Fred’s Group:  I had never really though about the aspect of how cartoons and comics are made.  This was very Informative.

Joe and Ivan’s Group:  I never knew that are so many different forms of medium and that there is hot and cold medium.  I am very impressed with the vidoe quality and congruency of the work.  It was presented very well.

Author of How to Use Your Eyes, James Elkins, had a unique way of presenting information.  That creative insight might come from the field he chose to study, the arts.  Elkins is a professor at the School of the Art institute of Chicago.  He received a Ph.D in art history in 1989 from the University of Chicago and has been teaching ever since.  Since I think of him as an art and history major he is normally asked to challenge reality and perception.  After all, art is subjective, and history can be very subjective once you try to read between the lines and explore the unknown.  It all makes sense that some day he would write a book on how to use your eyes.

Brian Martinez and I decided to emphasize only one chapter from Elkins book, How to Use Your Eyes.  We felt the use of our own footage, would more than encompass the allotted time restriction of 7 minutes.  As expected, our final product rolled over into an 8 minute clip, much further than we would have liked but all of it was necessary.  Brian and I used Elkins study of pavement and how it becomes distressed as the building block behind our video presentation.  We scoured around campus shooting video of distressed pavement in the attempt to make a countdown of the worst pavement on campus.  We had some objectives in mind to accomplish that were greater than just collecting footage of the worst pavement.  Elkins described several forms of distress cracks in pavement and how they formed.  It was our goal to locate these very same attributes in pavement down here on campus, rate them, and then explain how these images of pavement were different from all the others.

One of the first types of distressed pavement Elkins explains is actually also one of the most common.  It is often called fatigue cracking or sometimes alligator cracking.  Fatigue cracking was displayed in probably every clip of our video but Brian and I decided to analyze it in the first pavement of our countdown, near Newman Hall.  It is most commonly caused from pavement overuse or water permeating underneath the top surface.  It appears as a series of stress cracks causing usually a large network of broken pavement loosely held together by underlying layers.  This type of distress only gets worse over time and can lead to further repairs in the highway.

Rutting is caused through the continual wear of pavement by wheels from vehicles over the same stretch of road.  This most commonly occurs in country dirt or stone roads after it rains causing the substance to get softer and give when vehicle traffic drives overhead.  As these occurrences happen more frequently, the wheels begin to tear into the road and form groves or ruts.  This can happen on pavements as well and is very dangerous to motor vehicles.  If water collects in these ruts, a car that passes over them can hydroplane and lose control.  Cities rarely let rutting occur all that often as they are aware of the danger and quickly fix the problem.  Advanced forms of rutting can generally only be seen in country dirt roads due to the fact that many of them are privately owned, and thus difficult to maintain.

Shoving is actually nearly as difficult to find on modern pavement due to advances in technology and techniques for dealing with it.  Shoving is normally only seen on asphalt that hasn’t be compacted properly.  It occurs when the upper layers of asphalt are stripped from the lower layers and are shoved on top of one another, creating a small mound.  This rarely occurs and usually only happens where large heavy vehicles come to quick stops over the same patch of asphalt repeatedly.  Heavily trafficked bus stops and truck weighing stations are the most common locations for shoving.  Other than the fact it can be bumpy and it can create rippling effects in the road, shoving is typically harmless.

Corrugations are ripples in the road that appear at specific intervals, or frequently enough to know that one is correlated to the other.  They appear horizontal to the flow of traffic on the road which is counter intuitive to the direction that one would think they would form.  Corrugations are frustrating to engineers for this very reason, unfortunately they have not figured out the exact cause of corrugations or why they go against the flow of traffic.  For whatever the reason, corrugations seem to stem from tiny bumps naturally in the road, over time vehicles somehow add to the depth and number of these corrugations.  Eventually the whole road contains them.  This phenomenon does not only relate to roads, apparently it also occurs on railroads, ski trials, or wherever there is a track with decent traffic.

This is a large sample of what will be presented in the final video.  Brian and I used iMovie to tie together several pieces we had created for the project.  Brian had a great idea to use an old SNL skit with Chris Farley called Bill Swerski’s Superfans.  We used the characters created in that skit as our narrators for the top ten countdown of the worst pavement in Champaign-Urbana.  Brian and I write a script and then recited the lines into iMovie, all the while mimicking the voices of the two characters we were trying to portray.  Our goal was to put a comedic spin on this information since it can be seen as pretty dull to some viewers.  Even though, our project is a movie, I feel that our best work was in the dialog between the two characters and made for some funny moments in the clip.  We considered adding music to the project but eventually stopped because we feared it would interfere too much with our commentary.

Overall, Brian and I used several forms of media: audio, video, and photo, to capture the viewer’s attention.   We tried not to leave out any detail and approached the information from a new angle different from Elkins analysis of pavement in his book.  That in turn was the message he was trying to send with his book.  Don’t always look at something from the surface, dig a bit deeper and see what is underneath, you might just find a completely different answer than you were expecting.

