#jessicarhe

I’ve noticed lately that minimalism is very trendy, which applies to anything designed from app interfaces to poster ads to furniture. It’s interesting to compare this aesthetic appeal to say, the very intricate designs of Corinthian column capitals. Or art! I was at the Blanton Museum of Art a few days ago and noticed that the older art is very detail oriented and realistic while modern art often features simple gradients or monochrome colors or blockier shapes. 

Obviously, minimalist interfaces allows for easy access for users. The definition of minimalism is that the subject is stripped down to its bare essentials. So what makes very detailed and complicated pieces more appealing to some and simplistic, smooth pieces appealing to others? Why does the motto “Less is more” work?

Minimalism is easy to learn but hard to master; it’s about stripping away what is unnecessary without changing the purpose of the piece. It leads to less clutter and a less noisy design for audiences. Clutter will only block the point and become obstacles in sending a message to the audience.

Kelly and I spent all weekend and woke up at 6am on Monday to film our final project. It’s actually a video promotion for a personal project we’re doing for charity, so it was really exciting to be able to apply things that we learned in a college course to something we’re doing in real life. 

The process of making a short film is always really tedious but rewarding. It takes forever to shoot a simple 2-minute thing because there are so many aspects in a video that one needs to keep in mind, from the lighting to composition to audio, etc. Editing is also a very long process, especially on Adobe Premiere, which is the program we are using, as there are so many options. There’s always a vision that is in the mind, but it is really difficult to create that and make it real, especially with limited time and resources. But it’s always a learning experience, and we did our best! Working as a team helped a lot; we were able to collaborate and come up with more creative ideas than if I worked by myself. 

Besides creating the promotion, we took some photos, and we’ll be linking our project to theorists that we have studied in class as well. It feels especially rewarding to actually use concepts we learned in Intro to Visual Rhetoric and apply them to create an effective argument through film, which is probably my favorite medium. 

Annotated Bibliography

Felton, Julie. "10 Rules for Choosing the Perfect Typeface - Tuts+ Design & Illustration Article." Design & Illustration Tuts+. Tuts+, 12 July 2013. Web. 15 Apr. 2015.

In our project, we will be using typography in order to write the title and other necessary messages we wish to include. Choosing the correct fonts will be crucial in order to achieve a persuasive visual argument. This source gives ten rules of choosing the perfect typeface. One of the more helpful rules in this source is choosing the correct mood and combining typefaces effectively. The claim of this article is that fonts have a powerful effect in persuading an audience towards a specific purpose. The author of this article has been a graphic designer and illustrator since 1987 so she is extremely credible and knows what she is doing! This article will help us make an more informed decision while we are deciding on our font choice for our video project.

http://design.tutsplus.com/articles/10-rules-for-choosing-the-perfect-typeface--vector-12548

Bell, Jaclyn. "How to Create the Perfect Public Service Announcement." How to Create the Perfect Public Service Announcement. Center for Digital Education, 2 Mar. 2010. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.

Since our video will essentially be a PSA, we will have to make it effective enough to where the audience will be moved to take action. This source provides helpful information and tips about how to go about creating a PSA, step by step. It starts off by giving advice on how to choose a topic, consider and audience, and then goes on to describe how to grab the audience’s attention. Then it advises to create a script and begin the filming process. This is all extremely helpful since it’s basically a guideline for our project! The writer of this article is a digital media instructor so she is credible, and the purpose of this article is just to inform people on how to make an effective PSA. We will definitely look at this while creating our final project.

http://www.centerdigitaled.com/artsandhumanities/How-to-Create-the-Perfect-Public-Service-Announcement.html

Bordwell, David, and Kristen Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, 1997. Print.

