December

Assemblies

When I first conceived what effect I wanted to make by this assemblies, I though about making a chart that reflects the relations between all the assignments I have done and three variables: motivation, time, and techniques. Then I figured out it would be hard to present them altogether within a chart, and the outcome would also be too vague to convey what I have learned in the class. Therefore, in order to narrow down the skills that are required and facilitated by the learning process of the class, and also cover all the tools I used when doing assignments, …

November

256 Points — Rob-B-Hood

  For this assignment, I recreated the scene of a baby, the protagonist of the film Rob-B-Hood. When I though about what kind of scene I wanted to recreate with the restriction of only 16 times 16 pixels, I decided to not create something complicated in forms of colors and patterns, but the one that is relatively simple. Since I anticipated that the recreation will look dramatically different from the original work if the original picture contains too many details, I wondered if the effect is going to be the same if the original work itself is not complicated. Therefore …

Visual Poem

  I used the second page of the chapter 6 of Dickens‘s novel Great Expectations to create this visual “poem” (though strictly speaking, it is not a real poem). The way I was trying to make it in the beginning was that I jumped around paragraph and paragraph to pick up random words, with an intention to use “I” and “You” to create this poem. I wanted to completely jump out of the original book’s context and made something totally different. But I found out it was so hard to make it possible, so I changed my strategy to read through the page …

Movie Scene Recreation

The Graduate from www.pinterest.se    For this assignment, I chose to recreate a classic scene and also the poster of the film The Graduate. I started by skimming through images of “the classic movie scenes” on Google and selecting ones that I could most possibly imitate with the limited props I had. I found that most feasible scenes are characterize by male protagonists or female protagonists who look totally different from me in appearance, especially hairstyles. So I compromised by asking my boyfriend to help me to together pose for this picture (in which one of my legs is framed in). I …

Podcast Reflection: Bilibili and Participatory Democracy

Screenshot of Sherlock Holmes on bilibili   Cindy, the producer of this episode, brought to me her idea of talking about bilibili, a Chinese video-sharing website that acquires the hearts of millions of users, especially teenagers and the young in the 20s. I knew that Cindy is a big fan of bilibili and always uses it to watch Japanese anime. As for me, I have been using it for a few times, but I am certainly not as acquainted as Cindy is. As the assistant producer of this episode, rather to say that I helped Cindy integrate information of bilibili, I performed …

Podcast Reflection: Renren’s Rise and Fall

Renren struggles to halt decline by China Daily    In this episode I chose to talk about Renren’s rise and fall by elaborating its original mechanism and its later transformation. I came up with a broad idea that I wanted to talk about Renren and its comparison with Facebook a week before the podcast had done. Then I brought this idea to professor Morgen to see if it would work. He gave me really specific and helpful advice by suggesting me to delve into the reasons why Renren declined despite of operating the similar strategies with Facebook and to integrate …

October

Cinemagraph

I really enjoyed doing this assignment since I decided to make a cinemagraph with the best scene of a film starring Leslie Cheung, one of my favorite actor who committed suicide on April 1, 2003. Leaving the world and all who love him, Leslie had remained numerous classic films he starred, which record his unsurpassable performances. The clip I used in this cinemagraph is from Happy Together (春光乍泄), a 1997 Hong Kong romance film directed by Wong Kar-wai, and starring Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. This smoking scene of Leslie is always praised as the most handsome smoking scene in Chinese films. By making a cinemagraph of …

Data Visualization

For this data visualization assignment I chose to measure the frustration level of my daily life. The reason why I chose to measure this concept is because this semester has been the busiest one in my college life due to my graduate school application. At the point of doing this assignment, I felt overwhelmed by multitasking school work and graduate school application and always felt upset about what happened to me, till one day I asked myself: do I really have so much frustration every day or am I overreacting to my daily tasks? Therefore I decided to trace my …

Movie Montage

The movie I chose to make a montage of is Blue is the Warmest Color. The reason why I picked this film as the subject of my visual macroanalysis is that I want to know how the film title is embodied in the film in terms of visual representation. My main goal is to have a macroscopical understanding of how frequent the film has blue as its main tone. Before I watched the film, I presumed that there might be plenty of scenes that have major tone of blue to echo with its title. However, when I was watching it, …