Vittorio Giannini - Final Post

Dear sir,

We have never met, partially because the time between your death and my birth spans the length and breadth of five decades, but also because I was busy.  I’m sorry about the second part, because if I’d had the chance I would have congratulated you on a job well done.  You were a composer, and your music has lasted.  You were a teacher, and your students have proliferated.  But most of all you were a visionary, and your vision has become real.  North Carolina School of the Arts is the place you imagined it to be, and more.  Music, Dance, and Drama are still taught here at the highest level, and the additions of film and Design and Production make this institution, your institution, a truly multi-media environment in which to learn.

In your music, you practiced a disregard for the academicism of the day, maintaining in your trumpets and timpani a connection to grounded musicianship that was mirrored in your educational philosophy.  The viewpoint was of constant practice in symbiosis with theory.  The concept being that growing professionals learn best in a professional environment, where they are not only taught how to succeed but also given the opportunity to.  I thank you for this.

My Tribute Video to Giannini.

Video Project

The video can be found here.

Also here:



It's been fun to get acquainted with adobe premiere, which I hadn't really used before, and finding all of the clips was equally enjoyable, though I didn't even use half of the ones I gathered. There was an educational video on how to be thoughtful that was absolutely hilarious, and though I include its title block in my video I never found a place for the full content within the narrative. I think the final product, though a tad rough, captured my initial thesis. Though I don't entirely prove it, I think I lay out the premise in a very cinematic fashion that accomplishes my overall goal: to insert the question, and to get the viewer thinking.

Video Update 2

After several botched attempts at narration, I've decided to switch to the classic computer generated voice of "Crystal."  My voice just can't generate the ambiance I'm going for, that being one of gritty, somewhat impersonal media overload.  My editing style follows this, as I try to cram as much as I possibly can into every second, making the use of silences and black screens to punctuate important points all the more effective.

Video Project Update

The concept I'm following has led me to a Ted Talk about video games.  Within it the presenter shows a video one of his students made about video game addiction, and its ambiance really hooked me.  In my video I am trying to replicate the feeling, through borrowing one or two of the concepts and using the same sentence structure and editing style.

EAS

My video will focus on the issue of attention span, and Digital Media's tendency to shorten it.  That's a pretty standard complaint, but I plan of whittling the "problem" down to "emotional attention span" (a term I'd like to think I've just coined, but probably haven't).  Emotional attention span is the time and investment it takes for us to become emotionally invested in something.  Many who use the internet as frequently as I do have spoken of the immediate intimacy they feel for many things.  How they can be brought to tears by a 30 second clip, or laugh harder than they ever have at a sentence.  I'll attempt to explore the pros and cons of such an existence of immediate emotional gratification, but can only promise to diagnose it.

Remixing Light

Near every light design is based off of the same basic technology.  There are the inventive shows, and plays that allow for unconventional illumination, but for ninety percent of the entertainment productions running I could name for you every instrument in use.  This changes the concept of remixing a little bit.  If we're all based off of the same platform, our artistry can be much more inter-related than we realize.  A basic wash of a play, for example, can be very similar to one for a different production halfway across the country. And in the same vein, the same play put up on the same day in two different theatres can be wildly different. In such an environment remixing is not only necessary, it is encouraged. Though there strict copyright laws protecting designers, the youth of this industry (only about 60 years, by some markers) means that new ideas continue to be produced every day. Because of theatre's naturally collaborative environment, and the frequency with which new concepts arise, inspiration for lighting designers often comes from their collaborators.

rEmIx

Your education consists some 90% in reading (and listening),10% in writing (and then mostly not real writing, but faking things which are much too difficult for you) and talking, the play of mind on mind, almost none at all (occasionally you will ask a question in class).  A chasm exists between your education and your personal life.  In the one you sit, stolid, non-responsive, fed information, and in the other you are defined by your interactions with digital media, wherein you are a player in a grand game.  Information in this situation cannot be contained to one source.  Unintentionally, everyone is inspired by everything... when one lives on the web.  And intentionally, inspiration ought to have no limits.  If you see something you want, take it, make it your own.  Remix it.  the first taxonomic level of the remix is the extension. this is the differentiation between values like “album version” and “radio edit.” The second taxonomic level of the remix is the translation, in which a song is re-adapted from its primary genre to a secondary genre. The third is the mash-up. All about the superimposition of well-known songs within one another, the mash-up at best constructs an homage and at worst creates superficial allusions that say “oh listen to that, and that. my wasn’t that something?” These forms of remix are not only personal, they are educational. Not formally so, yet.