Comm Lab

Wednesday, November 02, 2005

Shot list for video project

Here's a shot list for our video project. It is yet to be finalized. Rolf has kindly provided pictures that we can use as part of the storyboard

http://homepage.mac.com/rolf_a/PhotoAlbum9.html


Shot List – Washington Square Arch

  1. General view of the Arch – close and upfront

  1. A shot of the arch from afar – including the park in the shot as well. Early morning, day and night.

  1. A view from the top – possibly Kimmel center.

  1. Close up on the two sculptures of George Washington.

  1. A sweep around the park

  1. A view through the Arch, where the WTC used to be visible

  1. Possibly interview of local park patrons.

Thursday, October 27, 2005

Sound file

Here's a link to mine and Britta's sound file;

Sound file

We asked a bunch of people on Canal Street to tell us their embarassing story. Our own stories are included as well. We had to do a lot of speech editing on the file. the raw material was over 15 minuts long, so we had to cut and lot of it out, and splice the rest into coherent stories. We also did some noise reduction, normalizaion, fade in and out and compression, among other things. The quality's not the greatest, because it was recorded on the street and u can hear some wind and other street noise.

Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Story board

The story of The Amazing Supakitty can be found here:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~km602/CLab/story.html

Songul and I had a hard time finding images that would portray an interesting story. So after a few days of struggling we decided to come up with a story and get supporting images.
www.gettyimages.com was a great resource for images. Unfortunately, they have mostly low-res images, so our images are small to avoid blur and distortion.
Songul is defenatly the Photoshop wiz out of both of us. She showed me how to do the most amazing things with using the very simple tools, such as lasso selction tool, clone tool, stamp tool, basically all the tools I've ised befpre, but never to create such an interesting effect. I guess the coolest thing that she was able to do was to replace human heads with cat heads:








Another cool effect we've achieved with Photoshop was merging to images together into one:

Monday, September 26, 2005

Frustrations with technology

I just realized I forgot to write about frustrations with technology.
Well, I work in IT, so I get frustrated with it on the daily basis. But in relation to class, I have the following issues:

1. Flickr -- slow, times out, can't re-arrange pictures, freezes during upload.

2. Blogger -- once the entry is posted, I can't seem to find any easy way to return to the dashboard to put up additional posts.

3. www.minettabrook.com -- why not post the weekend schedule in advance?! Why?!?!?!

Floating Island and using technology

On Sunday Songul and me went to see the Floating Island at South Street Seaport. We met up at 12:00, since the schedule on the website said that would be the time when the Island is visible. We waited till 1:30 and never saw the island. After that, according to the schedule, the Island should be visible from Battery Park. We went there and waited there till about 4:00 and the island never showed up. It was disappointing. At least we took a bunch of pictures of each other using technology. When I went home and looked into the Island schedule, I found out that the weekend schedule is different from the weekday schedule, that is why we never found the Island.

Here are the links to our flickr pages:

Mine: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaxy/

Songul's: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12802745@N00/

By the way, Flickr posts pictures in a backwards order. I did not find a way to re-arrange the picture order.

Monday, September 19, 2005

First Webpage

I've done some HTML and CSS before, but never that much, especially not CSS. CSS makes managing styles much easier and I was suriprised to discover that you can put all the setting to different html files on one css file. Anyway, I still got a lot to learn, but this is what I have so far:

http://homepages.nyu.edu/~km602/CLab/main.htm

Here's the css file, the HTML files should be viewable, by "view source".

.bann {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 38px;
font-weight: bold;
background-image: none;
border: 50px groove #00FF99;
background-color: #2277FF;
color: #FFFFFF;
float: left;
text-align: center;
width: 90%;

}
.bod {
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 12px;
color: #FFFFFF;
background-image: url('Neuron.jpg');
height: 100%;
width: 100%;

}
.men {
font-family: "Courier New", Courier, mono;
background-color: #2277FF;
border: medium groove #00FF99;
text-align: center;
vertical-align: middle;
height: 100%;
}

Monday, September 12, 2005

Self and Subject

When I went to see "Self and subject" I was expecting a rather boring collection of portraits (since the website said it's a portrait exhibit). I was expecting to see the conventional portraits, forward facing, from waist up, and I was rather surprised to find the opposite of that. The painters represented in the exhibit depict themselves and others in very unconventional ways -- from the regular photograph-like portraits of Skyllas and Joseph P. Aulisio, to expressing their personal turmoil, such as John Kane's "Seen in the Mirror" or Hugo Sperger "What Doesn't Destroy Me", to representing people as buildings (A.G. Rizzoli), to collages, cement sculptures, dolls, plywood, and two of my favorite - Ray Materson's miniatures made of cotton thread make from unraveled socks, and Linda's Firedman Schmidt's "Hear no Evil" made out of scraps of her old clothing. Despite the face that all these portrait artists (and I cannot call them painters, because of the wide variety of media used) were all amateurs (and in most cases it really shows), I was amazed by the range of expression that can be defined as a portrait.

Thursday, September 08, 2005

Intro

Created a blog for the first time. This looks a lot like AOL.
Going to see which exhibition I can go to, because I cannot do the walk in the Park (even though that sounds fun)