Creativity: Reflective Writing

I've never really been comfortable talking about myself. I quite enjoy writing essays about defined, impersonal or academic topics because there are definite answers. However, this assignment has asked us to write an essay which is very much so indefinite in it's outcome and conclusion. I have been asked to write about myself, to write of a certain experience that has affected me emotionally or taught me a lesson. It could be a negative or positive experience. I am finding it a little difficult to fathom the concept of self reflection. I take criticism fairly well when it comes to impersonal projects as there are right and wrong answers - there are simple ways of correcting your work, but I'm not sure how comfortable I am with writing about my feelings or experiences and then being critiqued them. 

In fact, the input of "I feel" and "I think" within an essay will feel a little peculiar, that's for sure, but, all that aside, I feel this assignment will be highly beneficial on some personal level once I overcome how uncomfortable it may be.

Western Genre

This week has been pretty Western themed. For starters, I went to see Django Unchained (Dir. Quentin Tarntino) on Tuesday and then on Friday's lecture we began studying the Western genre. I'm pretty excited to begin learning more about this topic. I've always loved the Western genre and I have a feeling that Django's success might cause an uprising of a new cycle of Westerns.

Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium Is The Massage"

The results have come in for the essay assignment in which we were to write about a book and explain it's theories in our own terms, using our own examples in order to demonstrate our understanding. I wrote about Marshall Mcluhan's The Medium Is The Massage. I quite enjoyed writing this essay as McLuhan had some great theories in the field of electronic media for a man of the 1950s. I also enjoyed taking his theories and applying them to modern technology and media. For example, his theory of amateurism and professionalism, I applied the case of the Zodiac murders where professional crackers were not able to solve the puzzle, whereas, upon release to the general public, a teacher and his housewife cracked the case in under a week. I feel like his theory of the "Global Village" can be applied to the modern technology of the Internet. Using this term, McLuhan was in fact referring to television and telephone system, however, I feel like the internet draws us into a global village even more-so today as we can not only watch and be seen by others on screens, but we can converse and using technologies such as Google maps - we can pinpoint and place ourselves anywhere in the world. I feel that through the internet and such McLuhan's Global Village is expanding still.

I am pleased to have received a high 2:1 for this essay.

What Is Art Presentation

"What Is Art" Prezi

Today, Joe and I pitched a short film idea based on the culture of Liverpool. We were given the theme "Art" so we decided to discuss "What Is Art?"... Unable to come up with a definitive answer between us, we hit the books and the telephone books. With myself being an ex art student, I was able to dig deep into the history of art to try and answer the question. I came up with a lot of information as to how the meaning of art has changed over the years, coming from a privileged skill to a democratic meaning. However, no matter how much research was done, we needed expert opinions from those in the field. With Joe being more familiar with Liverpool than I, he was able to find and contact a street artist, Phillip Garrett. We interviewed this artist to find his views on the subject. We also found a worker of a local gallery, Joan Burnett, to give us an alternate opinion in order to appeal to a broader audience . We structured our intended film narrative around these characters in order to bring the documentary down to a subjective human level, and added slices of valuable objective information  in-between. I feel our pitch went well as we were well rehearsed and our words were heavily backed up with research. 

snapshot from interview with Phillip Garrett

Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950)

For the second essay of the year, we have been given the task of writing about the relation between narrative and narration in any Hitchcock film. I have chosen Hitchcock's return to British cinema, Stage Fright (1950).

I have chosen this film due to the falsity that is portrayed on-screen through techniques within the narration.

Narrative: Contemporary Media Issues

Our upcoming task in Contemporary Media Issues is to create a narrative using Google Maps. We discussed many narrative theories and the organisation of events. In order to practise with our storytelling, we were given an object and free reign to tell any story we please using said object that could engage an audience.

Given a broach  my group created a crime scene detective's wall investigating a scenario in which the crown jewel's had been stolen. We included a newspaper article, Royal Garden Party invitations issued for the day of the theft, a list of suspects, motives, evidence and the final piece of the puzzle, a piece of paper where the audience would guess as to who committed the crime. 

Jack Reacher

"6' 5" tall (1.96 m) with a 50-inch chest, and weighing between 210 and 250 pounds (100–115 kg). He has ice-blue eyes and dirty blond hair." is how Lee Childs, writer of One Shot described the character of Jack Reacher. When reading this description, not many people would think to cast Tom Cruise. Not even because of the hair and eye colour issue but the small problem (no pun intended) of him being a whole foot too short, and not impressively built. Mostly, this wouldn't be an issue, as I found casting Will Smith as Robert Neville in I Am Legend who was originally written to have long blonde hair, a beard, and piercing blue eyes to be passable simply because those traits weren't greatly important to the character's portrayal. With Jack Reacher, however, his appearance as an intimidatingly large man, of impressive stature was so crucial to the storyline that I found little Tom Cruise trying to fill much bigger boots incredibly distracting and almost laughable. Even if he was the correct height, Jack Reacher played by Tom Cruise didn't so much come across as cool and aloof but just plain cocky and annoying (as many of Tom Cruises' characters tend to be). If you're going to make all the supporting actors so incredibly shallow I would recommend you make the leading man ever so slightly likable or at the very least believable.

However, what he lacks in likeliness to the character, I guess he made up in money as he produced the film. All in all, I feel like I've just watched Tom Cruises' midlife crisis.