Journaling the adjective and self-discovery process through meaninful images and sounds

My first impression was “I have to concoct three adjectives?” My second impression was how well I got over the shock of doing something blatantly… creative, for once in my college career. Before I dove into the world of creative neologisms, I borrowed my girlfriend’s digital camera and collected the necessary images that define myself: the bike ridden everywhere, the bizarre rasterized artwork, the hung-up shoes that represent youth and vigor from a bygone era, Allen hall, and a tidbit of computer code showing the toil of such a difficult engineering discipline. That said, I quit my adjective quest for a few hours to think about issues that were important to me. Dodging the difficult task of taking photos of the melting ice caps or having to go out to Savoy to capture the (sub)urban sprawl, I searched the Hall for the typical liberal issues that I would normally hold a sign for if not for the endless hours of other burdens to be overcome, like optimism, anti-Chief-ism, and un-plowed-bike-paths-ism.

So now the adjectives. The first one was easy. I wanted to capture a feeling of contrast, something at ends with itself and at the middle very peaceful. Something Zen. I thought of “immotion” – maintaining a constant position through constant motion. Like trackstanding on a fixed-gear bicycle, the filming part was simply that. I then realized “immotion” is less a noun than an adjective, so I added “-al” to the end. “Immotional.” Like emotional, but not. More Zen. My next was not so easy. I though of a definition first, the quality of a inelegant, inexpensive, and aesthetically unappealing solution. This lead me to my friend Ben's room whereupon I chanced his crappily-affixed whiteboard on the underside of the bunk above where he sleeps. Henceforth was Begineering born and it's descriptive counterpart 'bengineered.' The third was a complete dodge to the assignment, I just took a photo of a painting I helped to create by throwing paint off a parking garage onto the canvas below. Garage-tossed was hastily crafted as a means of describing art that is the result of probabilistic forces, like gravity, or just by throwing paint off a parking garage.

I made a successful attempt at getting sound to complement one of the above images; I simply pointed my camera at my keyboard as I typed in a manner suiting to Steven Colbert as so many of my friends have pointed out. I'm always concerned with capturing sound poorly due to the fact that my camera has awful sound-recording capabilities. At the price, you would think it attenuates sound better, but it still takes excellent photography. It's best to overcome this failure by pointing the thing close to what you're shooting and hope for the best. This will explain a lot of close-up framing of people, especially when they're speaking.

Lugging both my camera and my computer in my messenger bag to class was an adventure, man was not intended to carry sling multiple bags on his back and bike down Gregory in the cold. I avoided this pitfall in later classes by loading the video into my computer first or my hard-drive second, which fits snugly next to my computer in one bag. Plugging my camera into my laptop in class brought back some memories, I hadn't edited anything this summer when I produced a short piece for my hall's orientation program. I love iMovie for its simplicity and hadn't lost on the little nuances that gets things done really quickly. I need, however, to graduate to Final Cut and take advantage of it's rich feature set, despite the learning curve involved.

I kept the assembly of my images in a logical order and added the obligatory titles. I let the adjectives define themselves (or rather, I defined them) for sake of brevity and the fact that trying to add long dictionary definitions would prove cumbersome. I try to let things speak for themselves and draw on the evocative power of the image. Of course, a well-chosen sound always bolsters an image and can create a strong rhetorical effect. In whatever I make, I try to add some pervasively ironic component, and in this piece I put the iconic measures of the Marching Illini's Three-in-one behind the image of the anti-chief, anti-racism logo. If I had to defend this inclusion, I would probably just cite the fact that the anti-chief movement doesn't have a soundtrack like the pro-chief movement does. So why not co-opt theirs, call it funny, and thus detract from their credibility as a regressive movement? It's exactly that that the juxtaposition of the image and sound intend to do.

Taken as a whole, the adjective process got my feet wet again thinking about images and their inherent and collective meanings. I enjoyed particularly trying to encapsulate who I am into a handful of images and deriving from it some sort of personal insight. Honestly though, I think I'm getting ahead of myself. There is still much to explore and learn.

Take a sneak peek. Higher quality movie coming if not already "higher quality". Meaning something you could bear watching on an ipod: