Brainwashed

If you clicked on the link above you would know what acknowledging the lizard is. The lizard is that little voice in the back of your head that wants to shut you down every time someone laughs at your work. You work hard and put all your effort into something and someone laughs at it like a joke. This can shut a person down and put them back in line with the average brainwashed minions of the machine. It's not just laughing too it is criticism and distaste that can shut a person down. This is the barrier between an artist and their art. You have to acknowledge that the lizard is there and you have to break the barrier that it puts on you. This is one of the pillars of Seth Godin's Seven Ways to Reinvent Yourself.
One other pillar from this article that spoke to me was the pillar "Learn". It doesn't mean to do useless work that is similar to what you did in school but to perfect your craft. You must experiment and find out for yourself what to do and how to do it. If your a video production major get out there and try to make a movie. I have been doing this since middle school and I feel it truly has helped me as an artist.
The blog we are doing this quarter I believe can be connected to the two pillars above. By assigning us blogs that force us to write down our thoughts and beliefs about something to be critiqued by other students in the class will help us fight past the lizard. We have to post our thoughts like it is our art so that we are not afraid for others to see it. Something as small as a blog can turn into you posting your next song or movie on youtube for the world to see. In respects to the learning pillar I believe the content that we read to comment on in these blogs is very interesting and forcing us to think about our work. These articles are encouraging us to get out there and be different, and we are learning this from these blog assignments. They are forcing us to think outside the box which is exactly what we need to do to make our art stand out and be noticed.

Soundscape

 

LOATHING

Finding Yourself

http://changethis.com/

The link is above is to a short story written by a man named Jonathon Flaum. The story is called "Finding your Howl" and is a very interesting story. The story talks about an endangered Red Wolf that is introduced into the wild from captivity. The only problem with this wolf is that it lost its ability to howl so it goes out and looks for it. This wolf can talk to other animals and learns a very important lesson on his travels which eventually results in him finding his howl. The story is a lesson on how a person needs to forget their old selves if they want to become the person they are meant to be.
One of my favorite motivational quotes comes from the one of the greatest wrestlers of all time, a man named Dan Gable. The quote is "Once you've wrestled everything else in life is easy". It seems out of place as a creative quote but it means something to me. It is the drive and motivation from doing something so hard as wrestle for nine years of my life that makes me drive on when I feel like I'm going to quit. This quote reminds me of all the struggles I've been through and makes it so I can succeed. This applies to my skills as a film maker and makes it so that I never give up on my dream. I will find my howl one day and I'll also find the new me.

