Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Neat Things

While examining my (non-book related) literacies, I discovered that there are three basic elements involved.

First, there's an input of influences. I listen to the things that other people make and sometimes I think they're neat.


Next, to varying degrees of success, I attempt to make my own neat things.


And finally, I get involved in a community of other people who like similar neat things.



To recap:

1. Input.


2. Attempt at creation.



3. Involvement with others in the community.

This is a picture of my friend Mark at the end of the first day of shooting a big blockbuster movie. He normally doesn't look like he just got run over by a truck.




In brainstorming for this assignment I knew I wanted to do something with music, and something with film because these are important and somewhat unconventional literacies that have played huge roles in my life. Figuring out how to organize them in a way that told a story, however, was a bit difficult. But this challenged me to think about these subjects in new ways. How were these things related? How could I tell a story using these images? While I have a background in visual storytelling (i.e. filmmaking), this seemed like a much different kind of task. I wasn't just telling a fictional story, I wasn't planning a documentary, instead I had to tell a story about literacy, which is something that I don't usually consider to be a very visual subject.

As I started to determine what images I would use, I simultaneously started to figure out what the story would be. In a lot of ways, this mirrors my process for writing a more typical paper, where I have some idea of what I'm going to say when I start, but where I don't really figure out my point until I've been working on it for a while.

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I know we don't need a resource link for the week but I came across Wing Young Huie's column in the Star Tribune and thought you all might enjoy his words of wisdom concerning the power of visual communication:

http://www.startribune.com/yourvoices/40430412.html?elr=KArks47cQiUdcOy_9cP3DiU47cQULPQL7PQLanchO7DiU