Brian Martinez

Professor Jon Stone

INFO 303

Final Project Proposal

We are using Visual Rhetoric II, “Using Your Eyes” by James Elkins.  We will cover five sections of how to look at normal everyday objects in a different light.  The five areas of topic we will cover are: oil paintings, pavement, periodic table, the human face, and the human fingerprint.  At this point, we are leaning toward doing a video a presentation.

With the first point, oil paintings, we want to possibly get video footage of the art work and show firsthand what Elkins is describing.  The same is true for pavement, though we feel photos are going to be much better and easier to present. The periodic table topic will contain various pictures of other tables that were invented for different functions other than the standard one seen in modern chemistry classes.   The human face has many symmetrical features that one does not notice on a conscious level but reacts to subconsciously.  We were hoping to have compare and contrast photos of people and ask the class to find what is different between the images, making for a more interactive presentation. The human fingerprint can also be engaging to the audience as we show how the fingerprint is mapped and compared to other finger print.

We were thinking of making a power point, with video and audio feeds throughout.  In addition we will be talking in class, trying to engage the audience, so as to make it a more holistic learning environment.  We wanted to take a trip to Chicago to capture videos of its pavement and of some oil paintings from Art Institute.  The other three chapters would be best suited for photo displays during the presentation.  Though we were thinking of maybe analyzing our own fingerprints, just another step toward making the presentation more involved.

Brian said that Elkins works at the school of the Art Institute in Chicago.  We were thinking that maybe we can arrange a short one minute question and answer video session with him, by very simply emailing him a series of questions.   We would inform him that we are making a video presentation about his book and would be grateful for any insightful information about himself or the book in general.         Hopefully he can respond via in the internet with a short video of him answering our questions or just saying hello.

Our goal for the project is to inspire people to view not only objects from a different perspective, but ideas as well.  The book can be used a building block to understand that not everything is in black and white.  Hopefully this can remind us how to use our eyes and our minds to create new ways to see and express ideas.

The most vivid news broadcast I remember are of the September 11th attacks.  At the time I didn’t realized the gravity of the situation, but the news was everywhere.  The world had stopped to witness these plane crashes.  I remeber my teachers discussing it in class amongsth themselves, kinda in a whispered tone, as if it was too horrible to mention the to students.  There were a lot of scared and confused people that day, I on the other hand did not really care.  I was off in my own world, more worried about what happened to me than anything else.  I was actually a little upset that every braodcasting channel was still covering the event when I got home that evening because it was starting to interfere with my life.  Now obviously I have a lot more respect for the event and I fully understand the ramifications that unfolded because of it.

2.) How do you think media is evolving?  Do you think its a sigular evolution, where it is strictly governed by the decisions of people or do you think it has grow strong enough where it is self sustaining, where media shapes itself and us as much as we shape it?

3.) There is a belief among sociologists that the simulation and imitation of reality has become more real than reality itself.  Do you feel society is heading down this path?  What is the critical or breaking point for you where enough is enough?

Hampe’s idea in his work Visual Evidence that the video needed to be able to stand alone when presented without audio was very challenging for us because of the deep social patterns we were trying to expose.  This was by far a major concern for Ricky and I because all we could think of doing was filming video of people walking and ignoring human contact while in a public setting.  When we reviewed our work later on we found that the video footage could not stand alone without audio support.

I suppose this wasn’t at all a bad thing because the purpose of the project was to create two radically different videos using the same footage.  There was another problem that was forgotten about early on in the group project, and that was the video that Ivan and Chang wanted to create with the same footage.  Ricky and I assumed that they had an idea for the Quad scenes and what they wanted filmed so as they could spin it however they felt necessary.  This problem arose quickly in class that following Thursday as Ivan and Change were at a loss for how they could use the images.

Luckily they were able spin our massive clips of students walking, into a documentary of the time spend by students during their passing period.  Ricky and I shot interviews which were of little help to Ivan and Change in the effort to capture how some of the student felt on the loss of social interconnection on campus.  This once again limited what Ivan and Chang could use and what they couldn’t in their video.

I had no idea as to the amount of time needed to spend editing and formatting the clips together to create a presentable video.  Thankfully Ricky was quite adept at using this type of technology and he was able to speed up the process significantly.  I never realized the amount of spontaneity and luck  needed when a producer is just going out into the field in the hope of finding the perfect shot.  There is no knowing if that shot may ever come and the only way to be prepared for it is to let the tape run as Ricky put it.

I had a feeing that working in a group would be difficult and we would be pressed for time, but overall Ricky’s and my availability correlated very well.  Setting up meetings with Ricky were not too difficult and were at very understandable hours.   The Intertext article by Ede hinted that group projects are usually more of a hassle than the benefits they provide but in our case I would say the situation ran quite smoothly.  I think that had more to do with the fact Ricky and I put a high priority on completing the project and putting forth the effort necessary when we were actually together.  Though I must admit he was the cog that made this project run.  In addition, he took the final product home the Tuesday before it was due and tweaked the video a bit more by himself.

I’m having a hard time getting the actual video posted up on my blog so just click the link above and it should send you to the vidoe on YouTube