Month: March 2023

Upon hearing that a director from CUT was coming to speak, I was immediately excited since I have been a fan of the CUT youtube channel for a long time. The videos have always not only been humorous, but also very insightful and telling about the people featured, and I think the main reason is the straightforwardness and vulnerability that the prompts entail as well as how willing the guests are to participate in them.

After watching a few more of their videos, I had an idea about an interesting topic that could be used for one; though it may not be as deep cutting as some of their other videos. I was thinking that an individual would have to match somebody’s pet to their owner. Often times, people say that an animal mirrors not only the personality of their owner, but also how they look. I think that the way people would decide whose pet is whose would be pretty funny and insightful from their reasoning.

The way I think it would work best is by having 2 or 3 guessers and about 7-8 pet/owner pairs. The guessers could interact with each of the animals first for a few minutes and then afterwards meet all the owners one by one. From then on, they could make their choices of who is paired up with which pet. 

In general, most of the assignments and projects that I have completed at SCCA were pretty smooth sailing. I am not to say that all things went perfectly, waters have been rough at times, but I have rarely had to nail in wooden planks against rushing waters to keep a project afloat. However, the most daunting setback I have had was for my final last quarter for the Lighting Techniques 1 class.

The final was to produce 2 images in a similar vein, one being a still life and the other being a portrait. They had to be cohesive to one another as if you could see them in the same promotional campaign. My idea for the duplet was something pertaining to a back to school campaign. My portrait was going to be of my younger cousin in hip new kids clothing, kind of like a gap kids splash page on their website. For the still life, I was going to photograph falling cereal in an aesthetically appealing way into a bowl of milk. 

I did my still life shoot first which went through with little to no complications, yet the following day, as I was shopping for kids clothes for my cousin to try on, I received a call from his older brother telling me that “plans” had arisen causing them to not be able to come any more. Upon this news, I realized that my plans for the shoot were foiled almost entirely, the shoot day was that night and I didn’t know any other children nor did I feel comfortable asking any random kids to come with me and take their picture.

I decided to do only option I could go for, which is just use a different person as my model and have them act like a child. Of course the vibe of the final was now going to be completely different, but the shifting tone actually led to something that I really liked and am proud of. The use of Jake acting like a small kid going to school rather than a real child gave a large overarching humor to the whole image which would have been absent if the original proposal had gone through.

I think the simplicity in the shape of fruits, just being oblong circles and spheres, allows them to have an extremely pleasing aesthetic. For this image, I tried to emulate the depiction of fruits by baroque painters, where the fruits are cast in a very soft and warm quality of light. For creating the image itself, I made sure to frame the fruit with a decent amount of negative space around it. For lighting, I used one large strip box to create a daytime window look at the light add flagged off the background and parts of the table to add more depth to the image. I also used a small white card to fill in some of the shadows on the off-key side of the fruit.