A thousand origami cranes

An ancient Japanese legend promises that anyone who folds a thousand origami cranes will be granted a wish by a crane. Some stories believe you are granted eternal good luck, instead of just one wish, such as long life or recovery from illness or injury.

Between the Folds

"Everything folds." That is one of the many messages this story conveys. In the film Between the Folds we discover that there is more to origami than just folding paper into a crane. It really is an art-form unlike any other and has a lot of truth behind it as well. I personally was intrigued by how much origami can be related to human life.

As humans we always feel the need to change things. Origami is a good analogy to this topic. Rather than other art forms, origami is just a square sheet of paper and that is all that is needed. No scissors, paints, molds, clay, adding to anything or subtracting from anything etc. All you are doing is changing the paper to form something else. And what you change it to does not have to be realistic. The first thing to most that comes to mind when speaking of origami is the paper crane or other animals. But many spectacular artist in the film have shown us that there is more than your typical paper crane. Yes, there is a thing as abstract origami and it truly is wonderful art. One artist believed that it is harder to do something simpler (i.e with smoother lines) than something much more representational. What defines right and wrong; art and not art?

Something that really stuck out in my mind was the discussion of emotion in origami and frankly in other art forms as well. As our techinical skills become more and more highly evolved so does origami. Much more elaborate paper folds can be created, but we lose something in this more high tech process. Too much technique can take away the emotion. It takes away the art-form. I believe this to be a surprising parallel to life. When things become too planned do we lose our spontaniety? Our natural human choas? Focusing too much on work and getting by, we lose the emotion and passion. We lose art. With all this growing knowledge of the world is it possible we need a limit before we are over-run by its effects? Lose our emotional touch with the universe?

An interesting film that surprises you about the art of origami.

What we have learned in New Works

In our New Works class, we have experienced the aspects of all the clusters in our school. I am a theatre student and I have been exposed to many different aspects of other clusters. One example was when we had to make our instrument out of recyclable items. My instrument was modeled after a guitar. I had make sure my instrument had pitch, a resonating chamber, and was of course sturdy or usable. All these things easy to any music student but probably difficult to any other that has no musical background. Another example of what I have learned is lines and color in the visual art matter. I learned things such as cross-hatching or primary colors. I discovered that I use these things in my own life all the time and it doesn't just deal with visual artists. I even learned a little bit about my own cluster as far as lighting the stage. New works is a class where I can learn about other cluster and even my own.

                                              

Our movie. (TEAM ONE)

Our group's movie was about a girl who is followed by a pumpkin she carved the day before, in order to get revenge. We took the view from a different perspective: the pumpkin's. I thought our plot was interesting and could have been better if we could have filmed more. Sadly we only had limited amount of time. I think our movie could have been improved by using better camera angles and possibly a tri-pod. Our shots seemed shaky or didn't capture the entire scene as good as it could've been. As far as acting goes I thought it wasn't bad, but that is the viewers opinion. Maybe we could have used clearer actions. The contrast quality could have raised. Because our film was in black and white little things were hard to see or catch. Our set was limiting considering we could only use hallways or un-occupied spaces. Other than these minor things I thought our movie was one of the best out of the class. We had our many disagreements, but I enjoyed my group none the less. :) team one!!

New Works Project.

For our class in New Works we formed into groups and made a short film based on a quote or saying, our group received. In my group we had difficulty creating an idea based on our quote. Once we jumped over that hurdle it wasn't difficult at all. I've never made a film before so this was a new and interesting experience for me. Being in theatre and loving film, I enjoyed imagining up a great story line.
       Some things that could have made this better was possibly a little more time to film and edit it. It would have been nice if we could have edited our film in class together as a group. Many of us wanted to put our input in, but couldn't without going to one's house (something we all weren't able to do due to our schedules). Because we all had different schedules we were not able to film outside of school as much, so we had to fit all of our filming in school and make sure our story line stayed in school. All of these things were no one's fault though.
       I enjoyed doing this project and hope we can do more like in the near future.

Space Project Review

I thought my project was pretty good. There were things I could have done to make it better like memorize it or performed it better. I think I spoke about space to the best of my abilities and put it to rhyme pretty well.
The project I thought was the best was a couple of them actually. I enjoyed all the dancers performances. The one I really liked was Joan's project: personifying space. I liked the way she really made space seem like a person. She made it have emotion and thought grouping. All the space projects were great and unique in their own way.

Nu-Works Classes {space}

Going to the different classes for nu-works was an interesting change from what we normally do. We explored the different aspects of space and shared our experiences. First we explored space with our bodies; we acted on a "stage" and explored space with our movement. Then we explored virtual space through the internet by creating a blog. Finally we explored the space in our imagination by creating a safe environment in our mind and talking about what we saw. I enjoyed all the different ways of finding space because some things were new and I had never done before. I hadn't thought of space in so many unique ways. We now have a to do a project for nu-works explaining what space means to us or how we interpret space. :)