Tim Needles blog for art & media art classes at Smithtown H.S. East
Welcome to Art Room 161
This blog was created as an extension of the dialogue that began in our classroom and the purpose is to share creative ideas, images, and critiscm. All posts should be appropriate for the high school classroom and critiscm should be helpful and positive.
We had an amazing Art Honor Society field trip to the MoMA and 5 Pointz today. Above is a short video of one of my favorite pieces an interactive media piece from Philip Worthington called Shadow Monsters which allows anyone to interact and make a monster with their own body.
In Media Arts class we have been looking at the history of Walt Disney animation studios and PIXAR in order to prepare for our short hand drawn animation. Friday we'll have a short quiz on the material but check out the short clip above showing the PIXAR animators discussing their student films!
This year the Strictly Students Festival will hold a Screenwriting Contest sponsored by Final Draft and just as a reminder the due date has been extended to December 21, 2012 because of the recent hurricane the deadline. The screenplay should be 5-12 pages in standard format and in standard format. Below are a few great writing tips from a terrific author Neil Gaiman who wrote Coraline and The Sandman enjoy and best of luck!
Neil Gaiman's "8 Good Writing Practices"
• Write.
• Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
• Finish what you're writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
• Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it
to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing
that this is.
• Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or
doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you
exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost
always wrong.
• Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it
ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and
start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon.
Keep moving.
• Laugh at your own jokes.
• The main rule of
writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence,
you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as
well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write
your story as it needs to be written. Write it honestly, and tell it as
best you can. I'm not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that
matter.
This week we will be creating an illustration based on a NY Times article- Hailing a Yellow Cab with an App. Above is a short time-lapse video showing an example of how to create an illustration but basically it is a piece of art that visually describes or explains a work of writing. Start by reading the article and then create a few pencil sketches of ideas of how to visually portray the article. Then create a final drawing, ink it, and color it using marker, color pencils, or watercolor paint.
The focus for the next AP Art breadth piece will be using repetition and rhythm in Art. When we talk about repetition and rhythm the names Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol often arise and for good reason because Pollock's drip paintings are somewhat related to Jazz music and include beautiful rhythms and Warhol is the master of repeating an image for effect but there are many other more subtle ways to include these elements in your work as well. The time-lapse video above is from the Soul Pancake website and shows artist Jeni Yang creating a piece in the theme of 'protection' which incorporates these elements in an interesting and unique way. What's your unique way of working with repetition and rhythm? Let's find out and share the results when the pieces are due on Monday!
If you want to check out more from Soul Pancake look at some of their creative activities
Animation Software - Powered by GoAnimate.
This weeks Media Arts assignment is to create your own short digital animation on the GoAnimate.com website. Above is a short demo of how the film works with instructions on the assignment. I'll do a short demonstration in class and go over some of the basics but you can begin by creating a free account and adding me as a contact, my user name is VoteNeedles2012 and the email chunckerthedonut@aol.com. The animation is going to be due Thursday and it should be 2 minutes long and about 25 frames.
I had an opportunnity to see the Regarding Warhol show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday and I would definitly encourage all my students to go and check it out before it closes at the end of the year. The show looks at Andy Warhol's work and his influence in artists such as: Chuck Close, Keith Haring, Ai Weiwei, Cindy Sherman, Damien Hirst, and Takashi Murakami. There are some terrific pieces and nearly everyone of my favorite modern artists are included plus it ends of a great not with the cowprint wallpaper room complete with 'silver pillows' giving a pretty authentic taste of the Warhol experience!
Above is a clip from the work of the Quay Brothers, one of the featured exhibitions at MoMA, their animation is pretty amazing and inspirational. Below is a really interesting time-lapse film of one of the 5 Pointz pieces being painted, it should be a great trip!
Yesterday we had filmmaker Sean Apuzzo and photographer Kate Le Roux visit and speak to classes and the Media Art Honor Society about their work and their experience at SCAD. They both offered some great advice for students from wide ranging suggestions such as taking advantage of some of the grants an scholorships offered for college to more specific advice such as how to structure a screenplay and the importance of keeping it dynamic in the first 12 pages.
Tomorrow we will welcome two guest speakers, Smithtown alum Sean Apuzzo who is a filmmaker and Kate Le Roux from Australia who is a photographer both of whom are currently finishing up their degrees at SCAD in Savannah. They will be speaking to the media classes and after school to the Art & Media Art Honor Society about their work and college experience and what they have learned.
Today we will be welcoming some students from Denmark into our classes and as we are reviewing the artists and styles we learned about in our art history unit I though I'd share some well known art from their home country. The sculpture below entitled "Boy" is a favorite of mine from artist Ron Mueckand is one of the spotlight works from the ARoS museum in Aarhus.
Here is a piece from which was installed nearby in NY from Danish artist Olafur Eliasson from 2008 where he created 4 New York City Waterfalls (this one under the Brooklyn Bridge) that flowed for a little more than 3 months and were illuminated at night as a public art project.
