Fireside Chat

Well... That was unexpected. This Fireside Chat has been the perfect opportunity to get to know myself as an artist as well as what I've learned throughout the class. I did some things that pushed me outside my comfort zone. Conceptualizing this mess was a bit of a nightmare to be perfectly honest. To me this project was a way I could marry my two favorite pastimes: film and Broadway.

I grew up on show tunes. I probably could have sung you 7 Brides for 7 Brothers by the age of 5, accents and all. My mother works for a regional theater doing costumes, she was even in a few when I was younger. The Tony Awards are an annual event in my house. Broadway is in my blood. I wanted to incorporate it into some project at some point this semester because I feel it is a massive fountain of inspiration. The Fireside Chat's main goal was to convey something we believe in. What I believe in can be summed up in a quote by Zachary Levi who said, "I think life should be a musical. I always hate it when people watch a musical and they go, ‘Oh, it’s so unrealistic, no one just breaks into song in the middle of their day.’ Yeah, they do- if they’re me.” That struck me. I've been defending broadway musicals all my life and the biggest beef people have is that they can't jump over the fact that people are singing their feelings. Here's the thing: don't you want to do that sometimes? When you feel an emotion strong enough just saying something isn't going to cut it. You need that full orchestra playing the music and choreography to express yourself. 

And so "My Life is a Musical" was born. My entire point was to argue the side for musicals. You can't have a presentation about Broadway and not have musical numbers. It would be like asking Tim Burton to make a movie without Johnny Depp: it's boring. Because of that I knew I needed music. So I sampled some of the most applicable songs and put them together with a projection presentation. But that couldn't be enough on its own. No, no, no, not when we are dealing with the opulence that is Broadway. The only thing I could think of besides hiring out a dance crew for the night was singing.  That's when the fight with myself started. I like to sing, however in comparison with the Mormon gene pool that is so rampant at BYU I haven't felt comfortable singing in front of people for a while. I did do some training in high school when I wanted a part in Hello Dolly and realized I'd have to learn how to sing to be considered. But that was in high school, it was a long time ago and I'm not exactly in practice. Unless you count the shower head on occasion, I'm sure it hasn't been impressed for a long time though. No, for the sake if the production it looked like I would have to sing. But isn't that the point of learning? Pressuring myself into doing things outside my comfort zone. I needed this for personal growth as well as artistic merit.

I do believe that this class has been a great kick start for my creative energy. Perhaps one day I'll even revisit some of my ideas. Who knows ? Life is full of changes. Musicals will stay forever, they will never flicker and fade. Like they say in Hairspray! "You Can't Stop the Beat!" You know what? That should be my new philosophy.

Living Media

I was one of the lucky people who attended one of the many workshops Ms. Allison Dobbins presented for the department. The one I chose was called, "The Sky's the Limit" which invokes a certain kind of kumbaya, you can do anything you put your mind to, sort of mentality. What I experienced was nothing like that at all...

She began by introducing her concept through a video demonstration. It was a prototype video that displayed what she was striving for within a specific project. This project turned out to be a live dance performance in which the  dancers would appear live as well as within handheld devices that the audience members were holding. The audience could then, through the technical prowess of Dobbins' programming, toss and catch the dancers as well as bring them out onstage. Dobbins has a strange sort of whimsy about her that makes her a perfect catalyst for outlandish ideas. Who would think to have the audience participate within a dance performance? She has a deep belief in getting the audience involved and letting them have a say in how the performance goes. Contrivance is something she turns away from, searching more for that spark of magic that comes from live entertainment. At one point she mentioned she wanted each performance to allow the audience to talk about it as though it was their performance too; say "you had to be there" when talking about it to friends. She views audience members as an asset to the general experience rather than a means to an end.

The great part of this workshop for me was the amount of time she took to demonstrate how she could build some of these visuals that reacted live. Rattling off a few programs to use, she deftly pulled up one called Isadora on her computer and began inserting all sorts of variables. It was amazing to see that just using a standard issue webcam built into her Mac, she began affecting the image coming through to the projector. So many different ways to affect the image; noise, light, speed, time, all of these things could be sensed. A lot of the media projections she comes up with come from fiddling with different kinds of sensors and tweaking them in the computer. Within this field there is a lot of programming going on as well, so I felt pretty lost at some points. When I asked her about it, she said that she was lost as well in the beginning and that as long as I paid attention to the program I run that it becomes second nature pretty quickly.

Being a gaffer at BYU Broadcasting I've learned a lot about the electric side of filming and I think it could translate very well into this strange new world of media projections. It fascinates me that I can make a naturally inanimate force such as light or sound sudden have a sentience, and sense it's surroundings. In my time as a student I want to find opportunities to try this kind of thing out and see what I can come up with on my own with my own specific skill set. Allison Dobbins emphasized the importance of collaboration on these things. If there's an aspect I don't like then I shouldn't do it, instead I should find someone who does and work closely with them. In this I can build new relationships as well as learn more about the artistic process and have my own improved. There's a bright teasing goal that takes a group of people to reach through their collective knowledge and ideas.

Never before had I heard of this kind of thing being done in a live setting, however it's a marriage of the two parts that I love about the arts: the image driven experience and the fleeting and ephemeral aspect of live performance. They don't have to be separated through the miracle of technology, they can become one in the same.