The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Questions:

1) Benjamin states that the uniqueness is equally confronted by the aura of how something is viewed. While the aura of something will change once it has been reproduced, does a piece of art still maintain its uniqueness once it has been reproduced? 2) Artistic value is an greatly argumentative subject. That being said, based on the idea of maintaining uniqueness once it has been reproduced, do paintings and photographs have the same value? Or is the aura being captured from the naked eye, onto a painting or photograph diminishing in value? How do the two medias differ in value after reproduction?

Animation with Audio

I had failed to make any changes to the initial video, such as making the "Blam" disappear after it explodes, and making the clock and compass rotate the entire time, due to my supposed lack of saving the after effects file, however, with the time I had I was able to add audio to the existing file. I attempted to accentuate the "color explosion" with a subtle explosion noise. In addition to that, I added a clicking noise to the rotation of the binary in the background, and I also added a fire-crackling noise once the fire appears.

Digital Media Animation:

Here is my Digital Media Animation project. At first I didn't know how to tackle this project, I had no idea what parts of my project I wanted to animate and how I wanted to animate it. However, after messing around with things for a little, I eventually just stopped thinking about it and just kind of went with it until everything fit together. I wanted to enable the viewer to understand all of the ideas and colorful thoughts someone could have while also expressing the emotional frustration of everyday life at the same time.

Basic Animation Discussion Questions:

1.  After reading the article, and watching the Please Say Something short film, I noticed that all voices used are synthetic sounds.  After he mentioned that he used flat shading and never had used light sources to enhance basic shading, he said with the story being told through "verbal dialogue" he found shading unnecessary.  If he had implemented shading in the short film, would it have enhanced the film, or was the lack of realistic shadows intended to keep the simplicity of the objects?

2.  Referring to when he said "I always feel that any filter that appears to easily add a lot of beauty to an image or 3D model should be avoided", I agree with him that having a beautiful base model over a beautiful filter would be more effective, but if there was a case to use a filter that would easily enhance a frame, would it be a poor decision to consistently use the same filter throughout the piece?

Project 1: Collaborative Digital Diptych Montage

 by Darius Mandegary

 by Zach Cordisco

Introspection is a term used to look inside of ones' self.  The way we approached the project was with the idea of actually going inside ones' self and what that would look like.  This proved to be extremely difficult to portray due to the nature of the project and we couldn't produce results that either of us enjoyed.  So we set off on another idea: the idea of bringing what is inside, out.  Looking inside ones' self becomes a lot easier when everything on the inside is out on the table.  With this, we wanted to use things that aren't normally expressed on the outside.  Underlying conflicts and ideas are constantly at war within a persons mind and we wanted to bring that turmoil out.  This was our idea and we ran with it.  This also allowed both of us enough creative freedom to produce two distinct works with the same 25 images.