Another Week
Update #3
My goal from last week was:
- Follow my schedule
I can honestly say that I almost met my goal. I was supposed to do a couple different photo walks and one Valentine's themed photoshoot, but I was unable to do them. I'd chalk it up to be a pretty great week with all things considered. So let me walk you through what happened this week.
Monday
I decided to hike A Mountain after a meeting I had for work. It was cloudy and windy so I didn't really want to go on my bike ride. I was listening to my current favorite podcast series from a guy named Thomas Frank who founded College Info Geek. The specific podcast I was listening to was "Getting More Done in Less Time" which you can listen to here www.collegeinfogeek.com/zachary-sexton/
I took a bunch of random notes throughout the podcast about task management and off-loading ideas somewhere. Thomas was interviewing a guy named Zachary Sexton who mentioned a quote from David Allen who said "your brain is for having ideas, not storing them." This really resonated with me and I quickly wrote down a note in Google Keep about planning out ideas.
The conversation continued into emails and how to manage them. A really helpful tip that I've been trying to follow since hearing it is to touch an email one time. If the email has an action associated with it, you pull the info out and put it into your calendar or a task manager.
I'm pretty sure I listened to at least two other College Info Geek podcasts after that, but this one really stuck out to me.
Tuesday
Notice the numbers next to the RGB (0, 71, 171). Those values make Cobalt Blue, which just so happens to be my favorite color.
Started my long day with a guest lecture in my Mixed Realities class called "What is a Pixel." The lecture was really interesting and covered how computers see images as 2D grids of numbers. Each pixel in that grid holds a value that represents the intensity of light, or radiance, usually given as a value between 0-255. That's only for a black and white picture though. To get color, there needs to be a separate value, 0-255, for each of the RGB channels.
That was just the beginning of the lecture because we soon were talking about the way game engines render scenes by simply crunching a ton of number values that are all influenced by things such as the type of light source and where it is located, the game object's geometry, the material it is made out of, and where the game camera is facing. We went over Lambert's Cosine Law which explains how shading and shadows work. Basically, I learned that there is a lot of math happening behind the scenes for computers to understand how to display things.
Also, during class Griz tickets went on sale for his two nights at Red Rocks this summer, and I bought my ticket to see the night with the live band. I'm already seeing Griz with the live band this summer at Electric Forest, but I couldn't resist seeing the show at my favorite music venue back in Colorado.
Next up was my Media Installations class with one of my favorite professors. During the class, we talked about a documentary film by Lars von Trier called The Five Obstructions where he challenges experimental filmmaker Jørgen Leth to recreate a short film Leth had made five times with a different constraint each time. The idea is that constrained assignments yield better results.
In the coming week, we are going to have a soundwalk assignment where everyone in the class starts a recording in the same place and then takes a walk describing what they see and where they are going. These are meant to be done at different times of the day, and I think I am going to do mine at 1:00 am when ASU campus is nice and quiet.
In my documentary production class, we started by learning to wrap cables and wires using the over-under method which never made sense to me until then.
Our staff meeting went by really fast which was great because I was going to meet up with my friends Kyle and Kathryn to plan our Spring Break trip. At around 9:30 they came over with our other friend Dulce and we worked on figuring out logistics of where and when we were going to be and how far everything was from each other.
The current plan:
- Alabama Hills for 2 nights
- Point Reyes for 2 nights
- We have a different campsite each night
- Spend an entire day in the Muir Forest and then either Airbnb or book a hotel for the night
- Point Lobo State Park and then drive back some and camp somewhere TBD
- Finish the drive back to Tempe
We didn't finish the plan until after 11:30 pm and I still had to do laundry. I realized afterward that I could have put my laundry in while we were meeting, but the thought didn't occur to me until after they had left.
Wednesday
After class, I was supposed to go on a photo walk, but it was really cold and rainy so I decided to start editing my Lantern Festival video I shot. While working I decided to check the Honors Digest which is an email newsletter that the Honors college sends out with events and resources every day. I saw an event called "Love Your Thesis" which was clever because it was Valentine's Day. I decided that I should probably go to the event to talk to the advisors about getting a committee together for my Honors Thesis/Creative Project.
I will be making an experimental documentary focusing on the importance of preserving our natural soundscapes and the ecological effects that our anthropomorphic sounds have on our environment. The documentary, at the time of writing this, is going to be shot in standard 4:3 or 16:9 resolution, but will also incorporate full 360° video as well as ambisonic 360° audio. I will be interviewing people who are experts in this field as well as people who may not know anything about this subject. The goal will be in two parts.
- Educate people on the topic of acoustic ecology and soundscape preservation
- To see if this is a style of filmmaking that I'd want to continue doing
The Love Your Thesis event was really great because I was able to get the names of a couple people that I should get in contact with.
I went back to working on the Lantern Festival video and put together this short clip from about halfway through the day. Right before my two friends Kyle and Dulce started their obstacle course race, I handed Kathryn my phone and told her to record the race while I record it with my camera. I spliced the videos together and wanted to share it with them as a little preview to the rest of the video.
Like I said at the beginning of this post, I had to cancel my Valentine's Day themed shoot, so to make up for the fact that I wasn't going to see my friends that day, I asked them if they wanted to get dinner together and they quickly said yes. I think it might have had something to do with telling them they could see part of the video if they came. We ate at Thai Basil which is right across the street from where I live.
When dinner was through, I went back to my dorm and did my exercise routine for the day, worked on the video some more, and then went right into a bunch of homework to finish off my night.
