#seniorseminar

[elisealoha]

Do you know that the way you hold title to your home makes the difference between paying $0 tax or hundreds of thousands of dollars for your heirs when you pass away?🏡❤️🤓 @evhonolulu #seniorseminar #sres #realtor #caring #for #seniors #kupuna #ohana & #aloha #myhawaiilife ✨ #knowledgeispower (at Honolulu, Hawaii) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0b7b2dDSU6/?igshid=o8kvf9ajiwoe

[fiarts-blog]

crosssection update: SA397

crosssection is going to be documented in a small moleskin journal using ZINK photo-paper through the KODAK Print-o-Matic. There is a strict timeline that has been up in my studio and will update if deadlines begin to switch. 

My favorite part about the project is spending more time to be able to really consider how i am setting up the different aspects of the studio exhibit and how i will be showing my artworks. There’s something very precise about the creation of a studio exhibit and the process is difficult but rewarding. 

[captain--of--my--soul]

Senior Seminar: Week 9 (11/2)

I just submitted the sixth draft of my script.  After meeting with Jon and Martha this week, they’ve articulated the concern that the project, as it currently exists, would not be feasible due to its many moving parts, specifically the multiple, intricate set designs.  I completely agree with them.  I was having difficulty trying to write over the summer as I was thinking about character arcs, development of themes, and the intricacies and nuances of plot, while also trying to think about the feasibility of the actual shoot.   So I decided to just write, get the character arcs and themes down, and then worry about the feasibility.  I’m running out of time though.  With this most recent draft, I wanted to finish the draft so that I could go back and edit it.  That’s my plan for the next week, so that the next draft will be readable for the class.  I’m starting to think about shooting.  I watched Paul Schrader’s First Reformed the other week, and the minimalist production design and cinematography really appealed to me.   As I edit and write this next draft, I’m going to try to develop better ideas of shots.  Attached are some shots from First Reformed.  

[captain--of--my--soul]

Senior Seminar: Week 7 (10/19)

This is my first post in three weeks and it’s due to the fact that I haven’t moved forward with my script up until this week.  The reason?  I’m my own worst enemy.  I am currently working on my sixth draft of the script and the fourth idea.  Last I posted, my script was concerned with sisters Dee and Jay, two young women who are traveling along a modern Underground railroad, attempting to escape from some authoritarian, patriarchal force.  I wrote a couple of pages which I thought established the world and introduced the characters, but stopped as they arrived to a house that acts as a respite for the sisters.  In my mind, the man in this house was going to be just as evil/ bad as the authoritarian force.  This man would feel entitled to some sort of sexual favor from one of the sisters because he’s helping them.  He’s a covert ally, a fake feminist, and a fake nice guy.  His feminism is merely a tool to get him laid and perpetuate his own toxic masculinity.  As I was starting to create this character, the Kavanagh confirmation hearings were reaching a crescendo.  As I’m reflecting on this now, I realize that this should have inspired me.  It didn’t.  I sat down with Jess at the beginning of Week 5 to try and plot out the different beats of the plot and set down the wants and motivations of each of the characters.  After the meeting, as I started to right down the motivations for this male character, I somehow got it into my head that this character was me.  This, paired with Kavanagh, put me into a self-hating depression for about a week.  Every time I tried to write, I’d get into a monologue of self hatred and break down.  I finally decided to scrap the idea and start over.  In my summer notes, I had an idea about a malicious, evil world as a character unto itself, so I took that idea and tried to run with it.  Because I would still be filming during the dead of winter in January, I tried to keep the same dead setting.  Instead of dead trees on the gap trail, I started to visualize the crossroads at the Quarry Chapel in the middle of winter.  I wrote out two pages and came with this idea that there’s a young woman coming home to a changed and dangerous hometown.  But even with a new idea, I wasn’t able to break my slump, so I decided to go home for reading days during week six so that I could write out a full draft.  The seven pages that I ended up writing took me a painful eight hours, but I finished it.   This past week I’ve been trying to write out a step outline with each beat for this new idea.  Going forward, I’m going to write out a complete draft so that we can read it in seminar.  

