Ghana

I wrote this a few days ago...I'd to add a part 2 to it for my next blog though.  It was a little more harsh than I meant for it to be...

2/28/12
What have I seen/thought/felt?  It's good to debrief.
            What have I not seen?  At 22 years old I sit here on the third floor of a missionary complex in Ghana, Africa, trying to figure out where in the world I am being called to go.  Africa, from my narrow exploration of it, is a place with an extreme amount of potential, full of people and places that vary greatly from area to area, crossing the spectrums of morally good to bad and monetarily rich to poor, but mostly poor.  Abandoned by the materially developed world rests a beautiful people who have an understanding of their environment completely different than I do.  I use the word "different," not to be confused with better or worse, but different for I believe they have been created equally to myself.  When an African child is born, his slate is as empty as mine was.  If evolution thrives from variety, then why is it that most citizens of the western thought have let Africa lay to waste?  Is it the innate human desire to be better than someone?  Has our selfish desire to feel better about ourselves come at the expense of placing a lid on our potential to learn from a society that has survived longer as a species than most countries of the modern world?  It doesn't take a scholar to realize how stupid that sounds, yet we perpetuate this concept daily.
            Please, lest we forget that at one point in time every person living today has ancestors who lived in a primitive lifestyle, living a less sophisticated life than most of our "primitive" African brothers and sisters today.  Primitive is not a word that we should associate with cognitive ability--need we pull up statistics?  Yet we do it anyway--assuming businesses won't work and explorers won't survive it.  I thought we stopped believing in fairy tales as children, yet just west of Asia and south of Europe is a forbidden forest where humanity doesn't exist--only savages and only the daring come back.  Try this for a fairy tale:
            2 hours ago I with 3 other Americans stood in front of 40+ children with a large piece of luggage we had brought from home filled to the brim with homemade dresses.  The little girls were eager to try on their new presents, but filled with even more joy than the child were the children's mothers.  I recall one particular instance when I was maybe 12 years old.  I had gone to maybe 3 different shoe stores with my mother trying to find the perfect new pair of kicks for school.  We finally found the pair and took them up to the counter to make the purchase, and the clerk told me that I could put those shoes on and wear them out the store if I wanted.  Without hesitation, I pulled open the box and put on my new pair of shoes and walked proudly out of that shoe store.  Unlike my adolescent experience, these dresses were taken back off the little girls, exposing again the rags of clothes they were previously wearing, the dress not to be worn again until a special occasion were to arise.  And they lived together happily ever after.
            What is it then?  Where is the disconnect?  Why does that little girl not to get to enjoy her dress daily when I can not even remember what my aforementioned pair of shoes looked like because my memory is clouded from all the other shoes I have owned?  I would love to blame one blame one place, a nation perhaps; China for seeping in and stealing their resources, 17th century Europe for excluding them in the partial success of quest for total enlightenment, 18th and 19th century America and Portugal for exploiting the slavery system put in place by the Arabians and the Dutch, or any other crimes from both our past and present that have caused the stint of Africa's progress.  More than any of that I, as a Christian myself, would love (and hate) to point fingers at the religious sect for allowing these things to happen--for, in some cases, encouraging these things to happen.  A million things are to blame, including myself in my unintentional pursuit of ignorance, that could be bickered over all day, and are, but the question that I think we need to focus on is what are we going to do about it?  Are we, as fellow citizens of the world, going to help?  Or is it too late?  I don't believe it is, but until we drop our egos and chase after righteousness, the death and torture of the people on an entire continent is not going to rest solely on the conscious of our ancestors, but ours as well.

It takes forever to upload photos, and none have been edited, but here are a few:

Portrait of a teacher

Everyday...

There's not electricity sometimes...so I took the opportunity to do some night photography

Where's the hardhat?

2nd Wind

So, I've ALWAYS hated sitting still. I am driven crazy by idle hands. So, then, what all have I been doing since graduation?
1) I worked on 2 separate resumes. I will be working to update my website soon, and will post them there.
2) I wrote an autobiographical statement, which I posted on this blog earlier
3) I wrote a ballin' research paper. I don't really expect anyone to read it, but I do think that this is one of the best papers I've ever written, so if you like learning about/getting refreshed on your 20th century art history, take a look:



4) Got accepted into Emory for grad school
5) Built http://www.totheleast.com/ from scratch. Go take a gander. It's not done yet, but there's definitely been progress made.
6) I got turned down by several jobs, more to come about that though--my luck may be turning!
7) I'm going to stop here because the rest of the post will be about my newest project: turning an old piano into a desk. It started as...