Thursday
I had been waiting a week for this Mixed Realities class. We were going to find out our results from a quiz we had taken the week before. Soon after the quiz, our teacher had emailed the entire class telling us that most of us failed it, and we were going to do a review and walkthrough of it the following week. That day was today, and I had thought I did well on the quiz when I turned it in, but now assumed I was in the majority of the class that had failed. It was a complete shock when I found out that I got an 80% on the quiz. I was so proud of myself for getting an 80% and when I looked at what I had gotten wrong, I quickly realized that I had just plugged the numbers into the wrong line of code which wasn't a matter of not understanding the program but rather making a simple mistake in reading the code.
I felt great.
In Media Installations we got an introduction to projection mapping which completely blew me away. Watch the video below by the production company BOT & DOLLY and you'll understand why.
I worked at the front desk after lunch, and then had to deal with a situation that came up in my Senior Community Assistant role. I took a walk with a friend and then went and ate dinner. I'm pretty sure I was on my 10th College Info Geek podcast at this point, but I couldn't stop thinking about this situation. I decided I was going to go on a night bike ride even though it was in the low 60s or upper 50s, which is cold for us down here in Arizona.
Friday
I started my day by biking over to my car across campus, and then driving to the film studio where the film program is located. I needed to get registered in order to have access to the equipment pool so I could check-out gear for class. I'm co-directing a class documentary about an organization on campus called Sparky's Service Dogs, and we are planning on filming this coming week.
When I got back to my dorm, I spent the next three hours cleaning my room. It had been quite a while since I could see any part of my desk as it was covered in equipment, papers, food wrappers, and other random things. I got my room to look the way it did when I first moved in back in August and hopefully, it'll stay this clean til at least Spring Break.
Following my deep clean, I went on a six-mile bike ride around Tempe Town Lake and thought there wasn't going to be a great sunset. Well, I was completely wrong about that, because the second photo was my view from the dining hall patio where I ate my dinner less than an hour after the first photo was taken.
Later that night, I went to the ASU vs UofA Women's basketball game, where our team took home the win. I had planned to make my bulletin board for my floor after the game, but I had a feeling that I should check my online film classes to see when the next assignments were due.
To my surprise, I had two units of my online Hitchcock class due at midnight. I was able to quickly watch the lecture videos and post in the discussion board before attempting the two quizzes. I was able to get by with some background knowledge and luckily the quizzes weren't too specific on the two movies I wasn't able to watch.
Saturday
I woke up early to bike over to my car so I could drive out to Dulce's house where my friends were teaching Kathryn how to drive. She didn't kill us, so I'd say it was a success.
We had tickets to go see Black Panther at the new Harkins Ciné 1 theater in Goodyear, AZ. It has the largest screen in all of Arizona and has the Dolby Atmos sound system. I was completely blown away by the movie. The directing, the acting, the sound design, just about everything about the movie was amazing. Killmonger was definitely the best Marvel villain to date.
Kyle, Kathryn, and I then went this place called Veggie Rebellion, which is the first all vegan grocery store in all of Arizona. I bought some ethical bean coffee which I ground up in my Magic Bullet blender that has been sitting, unused, in my dorm since August. Thanks to my dad, I also have a great single serving coffee machine that I now use to make a cup of coffee every morning. One of my residents told me that I should start a coffee shop out of my dorm, and if I'm ever strapped for cash, I just might...
When I got back to my dorm, I had a bike ride scheduled. For some reason I decided to make it a longer bike ride and ended up doing a 12 mile loop which felt great, but made me late to an event.
Two Community Assistants got together and rented out a rock climbing gym for three hours as an event for freshmen. A bunch of us CAs took the opportunity to go climbing for free, and I was really excited to finally be back on a wall.
This is Abbie. She and Austen, the other CA, put on this amazing program. Thank you both for a great night. Everyone loved it.
Back in high school, my dad and I had a membership to a rock-climbing gym for about a year and a half. We went at least once or twice a week, and it was so much fun and I was in the best shape of my life. I haven't climbed since then and thought I was going to be terrible. I ended up being better than I anticipated and finished 4/5 routes. Some of them I finished quickly and some I had to hang out for a couple of minutes before continuing my assent.
After the event, I was outside sorting through my bag to find my keys to unlock my bike, and couldn't find them. Unfortunately, the gym had already locked up and I had to head back to the dorms and go check-out a spare to get into my room for the night. There was a mild complication that made that task a bit longer than expected, but I ultimately was able to make it back into my room for the night.
Sunday
My forearms were dead and it was difficult to open doors all day. I definitely want to get back into rock-climbing and hope to get a membership to the gym soon.
I had planned on doing a solo Sedona trip because I was done with all of my assignments and I had the entire day open, but wasn't able to go because I had left my keys at the rock-climbing gym the night before. By the time I got my keys from the gym, It was already after 12:00 pm and so I decided that I still needed to get out of Tempe somehow. I looked up the Superstition Mountains on Google Maps and tried to find a trail that brought me right to the base of the mountains. I settled on one, packed up my backup camera bag because my actual bag broke and is in the process of being replaced, and hit the road.
Once at the trail, I realized that I had left all of my extra batteries in my dorm and only had the one in my camera which was before 50%. It was fine though because I still had my phone which takes amazing photos. While I wasn't able to get every shot I had hoped for, I still got a bunch of shots I really liked. It was also nice to just be out in nature again.
My goals for this next week
- Continue to follow my schedule
- Do a creative photo shoot