All posts by ACurseen

announcements, Check in, Final Project Check-Ins

Project Check-in #3 Due Monday

For this next check-in, I need to see visual evidence (i.e. an uploaded photo) of some part of your project that is more or less completed; an outline describing all the additional content you will  later add; and a detailed “to-do” list explaining each of the logistical tasks you still need to accomplish in order to complete the project.  Please include expected date/time for completion of these remaining tasks.

For  example:

If you’re making a book, maybe you show me the book cover with one page completed in it.  Or at least with a mock up page.   You would then describe in detail how you will go about laying out the rest of the contents of the book and how you might present the book.  If you have logistical details to take care of (ie. reserving a space, making and disseminating flyers, etc.) then you should describe the task(s) you still need to complete.  You should include a time/date when you plan to complete the task.

If you’re putting up a guerrilla education  workshop then you could show me a mock up of one of your supplementary materials.  You should also include an outline of the agenda (lesson plan) for that pop-up workshop.  You should describe all the logistical tasks that have been completed and all that still need to completed.

THE PURPOSE of this check in is to make sure that your project is feasible, and that you can realistically complete the project by the end of the course.  I ask you to submit at least one small part of the project that is done because, even the greatest outline and well thought-out logistical to-do list can’t foresee  everything. Often there’s no better way to find out something’s not working than to try it and see it doesn’t work.

Please keep this above described purpose in mind  and do your best with this check in.  Every group’s check in will be at least slightly different.  HOWEVER every group, should be posting a picture of some completed part of the project + an outline and detailed “to do” (+dates) list.  

announcements, Graphic Narrative Assignments

Graphic Narrative TWO Assignments for Monday!!!

You have two graphic narrative assignments which are both due by start of class on Monday.  If you are comfortable posting a photograph of your graphic to the site  before class, that would be great, but it is not required.

ASSIGNMENT ONE:  FRAMING  OUR MONSTERS

You should make 2-3 panel layouts for your We Monsters autobiographically-influenced graphic narrative that touches in some way upon the idea of monstrosity and adolescence.  You should already know what narrative moment you want to communicate.   This assignment is asking you to play around with how you will visually frame and layout your story.  I’m asking you to use the rulers and pencils passed out in class, to make a clean and legible layout of panels for your graphic.  YOU ARE NOT DOING THE WHOLE GRAPHIC.  You are just doing the panels, and then adding a  kind of mock up stick figure drawing that communicates how you intend to use each panel and how they will speak to each other.

Once you have done one of these, you will then do at least one more for the SAME narrative moment.   The moment/story is the same, but you will propose in this layout a different arrangement (placement, size, shape, etc) of panels.

ASSIGNMENT TWO:  PICTURING WILSON’S PICTURE

Pay close attention to the details of encounter between Darren Wilson and Mike Brown as the legal record provided in the transcript of Wilson’s grand jury testimony shows (see below image).   We focused  on page and lines of the description.

Depending on which group you are in (see below) draw a single panel of either the beginning, middle, or end of this story as  depicted in transcript.   You should not just be replicating the in class example we did.  You may decide for yourself what constitutes the beginning, middle, and end moments of Wilson’s narrative.  And you should decide how best to represent  the portion of the narrative your group’s been assigned to depict.

Where in the above assignment you are working mainly on layout of the panels, in this assignment you are working on composition and arrangement of figures within a single frame.   What figures, symbols, lines, colors, shadows, text, and shapes can communicate the part of the story your group is supposed to work on?

Groups A & B:   Do beginning of  a 3 panel graphic.

Group  C:  Do the middle of a 3 panel graphic

GROUPS D & E:  Do the end panel of  a 3 panel graphic.

 

 

Some things to keep in mind when drawing your panel:

ON REALISM:   Remember that you don’t always have to be literal or aim for realism in graphic novel.  Often money is communicated not by pictures of actual crumpled bills, but by a green dollar sign.  You can see in the example from class, the hospital is just a rectangle with a red cross like sign on it.

ON COLOR:  We have intense affective association with colors.  So colors can signify a whole host of moods and feelings and settings.   Again you don’t want to think literal here.  It’s not important that the shirt is red because it was red in real life (or even in the story), but you might use red to show your character is angry or in the case of the in class example has  a fever (which is a mix of literal and symbolic use of color).

ON MOVEMENT:  A lot  of times movement can be established by repetition of image, or by drawing movement lines that connote the “trace” of where the moving object has just been.

ON BREAKING THE FRAME:  The frame of the panel and the “blank” space between the panel are just as much a part of the visual  configuration of the story ass the drawing of the protagonist.  Having a character fill out the entire frame might make them seem huge or cramped.  Having them break the frame might communicate danger or transformation or some disruption of order and move into the liminal.   By contrast having a lot of negative space in a frame with a very small picture can communicate emptiness, loneliness, or something hidden and secret.

