A Response to Memento

Christopher Nolan does an excellent job with this film, in my opinion.
Memento is about a man, Leonard (a.k.a Lenny) who has a condition where he has no short memory. To keep track of everything, he constantly takes polaroids and makes notes to himself.

Lenny is trying to find and kill the man who raped and killed his wife. We see his interactions with people who he is close to, but sometimes they turn out to be people he can't trust. One excellent thing about this movie is the fact that the story is told backwards. That way, we're allowed to be forgetful with Lenny. We're not allowed to know more than he does until the end of the movie. 

*ALL GIFS ARE FROM TUMBLR

Sound: Professors

After learning how to cut and manipulate different recorded sounds, I took clips of my professors' voices in class while they taught. I used a lot of repetition to create a somewhat monotonous sound. I tried to play on humor and capture how sometimes it feels like professors are saying the same things over and over again and they all just seem to fade into each other.

Final Project Proposal

I would like to explore the continuity of time in objects by exploring trains and their stops for my final project. I think trains are fascinating because they go from one stop to another and never stop unless major construction is going on. I'll be focusing particularly on the L train which goes from the Rockaway's to 14th Street and 8th Avenue. I will be presenting my final as a short animation/stop motion film that shows a train, the L train, going through different sceneries of different train stop locations. I will mostly shoot in Brooklyn because the train goes above underground at different stops and it will be easier to see side views/perspective of the train from those points.

Labyrinths: Response to short stories by Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges was a poet and it is evident in the way he writes his short stories "Circular Ruins" and "Library of Babel". His colorful vocabulary and brilliant imagery made reading enjoyable.
In his short story, "Circular Ruins", Borges tells of a wizard who spends most of his hours asleep in an old destroyed temple so that he can dream about and eventually create a human being. He takes two years to finally complete this process; starting to form the man from his internal organs to eventually having him as an apprentice. One day, the old wizard dies by fire, but not without first realizing that he is also a dreamed up man. Borges uses dreams as a labyrinth of time, suggesting that the new dreamed up man may dream up a new human being and the cycle would be continuos.
His other story "Library of Babel", tells of the world as an infinite library with human beings living on shelves and no one completely understanding the past or being able to decipher the future. At the end of the story, the narrator suggests that the same events that took place in the past are possibly repeating themselves or are going to repeat themselves in the future, and that is order.
Borges uses time as a labyrinth by looping intricate and complex series of events that have to happen in a certain way before they can move on to the next stage of being repeated.
This is not too different form Sisyphus from Ancient Greek Mythology, whose punishment was to roll up a rock to the top of the hill, only to have it fall back down, creating an eventual loop of terror.
Jorge Luis Borges was interesting to read and "Circular Ruins" particularly appealed to me because the ending came as unexpected to me.

Sequential Time: Playing Piano Animation

Animators can make an animation scene come alive by simply manipulating one of the parts of the entire drawing. I attempted to do just that by only manipulating the fingers in this animation.

I drew the piece using only charcoal, and erased and redrew the fingers; each time photographing a different position to make the animation look sequential.

I wish I had paid attention also to the shadows below the fingers on the thighs; I think manipulating those as well would've added more to then overall production.

Graphic Novel: African Hair Story

A graphic novel is challenging and takes time to create, but I enjoyed working on this. I used Illustrator to illustrate pictures of myself and InDesign to lay the comic strip out.

I decided to focus on illustrating a story about my hair. Every morning, I wake up wondering how to style my hair for the day. Girls of African descent have naturally kinky or curly hair that takes time and proper maintenance to be maintained. I decided to illustrate a simple cartoon of myself managing my hair.

Inspired somewhat by Scott McCloud, I attempted to use action-to-action and scene-to-scene progressions to show time passing.

Looking back, I wish I had spent more time on this really developing the illustrations. I would like to turn this into more than a two-page spread. I am especially proud of the design of the cover: I think it looks very African.

Time Documentary: Storyboard

The life of an art student is often stereotyped; and as is often with stereotypes, no one really knows all that art students do.  Do art students really draw all the time? Do they dress differently from other kids of students? Do they have work in unorganized workspaces? Do they really not sleep? In our documentary, not only do Ishita and I hope to address all the amusing stereotypes of how an art student lives, we also hope to complete them by showing how art students actually find ways to better the world we live in.