Cristian Elías Gómez Calderón

Project Name:

Mass media- all work and no play.

Project Description:

•Collage based work. Will be dealing with images found in magazines, books, newspapers, etc. Both single images and stop motion will be used. To unify the project each work will have consistency with lighting & style.

•Topics will range from comical to serious, banal to the unexplainable, religious & political, or just referencing pop culture in general.

•The singular images will have text included in the piece almost like a headline on the cover of a magazine, while the stop motion will only be action an no words other than the title.

Conceptual Concerns:

Although I personally don't follow popular culture as much as most of the population does, I find it interesting how people connect with those in magazines. Knowing things about them like from what they ate in the morning to who they are currently dating has always given me the creeps. Followers of pop culture feel connected to celebrities based on characters they play on TV or movies and not on the actual person.

By using cut-outs of familiar faces, I hope to reach out to the masses with they're idols as my actors. Bending them and manipulating them as I see fit. Almost like a non-english speaker going to a dictionary and cutting out words foreign to them and arranging them in a purely visual way and not a logical one.

Technical Skills Covered

I will master the exacto-blade. I will also master the copy-stand & my camera as the tool for capturing each scene. I will be shooting the single images as RAW files and the stop motion files as Large Fine Jpgs. I have to shoot very carefully so as the images appear to flow smoothly and not be jumpy. I will have to master actions in Photoshop for any cropping and colour correcting of the many many jpgs. Next I will need to work with Final Cut Pro to arrange the images & sometimes audio. The images & videos will be exported to be viewed on the web as so I must also master outputting specifically for that.

Formal Guidelines:

I will make 8-10 short videos ranging from 5 to 30 seconds in length & 10-15 stills.

Each video will be a standard 720x480 with a few being 1280 x 720.

Each image will also be exported to fit nicely on a typical web browser.

Artistic References

20th century collage artists. David Hockney, Richard Hamilton, Man Ray, Ramare Bearden, Cecil Touchon, & others. TV y Novelas, Mira!, Glamour, Latina, Eres, Us Weekly, Life, National Enquirer, etc.

Readings

20th century art history. Real World Photoshop. Lynda.com videos. Gossip columns online and in print.

Grade

1st & for most completing the amount of videos and stills I said i would.

2nd If they are technically executed well & in a set style.

3rd if they are visually appealing.

4th if the piece & the title integrate nicely.

Goals List

Acquire enough material to really let go and not be tied down to the bear minimums. For this to be successful, I need to embrace chance as sometimes that is more interesting then thorough planing.