[captain--of--my--soul]

Senior Seminar: Week 4

This next round of writing and editing was much more productive.  I actually felt like the words were spilling out of me and I was able to imagine myself in this world.  I’m currently at 4 pages, which might be a problem, considering the fact that I am aiming for about 8 and the limit is 20.  But fuck it, having for then I need is better than not having any at all. 

I still need to introduce this white male character, so I’ll have to figure him out this weekend.  I really want to have him in this script, mostly so that I can bash him.  In my head, he might be trying to help these sister out, but he’s the kind of “nice” asshole who things he deserves something in return.  So I’ll have to figure out how to fit him in.  To be honest, I’m kinda losing interest in this plot, I don’t see any actual themes in it yet.  But I’m optimistic that future edits will create a deeper script.  Also at this point, it seems to be more of a thriller than an actual horror story.  ughhhhhhhhhh

I actually found it easy to write their dialogue.  Because there’s an older sibling dynamic, I was able to think about how I would interact with my sister and how I would want to be protective, even if I didn’t have the immediate answers about how to get to safety. 

[captain--of--my--soul]

Senior Seminar: Week 3 (albeit half a week late)

Writing is always so daunting to me.  I always know how I want a sentence or paragraph to roughly sound, but when i start typing the words, it always falls short.  That blinking cursor on any writing program (including this one) is one of the most existentially frightening things of the 21st century.  You’re trying to bring something into existence, pull it out of the deep recesses of your imagination and put it to words in an eloquent way, and that fucking line just sits there, blinking, taunting you, daring you to stop it from blinking.  I’ve been back at school for a month, and the habits I had last semester (wake up, run, eat, work, go to class, etc.) seem as foreign to me as Cantonese and as distant as a childhood memory.  If the making of a film is a labor of love, then the habits one must develop in order to push back against the anxiety and writer’s block so as to get into the flow is a motherfucking tribulation.  I stared at my computer screen last night, too afraid to write a word.  I finally got in bed around 2 and wrote a single line in ten minutes.  This morning when I woke up, it took me half an hour to write a paragraph.  But then, it started to just spill out of me.  I only wrote a page, but I was able to turn of the judgemental, editing voice in my head.  Sheer force of will clearly doesn’t work.  What worked this morning was that I allotted two hours to just write, and whatever happened, I’d send it in.  Going forward, I’m going to schedule time in increments of single hours to write.  Of course, none of this is novel or groundbreaking, but being able to blow the rock away always feels cathartic.  


Another reason for my writer’s block over the past couple of days was my worry of poor representation.  I had an image of two people walking down a path in the woods in the middle of winter in the Midwest, so I started to ask myself who they were and where were they trying to get.  I thought that the instinct for survival would be a good motivator for these two characters, so I started to think what they were trying to survive.  Maybe they were trying to get somewhere where they could be safe.  Maybe they were running from something.  Then I thought, what if they were on a modern Underground Railroad.  Then my imagination really started to get going.  Something has happened and martial law has been declared.  The current administration is no longer satisfied with undocumented immigrants, they are not going after anyone who doesn’t look like they’d belong on a 1950s sitcom.  These two characters are sisters and are Hispanic or Latina and they evading the authorities who would like to round them up and send them to a camp somewhere to the south.  Because they are American citizens and were born here, they cannot be deported, so they would simply be rounded up and kept separate from “the real America.”  I then started to complicate things: maybe the older sister is able to pass as white, while the other cannot; what would that do to their relationship as they attempt to survive this ordeal?  I wanted to make these characters interesting and real, but how could I possibly do that as a white male from a privileged background.  How could I do these characters justice without proper research.  Am I brave enough to attempt to even do this?  


I met with Professor Sherman yesterday to go over another script for another class and I brought this issue up with him.  I wanted to explore toxic, white masculinity in the other script, and Jon had the idea to apply that theme to this.  I was already planning on having a white male character who shelters the sisters.  He would appear to a white savior, but then I’d subvert expectations and have him be a coward who sells the sisters out, and they have to fight to survive and save themselves.  But I think I’ll go a bit deeper now.  


