Readings

For my reading this week, I checked out http://blog.art21.org/ to see what I could find. They had a link to something about film, so I checked it out.

So, it turns out that the blog wasn't exactly about film, but it was related to film. The blog was mostly about power, but the people who made the little film about it wrote a little about their own experiences making their first film of interviews. They mentioned how some things seemed awkward and it took a lot of patience from the interviewers and the interviewees to get the movie done and in good quality. Isn't it interesting how we think something will be a piece of cake, and then we actually do it and discover that it takes a lot more than work than we thought? I know that's happened to me before. But I think they did a great job making the little clip about power.

I thought the content of the clip was interesting. It was about a teacher who was having his students draw pictures about power, leading up to a painting at the end. People have such different views of power. The students made drawings about parents, guns, lightning, wisdom, etc. It was neat to see these pictures develop into ideas for paintings. A lot of the paintings looked really good; I was surprised. I'm not a very good painter, so I that's probably why I was surprised. A lot of them did really interesting things with lines and colors to add different effects to their perceptions of power.

I think the point behind it all was to show the students what kind of power they can have with their artwork. A lot of them really got to explore their minds in search of what they think of as powerful and how to portray that power. But a lot of them were surprised at how well their own paintings turned out. It makes sense though, that they would look better than perhaps something just painted without any forethought. Once again, I'll bring in a comparison with writing. If you make a couple of drafts of a paper, I think you can surprise yourself with how well it actually turns out. Each draft gets better and more definitive. The same happened with these students and their artwork. I think the teacher was showing them just how well they can do, what kind of power they can wield, when it comes to their own art.