Final Week of 4D Foundations!

Nearly done! I wanted to make sure to post all the information we would need for our last week of the quarter. As always, if you have any other questions, please let me know!

• ATTENDANCE

• This week, students have one more work day (Tuesday), two lectures (Tuesday and Thursday), and a final critique day (Thursday). Attendance is required for lectures and Thursday's final crit (think of this as your final exam!)

• On Friday, we have Open Studios in Baskin Arts from 12-4pm. Your TAs will be setting up all video work for display that day. If your final project requires anything outside of a computer monitor, you must let us know soon! Attendance at Open Studios is required unless prior arrangements have been made.

• This class does not meet again after Open Studios (6/8).

• FINAL PROJECTS

• During Thursday's section, we will be critiquing your final projects as a class to finish up the quarter. You must have your projects completed and uploaded to your blogs before section to be considered 'On Time'. The final project is your course final and worth 20% of your grade.

• Final projects will be displayed during Open Studios. On Thursday, we will be making a playlist of projects from YouTube.

• Any late or missing work must be turned in by Friday to receive credit. You can always email and ask if you are missing any assignments.

• FINAL GRADES

• During finals week, I will be grading your final projects for the course. You will receive email feedback on your project as well as a final grade for the course during that week.

Don't sweat it! I have faith in all of you and can't wait to see your final pieces!

Animation Tips!

Hello, all!

Just wanted to share some tips and useful links that I've been researching for student final projects:

• This inspirational TEDxEd article on stop motion animation
• Another TEDxEd article on visual storytelling and animation
• This Apple forum discussion on 'tweening' or smoothing transitions between frames in iMovie

This Week's Assignment

Hello, all:
For this week's assignment, we will be dropping files into a shared folder so that we can listen during section. Here is a link to the folder:

Field Recording Submission Folder

On Thursday morning, I'll download everything in this folder so that we can listen to each one. You will only need to submit one file, 15 seconds to 1 minute long. To make sure we don't create a chaotic mess, please name your audio files like this: lastname_firstname_4D. For example, my file would be: jennings_colleen_4D.mp3

Let me know if you have any further questions!

Arboretum Field Trip

Hello, all:
Instead of attending lab tomorrow, I have decided that we should attend a sound piece on campus. This piece is at the UCSC Arboretum between the base and upper campus. The piece, Forest (for a Thousand Years...), is an audio installation created by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller that was featured at dOCUMENTA 13 in Germany. As we are studying audio and soundscapes this week, it seems like a good reason to attend and also check out the other features offered by the arboretum.

The Forest opens at noon and stays open until 5PM. I will be in attendance from 11:30-2PM tomorrow. If you are not able to attend during this time because of a conflict, you can go another time this week. While there, be sure to check in with me (or take photos and email them) to get credit for attending. To be clear, we are not meeting at 9am or 11am in the Porter computer lab. If you have any questions or need additional help with this week's project, please let me know! Here are directions.

I look forward to seeing all of you there!

Week 6-7! Body Politic and Activism

Welcome all to Week 7! Because of the strikes last week, a lot of our scheduling has shifted around and we are working toward submitting our fifth project on Thursday: the text project.

The text project: Create a text and image paper animation from a recent newspaper or magazine. Use material that speaks to the conditions of your community (Due Thursday).

We spent the weekend gathering up materials for this project, including magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, etc. and cutting them up/scanning/playing with arrangements in class today.

For inspiration, we had a look at work by early Dada collage artist Hannah Hoch, postmodern feminist artist Barbara Kruger, neon sculpture artist Bruce Nauman, and the LED and projected texts of Jenny Holzer.

We also looked at several examples of kinetic typography for inspiration:

We did a short tutorial on creating transparent backgrounds in Photoshop and using keyframes in iMovie (see below the cut).

Readings due by Thursday:

• What's Wrong with Cruelty to Robots? (from last week)
• Erick
• Delusions of Dialog (from last week)
• Arely
• The Virtual Barrio @ the Other Frontier
• Rebecca
• Zinesters, Ch. 6: Making the Game
• Selena
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Ch. 8-14
• Naomi

Processing Sketch!

As promised, here is a zip file containing the Processing sketch that I created for us to experiment with. You should change the sketch as needed and experiment (it's also on Canvas)! I've also included the code underneath the cut!

BODY TIME - Another Extra