At some point this weekend, I decided to make my film a horror film.  If I’m going to make a movie, I want to practice some important aspect.  Obviously, one needs to be able to build tension in horror.  The second reason is I think I can have my big idea condensed down and subtly articulated in some way within the horror genre.  I don’t want to come off as preachy, so I can now slip some lesson into the story.  Plus, I’ll be able to have a monster.  I want there to be the authorities as a monster, this faceless regime that lacks humanity, something like the Sheriff in O Brother, where art Thou?, but now I can also do something else.  I can have this white character who shelters the sisters be a white liberal from a privileged background.  But even though he’s attempting to help out, he’s a different kind of bad.  I’m thinking along the lines of Kavanaugh here: I’m a friend to women, I have a daughter, a wife, and female friends.  Yes but that doesn’t mean that you aren’t sexist and don’t have a toxic monster within you that causes you to do painful things to others, especially women.  Developing this character is where I’m going to go from here.  My aim is to have two more pages written and have this character fully flushed out by seminar on Friday.  


Attached are pictures that show what I’m thinking about for the sequence on the path in the woods. 

[captain--of--my--soul]

Senior Seminar: Week 2

When it comes to my thesis script, I have a general idea of what I want.  In my head, I know what I want the world to look like.  I know what themes I want to explore.  But the actual characters? plot? an actual physical script? fucking forget it.  Martha told me last week that I need to stop thinking in terms of the macro and focus on the micro.  Who are my characters? what do they want? what’s their backstory?  For some reason, it’s easier for me to drift off and imagine a world with a history, with conflict, with a society, with a culture.  I can see the world, but it has always been difficult to think up a backstory for a character that I find believable.  Maybe I’m my own worst critic.  Or maybe I don’t want characters who are flat and one dimensional. 

I biked from campus to the Ariel Foundation Park in Mount Vernon the other day, based on Martha’s recommendation, to try to give myself a chance to get the juices flowing in terms of developing some characters.  But the entire bike ride over, I could only see the characters DOING something.  I can’t get the image of two woman walking alone down the gap trail in the middle of winter out of my mind.  As I was biking along said trail, I noticed how much life and foliage there was around me.  In a couple of months, all of these green that was swallowing me up, that gave me the impression that I was passing through an organism rather than a forest, would be dead and gone.  As I biked down the straight path, I kept trying to keep my focus on the furthest point, which when paired with the fast forward motion of my bike, created a similar effect to that of the dolly zoom.  My mind kept drifting towards Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” and a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot that I saw once.  The dreariness, the death that surrounds, the sense of foreboding, it all came flooding to me.  BUT WHAT ABOUT THESE TWO WOMEN?  WHO ARE THEY?? 

My out of shape, dumb ass didn’t realize how far Mount Vernon really was from campus, and how tiring a 6.5 mile bike ride would be.  So my mind started to focus on why these women were on the gap trail.  Are they hiding from someone?  Are they wanted by some authorities?  Are they trekking across country through the woods to avoid someone?  Maybe they’re trying to get to the tower just like I am.   But for what purpose?  Are they meeting someone?  My mind went to the black market.  Are they gunrunning?  Are they buying drugs?  Selling drugs?  Trying to smuggle themselves to somewhere?  Maybe they killed someone, ditched them by the Kokosing, and are trying to leave this area because they’re Wanted.  So why did they murder this person?  Were they a traitor to some underground group and had to be dealt with?  Did they owe them money?  Maybe this person did something to them, something awful. 

I want to do justice to the characters, so I keep dissuading myself from attempting to write something out.  How could I possibly do them justice?  As a white guy, do I have a right to even try to craft two characters who I could sympathize with, but never really empathize with? 

[courtneylynnjacobs-blog]

Introduction

This blog is going to be a space for me to reflect on the progress of my senior exhibition over the course of this year, and it will give me a chance to talk about other artists and their influences on my work. The major theme of my work is Grace, which in the Christian tradition is a concept which refers to “God’s unmerited favor of sinner”. In other words, Grace is love and forgiveness and it is bestowed upon us despite the fact that we are not deserving. Through my senior project I hope to communicate the emotions and transformations I experienced on my journey to accepting Christ as my savior and realizing his unconditional love.