Tag: Thoughts

Week 3 summary:

This week was awesome. Real life threw me some curveballs, so I was a little more detached than usual, but I still really enjoyed what we were doing this week. The main objectives this week were to look at visual story telling through images and design and throw the AI twist in there of how it could affect these areas. We were proposed some interesting questions: Is it a photo if it didn’t use a camera? Can we even trust images now? What does AI mean for design? If an AI uses images that were already created, is it copyright? Very important as we delve deeper into digital AI art.

The first thing we looked at were a few posts about design. A few of them went over the work of Chip Kidd who was a book cover designer. His insight into the creativity required for designing a book cover really blew my mind. All the things he was trying to do with them, I did subconsciously because of his design skills. The main quote I take away from this is “It doesn’t occur to most people that everything is designed — that every building and everything they touch in the world is designed “. This was almost a revelation for me. it got me thinking about how everything is specifically tailored to get a desired reaction through design. There were also a few posts about movie posters and a title sequence. My full thoughts are HERE.

The next item was to do a 20min photo blitz. This was a fun activity because it put pressure on my creativity. What are you going to do when you have to get as many things pumped out as possible in a short amount of time? Will they be garbage? Or will they be better because you had to go off feeling instead of logic? You decide. HERE is my post about it.

Next, we had to do 3 assignments. One was curated and the other two were from the bank. I really enjoyed the AI art tools from the Middlebury College assignment. This was the exercise. The task was to use two tools and generate images using the same prompts and slowly get more elaborate. The results of mine were hilarious. I appreciate that it dove into the question of what this means for artists. I put some thoughts in my post, and I am curious to what you think.

For the other two assignments I chose to do two from the design catalogue. One was called Back to Basics, where I had to design a cottage in an open world videogame. I chose a new one called Palworld where not only can you design a house, but an automated ranch. So, it involves a lot of design planning and coordination and picking the right Pals to help depending on production needs. It’s definitely worth checking out. HERE is my post. The other design challenge was called Contradiction Creation, and its objective was to make a picture that made you feel something, but the words on it contradicted the feeling. These always make me laugh so I did two of them. You can see my post HERE.

I also did 3 daily creates this week. You know what these are so I’m not going to belabor the process. HERE is my post on what I did.

My activity this week was sub-par to say the least. As I am writing this, I have only commented a few times and most of them were on my posts, so I really need to work on visiting the other pages. I will comment on some as the night goes on. I really want to see people’s photoblitz.

So, to conclude this week, I learned a lot about design and the amount of work that goes into making us do and feel things subconsciously. I hope to utilize what I have learned this week in future assignments.

Man, we did a lot of stuff this week… well it feels like we did. But it also feels like we didn’t because I was having fun with a lot of these projects. Here is how it went for me.

The first thing I decided to do was read the articles about how to improve my post writing. I learned a lot and realized I was not doing all that I could to make my posts the best they could be. Over this course I am going to try and improve my posts week by week and hopefully get them up to par. You can see my full thoughts here.

The next two things I attacked were some assignments from the assignment bank. I’m not going to lie; I had a tough time picking because there were so many to choose from and they all seemed fun. I ended up going with Never Fear – It’s Words of the Year, a writing assignment, and Say It Like the Peanut Butter, a visual assignment. I wanted to spread out the style of what I am doing so I can learn some more skills. For the writing assignment I had to write a poem with words that were fully recognized by Webster in a particular year. I chose 1991, my birth year, and this is how it went. I was surprised when Paul thought it would be cool to run it through Dr. Oblivion to see if he could make a real song out of it. I can’t wait to see the results. For the visual assignment I had to make a gif. from a movie that is essential to major plot points. I chose to do “Alien” and compare the emotional response it creates to a similar plot reveal in “The Thing”. You can see the results here. I can’t wait to do more next week.

The next thing I did was create my character. This one took me a while because I wanted to create someone who was different than me. I thought that if something came up where I had to write a post as this character, I would want something challenging that would make me think like someone else. I tend to be very accepting of new information and think of all the possibilities while decision making. I made this character Kevin, who would resemble the evangelist archetype and be a die-hard AI rights activist demanding total AI freedom. I do not agree with this sentiment, but I believe this will be a fun character to explore. Meet Kevin here.

The next post I did was about all my daily creations. I thought it would be good to put these as one post because I feel a rapid fire visual of what I did would be the best way to display it. Not a lot to say other than I really like doing these. See my week of daily creations here.

Then I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Oblivion for the first time… That was an experience. I don’t want to ruin the surprise so, if you haven’t seen my post about my movie review re-write… check it out here. You will not be disappointed.

Last assignment I did was read the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. It was an interesting read, I didn’t agre with it too much, but it had some valid things to say. It was a far cry away from the main character in my iRobot movie review. You can read it here, it’s a long one.

I’ll admit I wasn’t the best this week at commenting on other blog posts. I only did a few. I went to the page every day and would read, but I get kind of gun shy when commenting on other people’s work. I will work to do better on this next week.

I also didn’t do much with blog customization this week. I changed the colors slightly and I changed some text and added a few tags, but I really didn’t get too far into the weeds. I figured out how to embed gif and video and pictures so that’s a plus! I will try better next week to add some more flare.

All in all, it was an eventful week. I got a lot of work done and learned a lot. I can’t wait to dig more into the assignment bank and pick some wild ones. See you all next week!