Blog Assignment #5

When I started off in this class, you could definitely tell that most of my work didn’t really have much meaning or purpose behind it. I was more making things that I just liked or wanted to see what I could do in general, but as we started to progress and learn more advanced things I started to put more effort into creating meaning and purpose behind what I was doing, giving the artwork a significance that I didn’t have in earlier quizzes. This especially came out during my final when I could use whatever theme I wanted. When I heard that we could have any theme, my first thought was to Joe Hisaishi just because in all of the music that he does he gives his all and put such meaning and emotion into it that it can bring anyone to tears. So as I edited my final I just thought of how can I really convey these emotions to my audience and how can I get them to feel like I feel when I hear his songs, and I felt like with all of the techniques and other things that I learned that it really did convey that great sense of emotions that none of my previous works did and I’m glad I took the time to do this. Overall I really enjoyed this class all the way to the end and hopefully I can use these skills to help me later on in life. 

Blog Assignment #4

For my Final I chose to do the Big Idea of Life and Destruction. For this big idea I use two images from Ghibli Studios films. The first one was from the film “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”. In this picture we see a giant robot offering a young boy and girl a small delicate flower. This image is from a scene in the movie when the two main protagonists, the two children pictured, arrive on the castle in the sky that is known to them as the city of Laputa that has been lost for many years. When they first land on this seemingly dead and run down floating castle, they are approached by this robot who eventually leads them into the inner working of the caste were they find a great tree in the middle of the castle. As they approach the tree they see a large memorial stone that talks about the great people of Laputa and at the foot of this monument there are several flower that have been laid there. And to the children’s surprise it is the giant robot who is bringing these flowers to the memorial because we was created to protect this garden and in an iconic scene of the film this gently giant extends out his arm holding the smallest flower that he wants them to have. I felt that that moment in the film just really captured the true essence of life and a new. That even after this giant castle had been lost to the known world for centuries this one lonely robot still had hope and kept this castle alive. The second picture that I used is from the Ghibli film “Howl’s Moving Castle” in this movie there is a war going on and in one of the scenes the village that the main protagonist is living in is being bombed by one of the forces in this war. And as this scene unfolds we see complete carnage and destruction as houses and roads are completely demolished by these bombs and in the scene depicted in the photo, we see Sophie, our main protagonist, observing the carnage as it unfolds in front of her and see can’t help but cry for this senseless destruction that is going on around her. I just felt as though this display of destruction and absolute disregard for the lives of fellow human beings was a real textbook example of what destruction really is.