#trimester one

This project started off with Sivan displaying some examples of what exactly a motion graphic is which was helpful as at first I'd been a little unsure. The project as a whole feels nostalgic, maybe I don't watch enough movies which I think I will aim to rectify but I haven't seen an opening credits like that in a while.

That is to say I'm intrigued by the possibilities in spite of the challenges. Last year I struggled heavily with using the software such as adobe after effects but I'm optimistic this year that I will figure things out. This year I aim to be less afraid of asking for help but also in challenging myself to do more difficult things.

While all of the stories seemed interesting, some of them being ones I'd heard of before such as 1984, I am hoping to get permission to use one of the stories I already know well. While I understand the importance of having enough relevant material to make a full video and that part of the challenge is in working with material you don't know so well (as is the case often for commissioned artists), I do think getting to choose a story I'm truly passionate about will help me stay dedicated to the project in spite of the troubles I might run into.

This monday we began work on a two week character design assignment in which I will need to eventually create a portrait, turn around and comic orientated around the character I come up with.

Initially the assignment started off with picking traits for a character from a series of hats. I got willowy, rebellious and Flander's renaissance.

In basic my process so far has taken into account lectures on shape language and inspiration for my design. I have not only made a mindmap about the historical setting but also set up a pinterest board featuring fashion and paintings from the time period. I have already firmly decided to create a painter and so I followed that up with a small mindmap dissecting the symbolism behind many pieces of art created at the time including themes such as beauty, power and religion.

When first beginning to draw my character I have made a large effort to use pointy, sharp shapes for features such as the hair, nose and chin inorder to feed into the idea of 'rebellious' and its associated synonyms including dangerous and sharp.

Additionally I have looked at images of characters describe as willowy, creating a stronger understanding of what that sort of character may look like. Coming to the conclusion that these characters are often tall, lanky, dour and skinny, I've made the choice to create a teenager as I feel those proportions suit well the idea of a moody, rebellious teenager not entirely grown into themselves.

With this basis in mind I will explore more fashion, poses and expressions so that I can use them to better express the character's internal attitudes. My observational drawing work will help with this as I have practiced motion and balance within poses hopefully enabling me to deliver a better sense of weight (something I struggled with last year).

Additionally I will continue to work on my character's purpose and the meaning behind his story, I think this will help providing more clues as to his personality over the upcoming week.

     The nice thing about short poems, is that a close reading passage can include the whole poem! This is “’Hope’ is the thing with feathers” by Emily Dickinson: 

““Hope” is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul  / And sings the tune without the words / And never stops / at all 

And sweetest / in the Gale / is heard / And sore must be the storm / That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm -

I’ve heard it in the chillest land / And on the strangest Sea / Yet - never - in Extremity / It asked a crumb - of me.”

     Have you ever read something so powerful that you just have to sit back for a moment? Something that moves something deep inside of you to the point where you don’t know how you went on without this in your life before? If you haven’t, I recommend “Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou. It will take less than five minutes to read and it will change your life. 

     Now, let me be clear, Maya Angelou wrote this poem about her experiences as a black woman, and as someone who is not a black woman, I don’t have the right to claim it as my own. However, that doesn’t mean I can’t marvel at it’s strength and beauty and want it in my life forever.

     Still I rise.

     How wonderful is that? Maya Angelou took her years of facing discrimination and prejudice and oppression and made this declaration.

     I rise.

     From “a past rooted in pain” she grew and she wrote and she changed perceptions about her race, her gender.

     I rise.

     She does not allow the disrespect of her form, the shaming of her body, her sexuality. She does not allow you to use your eyes or your words to make her feel like she is less of a person.

     I rise.

     She is a force to be reckoned with, a person in her own right. Maya Angelou doesn’t have time for your disapproval and she most certainly does not care for it.

     I rise.

     I rise.

     I rise.

     Of Mice and Men remains one of my favorite books. I had read it once before when I was much younger after seeing the play performed, and I was transfixed by the way the characters talked and the way Steinbeck wrote, so different it was from what I was used to. I didn’t understand why everyone was so mean to Lennie, because I couldn’t see that any of the bad things that happened were his fault, and I cried when George shot him. I have been invested in this story from a young age, and I think it was really important for me to come back and revisit this classic now that I’m old enough to really understand it.