 

announcements, Final Project Check-Ins

Final Project Check In #1 Due 4/24/17 @ 10am

By 10:00 am, Monday, April 24th  one person from your group should post a description of what your group plans to do for the book project.  Remember to check all relevant category boxes. If your group is a little undecided, you may propose two descriptions (but no more than two).   Each description should include a WHAT and a WHY. 

THE WHAT is a detailed description of what you’re actually planning on doing for the project (e.g. make a book, create a webinar, put on a performance, make a video installation in one of the main bathrooms, present a panel of papers, etc.)   You should be as detailed as possible about the WHAT.  Don’t just say you’re going to make a physical book or do a performance.   Explain the nature of the physical book (i.e. size, material, etc.).  Detail the vision of the performance (Improvisation? Scripted, Lyrical, Dance? Musical?  Three acts? A one person show?  A Musical? And so much more.)  Your description should be 2-3 paragraphs.

THE WHY is where you reflect on how your WHAT satisfies the requirements of the assignment (please see the assignment description) and particularly how it resonates with the content you want to communicate.  You should explain why you chose the form you chose, and while your explanation might be partly out of personal interest in that form, you need to articulate a rationale that relates that form/medium to the content of your project.  How does the form of your particular WHAT speak to the themes/questions/claims you want to highlight?  Your WHY should  be at least be 2-3  sentences, but if you want to write more, you are welcomed to do so.

For example:  So my hypothetical group is working on Beloved.  Maybe we randomly decided to make a physical book made out of expired campus flyers.   Maybe we came to the idea partly because we were just joking around and partly because half our group is passionate about making Baruch more green and the other half just thought the idea was cool.  That’s a fine way to come to the idea (the logistical details of  which we will spell out in the WHAT), but then in order to produce a strong WHY, we had to do the WORK of considering how a book made out of expired campus ads might speak to the themes of the course as they play in our novel Beloved?  At first it was tough, but then we thought of two things: one that the main character was a fugitive slave, and so there’s something in the print ad that resonates with the danger of escape and hunt.  But also the ads we are using are expired, which signifies a passing of the terror of being hunted.  In this way the form seems important because by repurposing the expired ads, we both honor the end of that present life of the ads while acknowledging that something of them lives on.  This afterlife of the ads resonates with Beloved which is deeply interested in the afterlife of slavery and escape.  Beloved‘s interest in this afterlife that is both an end and a continuation resonates with the course themes on monstrosity and liminality.  Indeed the monstrous ghost baby in Beloved is monstrous in large part because she is neither in the past or the present and yet she is both in the past and the present.  She occupies in her awkwardly infant and adolescent self a liminality that eventually wreaks havoc on those characters around her who cannot both straddle and be outside of past and present.

This rationale would be plenty for the check-in, but one of the purposes of the check-in is to get you thinking about the what and the why because that’s a huge part of what I will want to see in the write-up.   So if in articulating the WHY described above, my group has other ideas about how to refine the what and/or why so they speak together, we can say more.   So we could decide to  limit the type of expired ads we use. If we only use ads that seem to ask students to market or sell themselves or conform themselves to the needs of institutions, well then now the form of our WHAT is in even better conversation with the content because just as the form speaks to the content (the ads for runaway slaves and afterlife of captivity and being hunted) the content of Beloved and the use of the ads in this way gives new life to the content of the ads and makes us think about the content of those expired ads in a new light.

 

announcements, Check in, Final Project Check-Ins, Frankenstein

3 Final Project Ideas: Project Check-in # 1 (Sample)

What I want for this first project check in are three possible ideas for your final project.

For Example: If my book was Frankenstein and I’m most interested in how it’s the space of education that allows Victor to go to monstrous extremes and create and abandon a creature that has no place in the world.  I’m interested in the ways in which Frankenstein speaks to western society’s ongoing investment  in the individual and the ways in which education and institution of education regulate the energies of the adolescent into narrow pursuits for individual accomplishment, progress and innovation at the cost of communal relation and accommodating difference.

So perhaps my group proposes the following three ideas for a final project:

1-create a short film which juxtaposes scenes of Victor’s monstrous education with images of grad students work in stem-cell labs and  images of  Aurora, CO and Will James Holmes, the grad student responsible for opening fire during the 2012 Batman premiere.

2-craft a workshop or a lesson plan that uses a combination of contemporary statistics about the consequence of loneliness and isolation on college campuses, scenes from Frankenstein, a mini-overview of various enlightenment ideas about the individual, independent rationale man (the relative newness of which animates Frankenstein and the legacy of which grounds our contemporary ideas of development, freedom, and success) to lead students in a discussion in which they reflect about the emphasis on individual success that we so often take for granted and asks them to think about alternatives ways of acting education.

3-design poster campaign based on Frankenstein that we put up all over Baruch and some other education institutions that in their visual recalling of Victor Frankenstein in various contemporary settings ask people to think about the connections between the ways we currently view being a student and educational advancement and the flaws apparent in Victor’s academic pursuits.