Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Catfish

“Catfish” is the first social networking documentary I have ever seen and I thought it as really good. I know what the main character was basically going through because I feel like I can relate to him in so many different ways. I’m sure anyone who is more familiar with another through Facebook, Myspace, or any other social media site gets skeptical once in a while. In the documentary, the main character meets a little girl who appears to be a prodigious painter at her young age. Through her, he ends up meeting her mother and falls in love with her sister as well. The story takes somewhat of an aspiring turn once he begins to consider the fact that none of these people may actually exist. This was when my attention was at its fullest.

The little girl got in touch with the main character when he discovered one of his paintings and found out her age. He thought he found the next Shirley Temple and decided to have a film crew follow him in his journey of discovering her talents. In the process of trying to get in touch with her, the main character was in constant contact with her mother and often wondered why her daughter was never around. He was in touch with the entire family via social networking sites.

He also became close with the brother of the young artist and became aware that he was a musician in a band. The little girl would send the main character some of his music and he got excited because of how legitimate it sounded. It wasn’t until he met her sister when he became truly happy. The sister and the main character fell in love rather fast and always texted and wrote on each other’s wall. As time advanced with this young couple, he noticed a couple of things just were not right.

One evening, she began sending music to the main character and he realized that she was sending him songs that were already recorded by preexisting artists. He started to question her about it and never really got a straight answer. He then decided to drive to their home and got the entire story. What he realized was basically that the mother made up the fact that her daughter was a great painter and the daughter he fell in love with doesn’t even exist. She seems like a pathological liar.

I have dealt with something fairly similar in this situation. When I first started to record music I had a bunch of buddies who were very interested in helping me out. One of them was not musically incline so he told us of his friend who passed away who was a musical genius. Every time we talked about him he claimed that he was too upset to talk about it. He would show us music that was written by other artists, and claimed that he was a personal hero of his. We began to get a little skeptical and couldn’t find any information about this person. Not a single scrap of Internet information, and for a musician on the rise it seems a little bit farfetched to not have any Internet advertisement. We eventually became so convinced that we began writing songs about the subject matter and became fascinated.

We never did call him out on it but we still are not one hundred percent convinced whether this person was real or not. What the mother and my friend have in common is that they believe they are not good enough to be honest. They need to come up with an alter ego or imaginary friend that connects them to someone they want to be with. My friend wanted to relate to the rest of his friends and so he invented a link to us. The mother wanted her own art to get recognized so she pretended her daughter created all of those brilliant paintings.

Its funny how today there is new ways to stalk someone or find out about him or her. The democratized media allows anyone to publish their work of art and lie about every detail. The mother lied about the majority of her made-up daughters friends. She created over ten different alias and characters that played a very important role in her little scheme.

In conclusion, it seems that anyone can be a superman when they are really a Clarke Kent. The suit that changes who they are would be the Internet and social networking websites. It is very important to remember to be careful when meeting people through social networks. Just because you are conversing miles away through screens doesn’t mean that you are safe from anyone.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Exit Through The GIft Shop


After watching Exit Through The Gift Shop, I truly began to realize how unbelievably popular street art had gotten throughout the years. I began to look at life a little bit differently when I walked outside once the film was finished. I started to pertain everything I learned to daily school life. For example, when I started applying for internships for the summer of 2011 in the city, I was answering questions with Exit Through The Gift Shop in mind. One question was asking for a breakthrough idea in advertising and I came up with a very creative and innovative idea. My idea was to promote anything that will eventually come out. For example, lets say a new sports company is coming out with their first clothing line. Lets say that their logo is $<J, which basically means that money is less than happiness. Months before the actual launch date, I would hire graffiti artists so place the logo all over the city so it builds some curiosity. Once enough talk is buzzed around the city then we move the logos to advertising billboards. Not on the center of billboards, just on the bottom right or left so they are barely noticing. As the launch date gets even closer then these logos are appearing and more frequently all over the city. Once the media gets involved, a huge billboard in Time Square is put up with the logo and that’s it. Then over night, the billboard is replaced with the clothing line with the logo on it. The point of this is to build curiosity about this symbol and when people find out its about a clothes line they are going to be interested in buying or at least checking it out. Ideas like these started to pop up in my head non-stop all because of Exit Through The Gift Shop. I began to think differently, more creative, more underground if you will.

The underground scene is extremely important. Historically speaking, music, art, and literature all came out of the underground movement. Without an underground scene, there is no illegitimacy in the world. Everything is unbelievably conforming and it takes the beauty out of life. A strong believer in this would obvious be Mister Brain Wash. The entire documentary consisted of Mister Brainwash running around the world with famous street artists as they did their life’s passion. Mister brainwash was so interested in this that he decided to take on this hobby and create art around heavily populated cities. At the end of the movie, Mister Brainwash decided to host an art show for all of his work in Los Angeles.

Before creating his own work, Mister Brainwash would film everything. Every time he went somewhere he would take his camera with him and simply film. To some it was a treat or a pleasure to be filmed but others would find it very distracting and rude. Banksy is a street artist who came from the United Kingdom and made famous portraits all over the world. For the first time ever, this famous street artist would let Mister Brainwash film his every move. At the end of the film, we learn that Banksy regrets this decision. It was very humorous how most of the people he filmed did not particularly like him, nor do they appreciate his art and editing skills. When comparing Mister Brainwash to every other street artists in the streets it seems like Mister Brainwash is the first one to sell out. Space Invader posted all of his street art because he had a reason and purpose and enjoyed doing it. Mister Brainwash just wanted people to recognize him as an artist and someone who can be famous to. Anyone can spray-paint, but it takes a true artist to create a masterpiece of the underground scene.

Bansky is a true artist because he only focuses on the art. The reason why he remains masked, if you will, is because it isn’t about the man behind the art. It’s about the art that is created. More importantly, he is probably wanted for defacing public property all over the world. It would probably be better off if his identity were kept a secret. Part of his art was for him to be incognito at all times.

If Mister Brainwash would not have been discovered it wasn’t for the Internet or any social networking site. He is too late in the street art game and his work is nowhere near as unique as it should be in order for Miser brainwash to be as famous as he is today. Bansky is famous because of the overall message he puts out. Sheppard Fairy is famous because of mass repetition of his Andre the Giant sticker and Obama’s Presidential campaign. The very popular red and blue face of the President is now seen everywhere because of this street artist. Space Invader is another great example of this. He only wants people to see the art he created, not who created it. In conclusion, this documentary truly opened up my eyes to the street art-working world. I will forever take this fame into consideration whenever I wish to be creative. I love the mysteriousness of this hobby.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

The Beatles

The original image, of these four infamous icons, was in a poor quality color that looks like it was shot in the mid 1960s. It was also a horizontal image. I decided to make it in a 'simple trace' preset and stretch the picture to a normal picture size going vertical. This made the figures look almost larger than life and we are somewhat looking up to them for inspiration. The great thing about The Beatles is that they can truly be in any shape or color, as long as there are four figures together, someone will always think of this revolution.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Redesigned Logo


This is a revised version on the band's logo using the pen tool on Illustrator. I decided to make the letters attached more and instead of a brown coloring I used different shades of yellow so it looks more like an apple core rather than just wood. I saved it as a jpeg and they both looked very similar. I will use Illustrator more often now because using vector is so much clearer and look great. Bitmaps look very choppy when zoomed in all the way. This was a very useful assignment.