Jacob Shafer

Honestly I’m having trouble thinking of one significant event in which I failed to live up to expectations set by myself or others. Not that it hasn’t happened, it’s surely happened more than I can imagine, but I guess I blocked those memories out or something. To be even more honest, I feel like I tend to avoid setting expectations for myself as it is. At best I just hope to wake up every day and function normally, eat decently, and take my dog out an appropriate amount. The expectations of others are a different story. I’m not entirely sure what people expect from me but generally I would say I don’t meet them. The most obvious example for would be the realm of schoolwork. Historically this has always been a struggle for me. In the context of this program, this primarily involves these very blog assignments. Naturally, as a student of this program I’m expected to complete all of the work assigned to me, and I’d like to meet those expectations. I care about the content and plan on completing the program, but at the end of the day my priorities involve gaining valuable knowledge and experience, as well as developing a professional set of skills which I can then choose to apply in a context I’m comfortable with. Analyzing corporate jargon and learning about leadership principles and networking are so far removed from what I expected to be doing that finding the inspiration to write about them has been challenging. I understand the value in those practices and the relevance some of the information has to people in this field, and I’m not knocking those who operate that way, but personally I’d rather be serving drinks at some giant tech banquet than be glad-handing for a job at one. But I do want to get everything I can out of this experience and actually graduate and achieve at least a modicum of success in life so like it’s whatever.

I like juggling. I’m not ashamed to admit it. I juggle, I’m a juggler. I learned how to juggle years ago and I’ve never looked back. I strongly believe that anyone can learn how to juggle, and the basic juggling pattern (three ball cascade) can be done thoughtlessly once you know how. But juggling is also hard, advanced juggling anyway. The kind of juggling that crosses the line between quirky party trick and kind of cool party skill. Unfortunately, ever since moving here and enrolling in this program, the amount of time I’ve had to practice has dropped like the first ^*club I tried to catch.

Enter the personal project. Inspired by the skate videos shown by guest speaker Andrew Nedimeyer, I decided this would be a perfect opportunity for me to produce my own- markedly less cool- juggling reel.

As far as a timeline goes for this kind of project there are a couple of things to consider; firstly, I need to practice. As a pretty experienced juggler; learning new tricks can take anywhere from an afternoon, to several hours over the course of a few days. The project would also entail putting together a more thought out routine to feature in parts of the video, so after learning the tricks I’d like to perform, I’ll also need to spend time perfecting the aforementioned routine. Ideally this all happens before even beginning preproduction because until I know what I’m shooting the best I can do is some location scouting. At best I can foresee the entire project wrapping up within a month or two, giving myself one month primarily for practice and basic preproduction, and around two weeks for shooting and editing. The actual production will probably only take a couple of days but this would give me some wiggle room to balance it with other schoolwork. The neat thing about this project is that it will cost me nothing. I have all the juggling props I’d like to use, a camera, and all the other production equipment I want just a conversation with Ed away.

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*Juggling clubs, not like a dance club. I recently learned how to juggle the bowling pin-esque props. Maybe I can use that to get into Berghain or something.

probably not

adjective

^*having or displaying a large amount of gusto

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Steve Hansen’s presentation was perhaps the most engaging to date, and for good reason. The depth of knowledge and passion which fuels his distinct visual style is both inspiring and intimidating. As someone who- perhaps naively- shirks from the idea of creating work for commercial advertising; learning about the seemingly endless applications of such work and seeing firsthand the amount of creativity it truly affords was super interesting.

For my attempt at the assignment I decided to go with something fairly simple and close to home for myself, this of course being the ubiquitous coffee bean. Apart from the subject I wasn’t immediately sure the direction I wanted to go. I’m not a barista and the prospect of manifesting a hot latte (which reads as slightly more appetizing to me than merely a pile of roasted coffee beans), within the confines of the studio seemed like a logistical hurdle I don’t have the brain power for. So I went with something familiar to me, and decided to feature my preferred method of brewing joe at home: the Chemex. This choice- and still attempting to resist the unyielding fist of capitalism- had me leaning towards going with more of a lifestyle feel, as evidenced by the lack of product labels. However I did end up composing it in a way which did leave a nice space for print. So like Chemex maybe hit me up.

Overall I had a pretty good time with this assignment. Being able to just zone out to some music in the empty studio and tinker with my setup turned out to be pretty soothing. I did run into some troubles along the way however; namely using strobes for the first time and dealing with some tricky reflections on the glass, but the practice it granted me with post production and manipulating lighting elements was invaluable and fun.

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^*not really

10.14.22

For my mash up project I decided to make a cheeky animation, inspired by some independent creators I’m a fan of. One such inspiration is the animation method I chose to try out, called rotoscoping. The process of rotoscoping is an animation technique that goes back to the early 20th century and involves tracing over video footage frame by frame. I’m not really an artist and I don’t have time for that, so I used a nifty little piece of software which takes one illustrated frame from your video and synthesizes the rest of the animation based on that. Add a backdrop designed masterfully in microsoft paint and you’ve got yourself- well maybe it’s an animated wallpaper or something.
This was a fun experiment and I definitely plan on using this process in the future, but it’s not perfect. The more information you feed the rotoscope software, the better a job it will do. If I were to redo this assignment, taking even more time to detail the animated keyframe or compositing several, would likely yield a cleaner result.

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