World Building

This week’s world building assignment brought up a lot of questions. So many, in fact, it took a while to narrow our group’s focus to a centralized tone and idea for our new world. Our what-if question, the thing that started all our speculation, was this: “What if there was only one world continent?” This is a pretty specific concept, but it was surprising how many possibilities stemmed from such a simple question. We had to consider how such a world might come into being, whether what we built would take place in the past or the future, and we decided on a future idea, inspired by scientists’ predictions of continental drift. We found a really great source for this at http://opengecko.com/geography/visions-of-continental-drift-on-fast-forward/. That provided all the geographical inspiration for Caitlin’s map. From there, we veered in a kind of dystopian direction influenced in some part by the tone of “Panem” in the Hunger Games. This thought, where we focused on the future and a kind of science fiction style of world, was further supported by the ideas from our reading of “Design Fiction” this week, which talked about where design fiction appeared most and was the most successful, particularly in the conclusion. It also discussed how design is the expression of an idea. We were able to integrate that into the world that we created. The idea is in the question, what if the modern world became one land mass?     World building is integral to science fiction, and therefore it was a great medium to take inspiration from. We felt that the world becoming smaller and closer together would have an opposite effect culturally--nations would feel more threatened by each other and would draw away, possibly scared of losing their own identity. That fear would encourage less cooperation and more paranoia. This was the tone and feeling behind our ideas about border control, found in Chad’s newspaper, which would be a huge concern in a world where all borders touched. It also contributed to Julia’s black propaganda posters demeaning mixed-race people. When cultures are colliding and mixing, as demonstrated in the map and in some the country changes therein, they would tend to feel fearful about losing that culture. Such concerns would not only be cultural, but also practical. Diseases and weapons would be much more serious, and much more difficult to escape. Hailey showed this in a really interestingly commercial way with her advertisement for fashionable medical masks, a wise idea in a society with no water separating outbreaks, an era with no buffers.

What would happen if the modern world became one land mass? Life would be very complicated and conflict would explode. Nothing good would come from this scenario because of the pride and lack of understanding that is in the world today.

Textual Poaching

            For as long as I’ve been living, I have identified with being American. With grandparents on both sides of my family having been war veterans, I was raised to love America and respect it; after all it’s the best country, right? It was clear to me weeks ago that American would be the identification of choice for this project because of my deep love for this country and what it means, or at least used to mean, and I knew there would be great material with great remix possibilities.

            Not long ago, I was introduced to a clip from the show, The Newsroom, staring Jeff Daniels who is a news anchor. Please watch the clip HERE (some offensive language). In the clip Daniels character is asked why America is the greatest country ever, to which he answers in a dramatic way that it is no longer the greatest country in the world. One of my favorite things he says is, “with a straight face you’re going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom?” he then lists other countries that have freedom and informs the room full of students that out of 207 sovereign states 180 of them have freedom. But after he convinces you that America is no longer the greatest, he talks about how it used to be, and infers that it could be if we went back to what this country was founded on. This was my inspiration both for using some of the most famous quotes in history (and one that is recent because it was too perfect) and wanting to pair something with the quote that was contradictory to it because that’s one of the things I took from Daniels monologue, that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans out there that believe that America is the greatest country there is, when in fact we trail many, many other countries in things like literacy, health, and labor force. So to get this point across I paired the quotes with something in the present day that directly went against what was being said, for example FDR saying that we don’t need to fear anything but fear and juxtaposing that with a picture of young Muslim girls because a fair amount of Americans fear Muslim Americans for no other reason than 9/11 despite the fact that there have been way more white American men terrorists than any other group in America.

            I was further more inspired by one of the readings we did that were the different depictions of the famous painting “American Gothic”. The one that stood out the most to me was of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reenacting it because they were so opposite of the farmer husband and wife that grace the real painting. It was comical because it is such an unnatural thing for them, that they were almost making a mockery of it; this translates well to my current feelings of America. Historically all these speeches have been revered and taught to us as young children and all through grade school, so they aren’t anything that any American would be unfamiliar with. Yet throughout the country we are going against what they have taught us to do. I feel like these sort of ‘America is the greatest’ and ‘look at how awesome our founding fathers were’ is so engrained in our heads while were young but then we grow up and forget that they aren’t here anymore and that it’s our time to be the role models.

            At the end of the day, I still love America and being American. I still wear my American Flag sweater and celebrate Independence Day with revere. But I have taken off the blinders and recognize the shortcomings of this country, and that’s why it was important to me to remix words this country cherishes with what it actually does.

Medium Specificity

This is What You Shall Do - Silent

This is What You Shall Do - Melancholy

This is What You Shall Do

           The medium I chose to work with was film, and the element I wanted to explore within it was sound. More specifically, how you can play with emotions through your score choices, without changing any of the film itself. I made three shorts with all the same edit of a girl doing different things outdoors, but changed the audio for each. The first is silent, where the viewer is forced to focus on the events that are happening without much meaning coming through them. The second has a fairly sad score to it which makes the girls actions seem lonely, since she is doing things all by herself. And the third has both a mellow score and a voice over of the girl reading a Walt Whitman quote, which drastically changes the short into something that is uplifting and happy.