Often used as a standard textbook for film courses, Film Art: An Introduction is especially useful for its authors’ attention to style and discussion about how formal aspects of movies create meaning. Its intended audience is composed of film students and anyone interested in studying the history of movies and how movies are written, produced, and distributed. Its purpose is to provide very objective information about film art. This book is definitely written by credible scholars of film and is a useful resource for discussing film and how visual rhetoric applies to this medium in creating persuasive arguments. It is relevant to our project because we’re making a (very) short film and this book will help us form an effective argument through visual rhetoric.

http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~mma/teaching/MS50/reading/Filmart-1.pdf

Olenski, Steve. “What Makes A TV Commercial Memorable And Effective?” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 19 Oct. 2012. Web. 16 Apr. 2015.

This is an online article about the main components of an effective TV commercial. The author came to his conclusions by receiving feedback from TV commercial viewers and what they thought. The intended audience of this article is mainly people who want to learn about how to effectively market their own products and services to consumers via TV ads, and its purpose is to inform this audience about what makes a TV commercial memorable and effective. The article is published on the Forbes Magazine website, a very professional and credible source of information about the business world. The author is a senior content strategist at Responsys, a leading global provider of on-demand email and cross-channel marketing solutions who has also been named one of the Top 100 Influencer In Social Media by Social Technology Review and a Top 50 Social Media Blogger by Kred, making him a very credible source for our research for this project. It is relevant to our project because we are trying to create a persuasive public service announcement, which is very similar to a television commercial.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/marketshare/2012/10/19/what-makes-a-tv-commercial-memorable-and-effective/

Cool graphic about how to find the right font for your project. It’s a bit more humorous than helpful because a lot of the questions on the map depend on the creator rather than the audience (for example: “Do people call you boring from time to time?” or “You cried while watching Terminator”). The questions should be less dependent on how the creator feels and more on what kind of message he/she wants to create. But I’m not sure what kind of questions would be asked. I guess the questions in the map kind of do address what the creator wants, as long as its consistent with the message the creator wants to send.

Album covers! I know it’d bad but if I’m at a record store browsing looking for artists that I don’t know of yet, I do judge books by their cover; otherwise, what is the point of having album cover art at all! I picked a few of the album covers featured on Pitchforks’s Top 25 Album Covers of 2013 to talk about.

Look at Tyler’s stuff. All of it, in fact: the infamous donuts on Odd Future merchandise like socks and sweathers, all the weird clip art and neon default colors...it makes for an almost ironic statement, yet people wear and love it unironically. Often, the things he raps about is very satirical, which matches his visuals.

Janelle Monae’s The Electric Lady album cover is pretty straightforward: featuring her backups, they’re all wearing matching black and white dresses, facing the camera. It’s simple yet memorable, and the silver skull placed strategically in the corner throws off their innocent look and empowers them as women.

Settle seems innocent: two little boys. Yet something so simple as the contour lines drawn over their faces make it a bit eerie and much more memorable...

Higher features a beautifully marbled circle, reflecting the psychedelic tones of The Horror’s music. Simple, beautiful, straightforward, and unique at the same time. Why hadn’t anyone else done this before??

Abandon. This one is cool because it directs the audience’s feelings; one is probably like “Cool, another pretty pictures of a girl’s legs, very Tumbler-esque. But still nice warm tones, simple, ni-wait, are those...maggots? Wtf, gross...”

A$AP Rocky’s latest album cover is cool because it alludes to his first mixtape, representing how far he’s come and how he will continue to progress. Long live A$AP Rockyyy

I just watched one of my favorite movies ever for the third time this month and it was still as good as the first time I watched it, if not better. Frances Ha, directed by Noah Baumbach. I just wanted to explore some of the visual rhetoric used in this film. 

The first thing one might notice is that the entirety of the film is black-and-white (shot digitally and made monochrome in post-production). Though this film is most definitely modern (released in 2012), the movie is about nothing in particular, with a lot of dialogue about things that aren't too important, essential characteristics of movies that fall under the genre called “mumblecore”. I think the director chose the monochromatic scheme to emphasize the normality and insignificance of Frances’ life. The contrasting tones of blacks and grays and whites also give the film an overall artsy feel, reflecting the free-spirit of the main character. 

Visual Argument 1.2