his friend from the facility all know something that they don’t because of their being honest. This also comes up right after Pat’s friend points out that Tiffany goes to therapy so he should watch out for her, even though Pat himself goes to therapy. The film touches on this over and over again with people being uncomfortable with mental illness and almost dehumanizing them the way they talk about them, and it’s really to point out that this really happens all over and that we ourselves need to not be so thrown off by something as normal as therapy. Going to a counselor or a psychologist is so normal these days that it really shouldn’t have the stigma that it does, because it doesn’t deserve it and could help so many people and maybe even stop the growing number of shootings and suicides.

It is not just the main characters that struggle psychologically. Pats father has violent outbursts and his friend Ronnie is struggling in his marriage where he is too afraid to confront his issues and instead listens to heavy metal. Pat who knows this is no good tries to help him, but Ronnie just responds that its okay because it isn’t possible to be happy all the time, which Pat is appalled by because of his mantra of finding a silver lining in everything. With this attitude it is no wonder that people have trouble confronting their issues because they believe it is just something that happens and they don’t have any choice but to accept it and move on without fixing anything.

            Silver Linings Playbook fights for those with mental illness. In this day and age when everyone is so judgmental of those will disorders that they brush them off, treat them differently, or tiptoe around the fact that something may be off about them. When in reality they should be supportive and urge them to get help if it is serious enough. This film urges that we get rid of the stigma that surrounds something so common that a quarter of Americans struggle with it in one way or another, and treat them like the normal human beings that they are.