            One of my sources of inspiration was the abstract filmmaker Terrance Malick, who is one of my favorite writer/directors. When I first saw Tree of Life, I was blown away by how he used montages and the spectacle to mainly tell his story. I am not nearly as artistic as he is, but that is what I was aiming for when I initially shot my footage, which is why I chose shots of looking up into trees (which he has done in multiple films), following my subject from behind, and exclusively shooting outdoors, which he favors in his films as well. Before I filmed though, I watched his latest film, To The Wonder, to get more ideas of what I could play with within film. Malick chooses to open with shots of the main characters doing things outdoors, with an underlying score, and the woman doing a voice over about love. It was a beautiful scene that I decidedly had to try my best to duplicate with my own twist, because it was amazing to me how thought provoking something so simple could be, without anything big or climactic really happening on screen.

            What made me want to do the different versions of the same thing though was the comic strip we read by Scott McCloud, where he explains, “in comics at its best, words and pictures are like partners in a dance and each one takes turns leading.” When applied to film, it is the images that are shown and the sounds that go with them that are dancing instead. He also exemplified this point by telling a mini story with both the pictures and words, and then showed the story again but with only the words and no images. This is why I chose one of my shorts to be silent, so that can see how vastly different a series of images can be by changing something as simple as the sound, but leaving everything else the same.

            After working with sound within film, I am even more interested with it than I was before. It is so interesting to me how different emotions can be evoked with all the same images. I asked my subject to look content rather than happy or sad so her facial expressions didn’t drive you to one emotion or another. Without that, the silent version is extremely dull, the second version has room to seem sad because of the slow and depressing tune, and the third can attach to her thoughtfulness because of what is being said to the audience who is most likely being thoughtful as well.

Historical Story

Catalyst (Script)

              This week we were assigned to write a script that dove into the story of someone in history that isn't necessarily famous. So, for example, instead of writing about Honest Abe for the billionth time and how he was such a jolly good fellow or hunted vampires or what have you, you would write about the woman who sorted and folded his socks. Granted, there may not have been a woman who pressed Lincoln's socks, but how are we to know? 

              We talked a lot in class about how history is subjective, and what we define as fact is what a bunch of scholars somewhere took a vote and decided, yes, that is what most accurately happened in the most factual format. However, every person has a different story. I'd love to hear about the little boy who started the snowball fight that began the Boston Massacre. I'd love to hear more about the blue-toed men that followed after Washington for months without pay in the hopes of forming an independent nation. We watched a video in class about the woman who pressed the shirts of the Norwegian King and had also taken down the Nazi's in their invasion. Who knows if this is true? Maybe it's completely made up by an old woman nearing dementia. But it may also be completely accurate.

               We also did a few readings in class on the same topic, and one that I felt was most illustrative of this idea was Vivian, Fort Barnwell by Ethan Canin. In it, the author relates about this specific memory he has about his mother because of this one picture he has of her, only to realize the picture wasn't even of the action he believed, or even of his mother. What he thought were sheets in the photo was actually tropical leaves and his mother was actually his grandmother. So did the memory exist, or was it fabricated upon seeing the picture and misinterpreting it? History is what people make of it.

               Following this theme, me and my partner decided to write the small story of a little family that moved right in the middle of the Hatfield/McCoy territory. Though no such family to my knowledge existed in that time and place, I've decided to make them the catalyst of the family blood feud.

               Historically, the Hatfield's and McCoy's had conflict prior to this pig incident. In 1865, one of the McCoy's ancestors had joined the Union Army instead of the Confederate during the Civil War, and was found killed by some of the Hatfield's after returning home from service with a broken leg. Devil Anse Hatfield, who was an affluent political member and the owner of a huge logging company that many of the McCoy's themselves were employed in, was accused of the murder but had an alibi of being sick in bed that let him off. The conflict was primarily dead from then on until 13 years had passed, and in 1878 a Hatfield and McCoy had a dispute over the ownership of the hog, and a key witness for that trial ended up murdered. 

                So using this basic historical plot line, we devised the small Abel family who had to move to a small cabin after the death of the father figure in the war lead to the loss of their original property. This cabin fell right between the feuding families, and when little Addie Abel accidentally lets out the pigs, he starts off the conflict. We chose to leave who's hog pen it was because we wanted to continue the idea that no one really knows who's pig it was. We also wanted to make a statement about the pointlessness of the blood feud and how far little misunderstandings can go, so we had the smallest, least daunting and innocent character be the cause of it all. 

                 In doing this, we hoped to hit on the theme of a subjective history and how it just might alter the way we feel about any given story. Here, we saw how a violent past could have been caused by it's antithesis: an innocent and curious boy. We hoped it would garner more thought toward history, and what the small contributing factors may change the way we feel about any given event. A woman in Norway could have changed the tide of the war in a little-known business of shirt ironing, and a small third party boy could have instigated one of America's most famous blood feuds. History is what you make of it.