Lecture #1 - Two TED Talks

I decided to watch two Ted Talks for this lecture.

The first was a TED Talk by Don Levy on A Cinematic Journey through Visual Effects.
In it Don Levy talked about how visual effects in cinema can be thought as essentially what magicians do. They create illusions using three basic principles. They are assumption, which is that people assume things in our world are the same as things in the world presented, presumption, which is people can presume things in the world presented will behave as we expect, and lastly, context in reality, which is does the items presented make sense in reality. In then becomes the obsession of the magician, or the visual effect artist, to never betray the illusion. He then showed some different clips of visual effects in cinema over the past hundred years. These showed different aspects and types of visual effects over the years. It was a very interesting TED Talk.

Link to the video: http://www.ted.com/talks/don_levy_a_cinematic_journey_through_visual_effects.html


The other TED Talk was Amit Sood: Building a museum of museums on the web. This was a very interesting TED Talk about the google art project. This is where google created virtual museums very similar to the new google maps. Whereas instead of walking along a street via your web browser you are walking through a museum! Then you can click on individual paintings and see them at 10 Billion pixels. This means you can zoom in to see the individual brush strokes and cracks of the paintings. People can also create their own virtual collections of their favorite art works and discuss them with their friends. These seems like an amazing project that google made and I am definitely glad I learned about it!

Final Project #3 - Marclay/Tinguely MashUp - Christmas At Someone Else's

This project was an interesting project for this being a digital media class but I had fun. Chohnny and I combined our two ideas. Her original idea was to have something robotic painting the vinyl, and my idea was to have an elongated abstract record player. So I think we did a pretty good job combining the two ideas. We built the middle part on top of my record player, then we added the Santa, and the speakers and then spray painted all the pieces. The Santa, depending on how wet his brush was, would push down on the record, which would slow it down and add a strange creepiness to the music. This made it feel familiar, because of the Christmas themes, but creepy and uncomfortable so it was like having Christmas at someone else's house.

Here is a picture of our project:

Final Project #2 - BYOB - Rudolph's Acid Trip

For this project I decided to just use my skills in Adobe Premeire to edit clips from rudolph the red nose reindeer. It turned into a freaky looking and yet funny video. I think it's hilarious.

Image from the video:

Video to be uploaded soon.

Final Project #1 - Broken Record

 This is the broken record that I made!

ART 345 - Project Two - Sounds from the World

Here is the link to my soundcloud page with sounds I gathered for this project. Eventually all of these sounds made into my video triptych whether they were edited heavily or not.

https://soundcloud.com/patrick-zbella

Planes Flying:

Dog Barking:

Pages Being Flipped:



Bus:

Project Five - Audio Tour - Bricks - JPZ

This is the link to my audio tour.
http://www.unr.edu/art/digital_media/tour/midtown/007%20Bricks%20--%20JPZ.mp3

Bricks by J. Patrick Zbella

This work depicts an unnamed fictional character that narrates the moments before his death. It is unclear exactly where he is and who he is with, but he is somewhere else telling the listener his story. The story shows him walking downtown contemplating death and suicide, until his unforseen death. And as he is dying he comes to several realizations about his life.

I intentionally made it unclear where he was; whether he is in hell or heaven or some other after life, I left that bit up to the interpretation of the listener. I did this because the story focuses on life and living and not what comes after. Though, my interpretation is that he is in some sort of heaven or purgatory but is still bitter about his circumstances because he is incapable of fulling understanding them.

I wrote the piece, recorded and directed the voice actors, as well as created all the music for the piece. The music is just me and my guitar and some effect pedals.

Project Four - Performance Art Piece

This is the video of my fourth project.

Walking With Yourself


This project consisted of me filming myself walking past the camera in several different areas. It was actually surprisingly difficult to film myself, as I had to set the camera up where I thought it would work, then walk past it, then view the footage and then adjust accordingly. After I got all the footage I ran into problems editing the videos. First it was difficult to figure out the spacing between the three different videos so I had to time how long it took to walk through the NV Gallery and then edit from there. I also somehow messed up my export of the videos because they turned out with a terrible quality and were all pixelated. But I decided to just go with it because I thought the loss of quality to the second me might be an interesting idea. I also realized how this project was all about not knowing what to expect, not only as the viewer, which is typical for viewing art, but for the artist as well. I had no idea what mine looked like or what it was going to look like till I watched it back. This added a very cool sense of randomness and adventure. I had no idea what to expect, really, only what I had taken with me and then I just winged it. I did not turn out how I'd imagined but that's okay because that's a part of this performance. The piece itself represents the difficulties of trying to follow your own intentions; whether from your brain or heart.