At the risk of sounding like a complete tech geek, there is nothing quite like a brand new computer. A completely clean, uncorrupted, ultra fast machine. A core two quad processor, 6 gig of ram, 640mb hard drive, 7.1 audio. Not a fingerprint on the 21.5" HD monitor, not a single letter worn out on the keyboard. It has taken four hours to transfer everything for the old machine, and I don't even have the graphics programs loaded, but right now I am in heaven.
This weeks assignment was to create a facebook ad. This was a very interesting project. Trying to combine a meaningful message and an image in such a small format was not something I had tried before. I plan on attempting others just for the experience.
I have never been a huge Star Wars fan. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the movies...once each, but my son has watched every movie and every episode of the animated series at least a dozen times. I wanted to find out what made this such a great story, so I interviewed him about it.
Kevin: “You’ve watched Star Wars like, at least a half a dozen, a dozen times each…”
Troy: “Yeah”
Kevin: “Why?”
Troy: “It’s a good movie, it’s pretty entertaining.”
Kevin: “What makes it such a good movie?”
Troy: “It’s just, uh it’s really action-ey…I’m not sure.”
Kevin: “What about the story line?”
Troy: “Um, well, there are these people that break off from the old republic and form the CIS and the republic has these guys called Jedi who are fighting them, but they don’t have any army so then the Karmenian, these people, give them an army of clones and they fight the droids and end up beating them. And then the republic turns into the empire, and goes bad and the rebellion starts and the main bad guy Darth Vader has a son who’s with the rebellion and ends up beating the empire.
Kevin: “So what about that story makes it so interesting?”
Troy: “It’s just a great process, I think, because it goes, it’s so unordinary.”
Kevin: “What is so unordinary about it? The fact that it’s in the future?”
Troy: “Well it’s in the past, but it has more advanced everything than now; like the weapons and vehicles, and it’s just there is so much stuff that you wouldn’t even think about.”
Kevin: “So that leads me to another question I had: What technology from the movies would you like to have today?”
Troy: “It would just be so cool to have, and like it would make the battles so much…it would help the battles because when you fight, when you fight, like the sides, it would help, because you can’t really…um now it is a lot of numbers game, but in Star Wars a lot of times the under dogs win because they have a lot better people. The lasers and light sabers make it so that you don’t have to…it’s not only about numbers. It’s more about strategy and skill. You watch the war movies, and you know pretty much all of the movies are about the same, and then you go to this totally different; there’s nothing like it type of thing, and when there is nothing like it, it makes it really interesting and good.
There’s only 10,000 Jedi. It sounds like a lot, but in the movies, there’s…they fight all over the galaxy so each one, what makes them so powerful is they use the force and they use a light saber which can deflect laser blasts. There so powerful, but there’s not too many of them. There’s not enough to fight the entire droid army which has hundreds of thousands of droids. The droids are the main bad guys, and I like the Jedi because they’re cool and the droids, they’re stupid pretty much.”
Kevin: “So what makes the Jedi cool?”
Troy: “Well they’re just so smart, and they do things that you wouldn’t normally think about like picking their troopers up and moving them to places using the force. And they’re just so awesome I think.”
I recently had to write a 5 minute speech for a communication class. I decided to do my speech on digital art. Specifically, I addressed digital art in comparison to traditional art. The main point of my speech was that to create any art, one must have a good understanding of form, figure, shadow, and design. These, and other basics, are essential to creating good art regardless of the medium. One section that truly summed up my feelings was “No matter how it is created, all art requires skill, dedication, and talent. No amount of software in the world can create art without the artist. Talent cannot be achieved by plugging in a power cord.” This being said, how close do you think we, as a society, are to accepting digitally created images as art in the same way we do traditional images?