As with any other project, I had no idea what I wanted the end product to look like when I started, nor do I know now, but I have come to the conclusion that nothing will Ever get done, good or bad, until something is done.  I originally bought this piano for $200 awhile ago with every intention to restore it.  Keys are stuck, it's out of tune, etc., but I recently realized that I'm broke and that I wanted to do something cool with it, and that I want a new desk.  So I played a tune on it, to make it feel loved, then started the disassembling process.






In the past, during guest artists' Q&A sessions, I have heard people ask them so many different questions asked about so many things, but when responding to the question that inevitably comes up about their artistic process, nearly every time I think there is a big part of their process left out.  So, I think I am going to start asking this, "How do you keep yourself SANE while doing art?"  I listen to books.  I download an audio book and crack it open.  I tend to work long hours straight, generally at night, and preferably with not many interruptions.  Though, today I changed it up and skyped instead.  Perhaps the secret is to keep yourself distracted from the Work of the project so that you only work on instinct and enjoy it, moment by moment.

Anywho, I won't exhaust this post with things I learned from this project so far, because I'm sure there will be at least 1 or 2 more posts about it, but I will end it with some photos I've taken so far.

It's getting fun here.

Hope you have a strong stomach because this is its guts
~chuckle, I crack myself up.

Took me FOREVER to get this back panel off...

I promise, I know what I'm doing!  I've got direction still!

I've got much to do, but it's gonna happen and it's gonna be awesome.  Stay tuned.

And the first greenscreen attempt is a...?!

Failure?  No!  I find that I refine most of the things I know by mistakes.  Like this one?



So it must be said, greenscreens, unless used well, are going to be cheesey.  I went ahead and embraced the cheesey-ness by finding flames to put behind me and adding the 2nd guitar in there.  And for that matter, most of my tests are cheesey anyway--why am I apologizing again?

ANYway, things I learned:
-Make sure your greenscreen is stretched tightly (but note that stretched fabric makes it more transparent--more about this in a minute).
-Guitars are shiny.  So what?  Well, if your guitar is reflecting the GREEN fabric all around it, the color that is being taken away (keyed out), then, well...parts of your instrument are going to be keyed out as well.
-They take planning and space.  This screen is relatively small in comparison, and it takes up quite a bit of my parents living room.  There's a good bit of hassle to take it up and put it down.  Go in with a plan, setup as necessary from there and make changes as you go.
-Cheap greenscreening is actually rather inexpensive, but as you try to do more advanced techniques, they quickly become really expensive and quite difficult.

That's a lot to take in if you really break it all down, so I won't say too much more about it in this post, but there will Definitely be more to come.  The main other thing is that I set up in front of some windows, no big right?  Wrong.  You'll see that my fabric was loose in the posted video (watch to the right of my head from 0:30 forward) because I had yet to buy the right clamps to fasten it, but after I did get nice and tight, I realized you can see light Through it quite easily, so when I was going to play with it some more today, the light from the windows was shining right through the fabric.  The key to a good greenscreen is to make it all one solid color.

Here's a picture of the setup (so far).  I really want to save up and buy some nicer video cameras, but that will be a long way away.  I need to focus on getting a job first.

Classy, right?

I'm not dead.

I never finished out posting videos from last semester, and I just crammed a lot into the post I did little while back.  But anyway, here it is, the last project (pretty much) of my undergrad college experience:




I really enjoyed making this video.  I did it with my brother Matt and a good friend of mine, Neal.  It would be quite easy to make a sequel to it actually.  When making this last video I realized quite how much I sometimes overdo the work, trying to make things perfect, with some of my videos and projects.  After watching the (great) movie Troll Hunter, I realized how nice it must be to embrace the simplest of things, like a shaky, home-video camera.  I've always hated a shaky camera effect before, but there was just something about it that I thought would work well with this project.

I'm also aware I overdid the static-y effect...these are the things you learn from experience.  Oh well, it still worked for what I wanted to do.  I was able to condense all the footage I had down into a shorter time period from it, which was really the whole purpose of it.  Problem--I had over 20 mins of footage to use.  I could have just made normal cuts and edits, but I wanted it to be suspenseful.  Solution--Use static, breaks in the footage, as a way to not only add to the intensity, but also condense all of it down.

I also love the black.  I'm just saying.  What if you were in a room alone watching this with the volume really loud?  THAT was the effect I was shooting for.  It's a select audience, I'm aware, of people who do that, but still...quality experience.

Also, I've made progress with my dad's website, here's a screenshot:



I've been working pretty hard on it, but I still feel like there's something missing.  It's been nice jumping back on the html scene though.  I've done the whole thing without a template.
Anyway, that's all for now...I feel like there are some really exciting things on my horizon.  I finally sent in my application for grad school--I'll be anxious until I hear back from them.

Documentary photo project--you've probably seen most of these photos but whatevv.
Kenya Photography