The Heart of Innovation

The Heart of Innovation

At the heart of every individual is the need to be remembered or to succeed. Everyone has their own idea that is going be revolutionary and make them famous. They can feel it inside them but how do they access it. This article tries to explain to the common person how to break through the walls of inspiration and create something innovative with these 14 different techniques. In other words, it tries to convince people that there are ways to be creative. It is a very fascinating article that caught my attention. It was interesting to read all the different ways one could stimulate their mind. It was almost like a calling for me because I always find myself in creative blocks, and a lot of the suggestions sound like they could do me a lot of help. Out of these fourteen suggestions many of them seem intriguing and effective, however some seem less then helpful. The very first suggestion is to follow your fascination. I agree with this statement and try to follow my fascination every day. I believe humans should not hide what fascinates them. I love slasher movies and I don't hide that from anyone. I have a tattoo of Jason on my back as a prime example. My innovation is all going towards writing my own slasher movie, and I stick to that everyday. I try to watch as many horror movies as I can while studying them at the same time. I plan the movie, write the script and just stick with it. It is just something you have to do if you ever intend to break through that innovation wall. Another technique is titled define the right challenge. This technique I have a little bit of a harder time agreeing with. I believe that when it comes to ideas you can boldly just answer a question. Ideas aren't formed that way. Innovation is a timely process that will simply just hit you if you factor in the right techniques to your life. By sitting there trying to answer a question you made yourself I can see frustration and failure occurring. Being free and not stressed to answer your question will make the right answer come if it is meant to. The final suggestion is to suspend logic. It really got me thinking and I have to completely agree with it. Imagine a world with no limits and no logic. I just feel creative just thinking about it. It is a free uplifting idea that could give you that childhood imagination that had endless ideas. It is scenarios like that, that I believe will open the doors to anything you want. A free mind is the only way to go about thinking if you want to create something that is inspirational and unique. I feel that ideas for movies like "Inception" and "Donnie Darko" came in a kind of environment where the creator envisioned himself in an environment with no limits. I find movies like that stimulating and it makes me wonder where the writers came up with such extravagant ideas.
At the end of suggestion number three, tolerate ambiguity, it asks What new idea of yours is bubbling on the brink of breakthrough? In what ways can you stay with it -- even if something in you is impatient for a breakthrough? I have this idea to write a break through slasher movie that is going to impress people but I just have not thought of the right scenario to truly scare people. The only way to stick with it is to believe that such an idea is out there and there is a way to scare people with a low budget script. That is the biggest obstacle that I want to overcome is to be able to truly make a good movie without a budget. It makes my challenge so much harder and forces me to think around my budget. This is why I don't like asking myself which question has to be answered because it is all I can think about and my idea suffocates. Maybe the only way I can stay with it is to write the movie without a budget limitation lingering in my head so i can openly express my ideas without limits. This is why I like the suspend logic suggestion the best. It is something I have not truly tried yet and it could lead to my break through. The idea is there and it just needs the right technique to release it.

The trailer you just watched is for the 1980's cult hit Friday the 13th. Sean S. Cunningham produced and directed this movie with nothing more then a name and a setting. In the 1980's the slasher sub genre was blowing up with hits like Texas Chainsaw massacre and Halloween. Cunningham was trying to cash in on the fad so he came up with the name Friday the 13th and set it at summer camp. It wasn't too long after that and the story began to come together. It is people like this that inspire me. Sean S. Cunningham was a nobody with a simple idea, and from that idea he was able to spawn one of the largest horror symbols in pop culture today. The signature Jason hockey mask is easily recognizable to the common person. People instantly reference it to Friday the 13th movies. These movies are my favorite movies to date and they are the inspiration for me to create my own slasher films. You see all slasher movies rely on simple similarities that you can find throughout the setting and story line. Slasher films have a lot of Contrast/ Affinity throughout them. Horror films rely on day time to set the story and night time for the killings to begin. The contrast of the two different lighting styles between day time and night time sets a certain mood to the audience. They know that once night time comes bad things are going to start happening. This is when affinity comes into play. Now that the audience knows something bad is going to happen they begin to see similarities in how the story is progressing. Every time a character is alone of wanders of they begin to connect the dots and figure out what is going to happen. It's all part of the formula. What makes this scary though is the Tension and Release. The movie can't be constantly have the killer killing every time they want to scare the audience. This is why they create false scares that takes the audience into someplace unfamiliar that they get scared in. An example is in the third Friday the 13th when a character screams and the audience is unaware why. All the other characters come to help her only to find out she found a snake in her room that scared her. This tricks the audience and makes them skeptical about future attempts at scaring them. They don't know if the movie is tricking them or if someone is actually in trouble and this makes the movie interesting because the audience loses the ability to predict everything that is going to happen. Below is an example of a fake Friday the 13th scare

There is a lot of fore shadowing and underlying meaning in Friday the 13th movies. This is usually performed through a prophet of doom/ an old timer from crystal lake town. This character warns the teenage group of characters in the film not to go to the camp and it is a perfect example of Text/ Subtext. The teenagers are warned and told they are doomed but they simply ignore the old man. It seems like just a crazy old man saying foolish things but there is a implied meaning behind the warning. He says they are doomed but he ultimately know they are all going to die and the audience generally figures this out. Below is an example of the Prophet of Doom

The Lizard King

Break On Through