     I’m glad I read this book because I love what it says about friendship and family. That may seem surprising, given the ending, but throughout the book, when Lennie and George’s friendship is called into question, they defend each other.Although Lennie doesn’t grow much as a character over the course of the novel, it’s established that he’s fiercely loyal to George and that his dream was really only to live with him in a place where they could be free from society’s harsh judgment. Through Lennie, George learns to become a better person, to be someone who sticks up for the weak and stands up to the strong for the benefit of others instead of taking advantage. When George chooses to shoot Lennie in the end, it’s because he can’t bear for his friend to have to suffer at the hands of Curley and his mob. He knows that Lennie trusts him to do what is best, and acts accordingly.

     I’m glad I read this book because it is beautiful as well as tragic. The opening pages describing the landscape of the story took me to George and Lennie’s Eden-- a place to feel safe and comfortable. The way Steinbeck uses synesthesia of the warmth of the sun and the smell of the breeze and the sound of a lizard “skittering across crisp leaves” creates the feeling of truly being there in this calm place. It is here where George and Lennie start and end their final journey together. It is painful and sublime at the same time, as life often is. 

     I’m glad I read this book because it is so very real. Anyone can relate to the struggles faced by our main characters. Anyone can read this book and find themselves or someone they know. And surely anyone can find meaning in the Robert Burns poem from which the title originates: “The best laid schemes of mice and men / go often askew / and leave us nothing by grief and pain / for promised joy!”

     In Walton’s final letter to his sister he describes finding FM weeping over Frankenstein’s body. It recounts it’s tales of woe in one such passage:

"You, who call Frankenstein your friend, seem to have a knowledge of my crimes and his misfortunes. But in the detail which he gave you of them he could not sum up the hours and months of misery which I endured wasting in impotent passions. For while I destroyed his hopes, I did not satisfy my own desires. They were forever ardent and craving; still I desired love and fellowship, and I was still spurned. Was there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all humankind sinned against me? Why do you not hate Felix, who drove his friend from his door with contumely? Why do you not execrate the rustic who sought to destroy the saviour of his child? Nay, these are virtuous and immaculate beings! I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on. Even now my blood boils at the recollection of this injustice.”

     It is in this final glimpse at FM at the end of the novel that we see how he could almost have been human. We see how how complexly he thought, how deeply he felt. In this passage we can see what the life of this monster might have been like, and it is horrifying. This creature who did not ask to be made was suddenly thrust into a world that would not accept it and became a monster because it was told that was all it could be. This naturally kind and gentle creature was driven to kill because the only emotion ever shown to it was anger and disgust. Not even it’s creator, the one person that should’ve accepted it and shown it kindness, would look at it. 

     One of the key themes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is that knowledge, both intellectual and visceral, is dangerous.

     It’s no secret that Victor Frankenstein began his long and terrible journey as a quest for knowledge. He left his home for university at Ingolstadt so that he could build on what he had already taught himself from scientific books and alchemical texts. However, soon he could no longer content himself with pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake and dedicated (read: ruined) his life to creating his creature. By using some sketchy science to try to make the creature godlike, Victor ruined it’s life, essentially guaranteeing that society would never accept it. He gave the creature knowledge, made it able to learn and be aware of it’s surroundings, but not how to overcome it’s unnatural origins. In all of Victor’s knowledge, he could not create something human, a fact for which the creature, and by extension, Victor, suffered. Victor then destroyed his creation’s only chance of something that might have resembled happiness, and so his creation caused the deaths of four of Frankenstein’s loved ones. You live and you learn, I guess.

     I want to start off this Frankenstein blogging experience by giving mad props to my girl, Mary Shelley, for creating an entirely new genre of literature because she couldn’t stand her boyfriend’s pompous friend teasing her about having no imagination anymore. For some background, in case the rest of you haven’t extensively researched Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley for fun like I have, I’ll clue you in: Mary Godwin was born in London, England in 1797 to journalist William Godwin and noted feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. She met Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Romantic poet who later become her husband, when she was in her teens, and had one son with him. 

     In May 1816, when Mary was just 19 years old, the Shelleys and Mary’s sister Claire Clairmont traveled to Geneva to spend the summer with Percy’s friend and Claire’s paramour, Lord George Byron, another notable poet. Without much to do, the group took to telling German ghost stories at night, which grew tiresome to the talented writers quickly, prompting Byron to suggest coming up with their own. Only Mary was unable to, a fact Byron would ridicule every morning. Then, one night, Mary brought up the idea of re-animating a corpse (how that came up naturally in conversation, I don’t really want to know), and from then on was driven by her imagination. She began writing, what she intended as a short story blossoming into a full novel which she titled “Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus”, published for the first time in 1818.