CRV by Me

What is a concerned citizen?  Is it someone running fundraisers and collecting donations to better the community?  Is it an individual who is fighting against an issue they see, making themselves a social warrior?  When we were thinking of who we wanted to focus on for our project, we agreed that we wanted someone who was passionate.  We wanted someone who stood for something good, and had that genuine spirit of wanting to make the world a better place.  What a better individual and example of this than that of a child?  After all, in the scriptures we are constantly encouraged to become even as a child.  Remi and Ella are two little girls on a mission to make their community a better place.  Some may look at them and ask what exactly they can do, being children after all.  But their reach is influencing and changing the environment in which they are a part of.  Being a concerned citizen does not have to be a large, global scale thing. ...

Thinking of a concept for this project was fairly difficult at first because I wanted to choose a social issue that I personally related to, and there are plenty of those! But the one I chose to bring attention to is that of the influence media has on people - particularly the millennial generation. To do this, I created a game inquiring about which political party the gamer believes they are a part of. Each decision led to a few options that were encouraging, but basic. Each option was just that - an option. Any sort of outside opinion wasn't available because that is not how media portrays politics at all. It's either that you are one way or the other. An article found in the Nieman Lab by Jonathan Stray suggests that "usually the complaints have to do with what the media is saying about a candidate. But another theory says that it's the attention that matters. Good news or bad - maybe the important thing is just to be talked about." Perhaps this is true, but th...

We chose fight or flight as a subject for our Webspinna Battle. This was one of the strangest projects either of us have ever done. The whole time we were preparing we kept saying to each other “What are we doing?”. At some point we just decided to go with it. It took some letting go and not worrying about outcomes anymore -- which was hard to do and a bit strange. But it was also very freeing in a lot of ways. Something that we discovered while doing this is that just how much we love certain media and how much media has influenced us. As we were discussing different possibilities, certain quotes or clips from movies and shows would come to mind. It was revealing that a lot of our clips were from Pirates of Caribbean and Lord of the Rings . These were films that we grew up on. They informed a lot about who we are, how we view and tell stories, and even how we interpret different ideas and emotions.          Everything that we come in c...

My Textual Poaching Project "Birth of Venus," by Sandro Botticelli, shows Venus, the Greek Goddess of love coming from the sea as a beautiful adult woman. She represents physical love - the role a woman should always play - as well as inspired intellectual and deeper love for all. I chose this piece because I identify as a woman, which hasn't always been a positive thing through history. The purpose of this piece was to give power to Venus, a well-known and commonly represented woman in legend and history, and to depict her as beautiful and mysterious. She is nude due to the Greek representation of women that aims to focus on a woman as a whole, but also as a representation of sex and physical attraction. It was uncommon to give power and recognition to regular women, but it was a common thing to focus power on the women they knew in legend. There are 3 women in this painting, though Venus is the focus, and as I remixed the piece to represent my identity as a woman i...

Quite frankly, we had little-to-no knowledge of the lost colony of Roanoke until doing some general research about mysterious moments in history.  As it turns out, anytime people go missing, the search and remaining questions are generally very tantalizing—even when it’s only one person. When it’s an entire colony that’s gone missing, the intrigue is even greater. The frustrating thing about Roanoke is that the historical details and answers about the case are relatively minuscule compared to the gravity of the situation.  Understandably, the details are sparse because this happened in 1590; if something like this were to happen in 2017, creating a detailed and accurate narrative around 115 missing people would be perhaps an easier task.  However, a surprising advantage in writing the script with little historical answers is that it left reasonable room for creative liberty with the events. While liberty was taken with the script, the historical references that wer...

Our process piece was the process of giving birth, an essential process for all humanity. The audio was recorded by Nicole during the event, with an added heart rate monitor sound effect as well as other hospital sounds to further clarify and enhance the setting of the birth in the hospital. The piece starts out right before the nurses have the mother start to push. The “beginning” of the process begins as the nurse tells her that she is having a contraction and she should start the labor process. As she begins to push, there is commentary throughout from doctors, the mother, the father, the mother-in-law, and the nurses as they all coach the mother and encourage her during her progression. The effort of pushing continues to the climax of the piece - the moment the baby emerges, and concludes with the resolution of hearing the baby crying and well. Because the recording was done previously, the project entailed detailed editing of the hour or so of original footage to showcase the ...