Tableau Flip Book

Media and Performance images can add meaning, but there are limitations to the work. The first limitation is what media is available. 

Catalog of Critical Creativity Presentation

11.    Potent Quotable—Have students instead of using provide quotes they would find the spine line for one of the characters and through their design show why that is the spine line.

22. Minimalist Poster—Have students create this poster advertising a specific performance or script. Show the main ideas of the script in a simple way.

33. Soundtracking the Moment—Have students create a soundtrack for their monologues. Talk about sound design and how that can change a performance. Do this after they already know how to perform monologues. They could pick a new one or have them do one they already know.  

  4. Chronological Choreography—Depict a timeline for a 10-minute scene in 3 minutes. Focus on the important moments of the script and showcase them using music, movement, and rhythms.

55. Brick-a-Book—Students will create images using blocks, Legos etc. for the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the denouement of a script. Would be really fun to do with a Greek theatre piece tie this into Aristotle and what theatre should look like.

66. Belief Board—Create Pinterest boards for people like Brecht, Stanislavski etc.  

I really like the idea of having students create belief boards for Acting Stylists such as: Stanislavski, Brecht, Uta Hagen, Viola Spolin, Michael Chekhov, Meisner, Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, etc. In the Intention book, they create their own characters and then have them create a Pinterest board for them. But I think it would be a really great way for students to show their understanding of these people and of their methods. However, that means that they would have to have a prior knowledge of who these people are—it can be a basic knowledge and they can do some on their own. They need to know just a basic knowledge to get them started. One thing that they also mentioned that I liked was that we could do an overview of all of them and then have the students build on their Pinterest boards as we go through the different stylings. Or if I wanted just to focus on one of the acting styles we could make a community board that we add to over time. Students could either put their initials at the end of the description of they could each have a number that they are assigned that I can identify them by what they put after the description.

The creative constraints that I would choose to have for this project would be:

·       Collect at least one quote—Not by them, but something that they would agree with

·       One meme

·       One piece of artwork

·       One piece of photography

·       One other object

·       Each pin in the description should be a caption from the Acting Stylist’s perspective.  

Then have students share and comment on each other’s boards. 

Textual Poaching

My Remix of Mucha's The Seasons

Original of The Seasons

The piece of art that I decided to remix was Mucha’s four seasons. Mucha paints and many of his painting feature art nouveau depictions of women. Mucha was trying to convey what the new women was in this time period and to celebrate her femininity. I really enjoy Mucha’s paintings and I find them to be extremely beautiful; that’s why I gravitated towards his work. I chose The Seasons by Mucha because it focuses on the women and different interpretations of the seasons as women. As I thought of Mucha’s work and what he wanted it to represent I thought that I could represent myself in addition to what the new woman is today.

I wanted to represent that the idea of a new woman today is this idea that we have many sides and are dynamic in our thoughts, wants, and needs. I then took this idea and tried to represent this with pieces of Mucha’s work. Instead of having four panels of seasons I wanted to have four panels each with a different side of my personality. I focused on having a quiet, a loud, a giving, and a selfish side. I wanted to highlight that I am all of these things and not just one of them all the time. I did this remix through using Powerpoint it has the easiest way to remove the background and I was able to layer the images. I did this and then when I was finished I put the powerpoint in present mode and then took a screenshot of my screen to create an image. I am a dynamic woman and I have things that I do and love, but I don’t do them all the time. I am not loud all the time and often I enjoy the quiet time that I need. I took things that represent those categories to me and underlaid them to the women from The Seasons. I kept the panels and retitled the panels to represent what I had done.

I felt it was important to document the idea that myself and women in general can be multiple things at the same time because throughout history women are often painted in a what is thought to be the ideal of the time. Often times it focuses on physical beauty and being attractive to the eye. I wanted stray away from what the ideal of this time would be and focus on a real representation of who I am and the idea that women can be more than just beautiful. I wanted my remix to focus on what women are and not just what we want them to be. Women are lots of things and often they aren’t perfect. I included the selfish and giving because this is something that is really prevelant in my life. I am constantly making choices about who I am and what I choose to do; I am not one or the other all the time. I wanted to includes some flaws of mine to ground my work in reality and not what the ideal version of myself would be.

Metaphoric Fashion

We really wanted to comment on how oversexualized women are in comic books and how these strong females are created by men for men. 

Processes

This project ended up not being one that I particularly liked, but at some point, you just have to let the project be what it is.

I wanted to document the process of myself doing makeup because this is a process that I do every day. And it is a very personal process it is something that I do very often and it is done alone. At this time I end up thinking about a lot of different things, wake up/preparing for the day, and critiquing what I am doing. I wanted to explore the inner voices that we have when we are doing our own things. I wanted to do a video of myself doing makeup and then layer voiceovers on top of it to show my inner thoughts as I went through this process.

This was hard because my voiceovers don’t sound as authentic as I wanted them to sound. When the inner thoughts are spoken a lot of times they lose their body as we start to correct and edit them as they are spoken. I tried to keep the editing to a minimum, but without fail, I did it automatically. Listening to your own voice is a little bit weird and made this process of creating harder than I thought it was going to be. Creating this video showed me how difficult it is to create something and to implement it in a way that we are proud of. I really don’t like this video because I don’t like the sound of my voice and there is not a ton that I could do about it. I could change my voice or have someone else speak the lines—but they are supposed to be my inner thoughts and so they must be in my own voice. I think this goes back to our discussion of authenticity. Creating authentic work means creating it in the hear and now and to honor my own creation I needed to be able to use my own voice.

This then leads me to think of my students. That sometimes creating for them is going to be difficult they are going to have to work through things that they may not like about themselves. Whether that be the way that they look, the way they speak, their handwriting, or their thoughts. Without their own voices and work their creations will lose authenticity.

The best way to battle this as educators is to showcase lots of different work and so that students are able to find something that resonates. They can learn that creativity doesn’t just mean that they need to draw or paint, but that they can find something that they love to do or love about themselves to be creative. By doing this, students are able to be creative in their own way. This creates creative projects that are authentic from our students.

Sensory Map of the HFAC

This is our Sensory Map of the HFAC. We focused on trying to show sight, taste, smell, and textures. We wanted to take pictures and video and add sound and music to explore all of our senses.

Medium Specificity

I chose to do a video because I haven’t done one of those in this class and my new phone had iMovie on it and I have not ever used it. I choose to do a cooking video because I love food videos and watching TV about food. My video consisted of a happy track, shots of someone making banana bread, and a vintage filter. I love cooking and carbs are something that I adore. I wanted to create a video that seemed home and conveyed that the bread was delicious. I choose this type of video because I always find it kind of funny that we have so many cooking videos because in the end the user can’t taste or smell the end product. But we still have so many of them there are entire TV networks that have to do with food and entire companies that all they do are online food videos. The nature of video then means that the video has to really capture that in showing really tasty looking shots and with music or language smell needs to be described. Visual translates to taste and auditory translates to smell. These limitations lead to the way that food videos are often created—they have lots of closeups and often have a sunny feeling. As an audience member there is no way for you to really know if the banana bread that was made in the video was tasty. For food videos there are some literacies that one needs to know the use of close-ups, dialogue, music, color, and perspective is to all create this atmosphere to evoke the taste.

This then becomes essential when asking students to respond to this video. How would the video change with putting a horror movie score in the video versus a cheery guitar song? Changing the music could change the entirety of the video because it is where most of the story comes from. From this we can then think about the creator’s relationship with music and how that conveys the meaning of the video. It is important that we get students to start thinking about the media that they consume. There are hundreds of food videos that are created and can be found on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. It is easy to just scroll through them without really thinking about them because we see them all the time. But what would happen if we changed our mindset? We thought deeply about why these videos are created and why people find them so enjoyable. Then we have this whole conversation that we can have about media and food. Why are we so drawn to videos of people making food? Why did they choose that specific dish to create? By getting our students to think deeply about media that they see all the time it opens up for a meaningful conversation.