Final Revised

After a meeting with one of my graduate advisors, I have modified my story. I have taken out the aspects about the future. I have also taken out the "signal" aspects. I simply have an astronaut discovering a duck-family on the moon and eventually taking them back to earth with him. Its been a fascinating process creating this piece and getting to know this program. Getting to create a shuttle launch and a trip to the moon in one of my narrative pieces definitely wasn't in my plans before this semester began, but now with this after effects knowledge and the right tutorial video, just about anything is possible in there.
I tried to better focus just on the astronaut and making the ducks appearance more of a fun animal-in-the-wild type situation. The astronaut then just follows him back to his nest rather than there being some signal source or something.

Adelaide Paul lecture

I was very fascinated by Ms Pauls lecture. It was interesting to see her humble early graduate work and the slow reveal and escalation in quality of her most recent work. Not only an increase in quality, but a great advancment in focus of what she wants to make her art about. She was greatly effected by a trip to a place where euthanized animals are incinerated. Also an animal lover, this has become her life's work and cause. She adopts elderly unwanted animals and connects with them while she can. This also caused her to delve a little further into the medical side of things, so much so that she began drafting mechanical illustrations of the body parts of some of the animals, never having been an illustrator before that. She purchased prefabricated mannequins and then warps them to her liking to make them look like the specific breed of animal she wants. She then covers and stitches them with various leathers, sometimes sewing a glass eye or two into the pieces. Often pieces are shown decapitated to emphasize the beauty of their imperfections. I greatly enjoyed her lecture and as a graduate student was fascinated by the continual progression of her work.

Ellen Weissbrod's A Woman Like That.

Ms Weissbrod showed the college her documentary film about Artemisia Gentileschi. 10 years in the making this documentary contains compelling subject matter about a female painter in the renaissance/baroque era. Her story is one of an early powerful female icon. Unfortunately this piece suffers from having been made over a span of time that includes the lower end of video qualities. It is interesting to see the progression of the video quality improving, but it suffers from a nostalgic camera operator doing unnecessary moves and transitions because of the non-hinderance of the lightweight DV Cams. We're often spun into a new scene which may degrade from the elegant quality of the subject matter. The artist herself was as nice as can be and surely spent a long time working on this. Unfortunately, craft-wise, we can tell that she is an artist that happened to make a film and not a filmmaker making a film about art. Again though ill reiterate that the subject matter was fascinating, but being someone in the film field, i was constantly distracted by the dated methods used.