Fireside Chat - Artist Statement

Artist Statement

I had a great experience doing the Fireside Chat. I was worried at first because I am not normally the kind of person who puts himself out there by doing performances and such, but the way that I chose to do my presentation allowed me to be very conversational about it. I decided to do my chat about the importance and usefulness of ice cubes. I covered the history of ice cubes, including going over the inventor of the modern ice-maker, John Gorrie. I also talked about the benefits that ice cubes have around the home, including for clearing up the carpet dents while rearranging living room furniture. Ice also has construction applications, by using an ice cube to smooth out a line of caulk, thus preventing the caulk from sticking to your fingers and making a mess. During the presentation, I accidentally skipped over one of the slides, the one that talked about the health benefits of drinking ice water. If you drink an 8 oz. cup of ice water, it takes your body about 20 calories of energy to warm that water up while it’s in your digestive tract. Thus, if you drink your eight cups of water each day, you are burning approximately 160 calories, simply by warming it up. I also included a personal story about why ice is so important to my family, and talked about when our ice-maker broke, and how it miraculously fixed itself after my wife refilled the ice bucket with ice she had procured from my brother’s house. It is truly a miracle, and I don’t know how that trick worked, but all I know is that we have ice now.

I chose to do my presentation in the style of a TED talk. It might not have come across that way, because I certainly didn’t practice this presentation as much as the TED presenters present their talks, but I wanted it to be informative, while at the same time presenting the audience with some useful data about ice and its many applications. For my visual media, I filled glasses with ice and water, and took pictures around the house, trying my best to make the images pleasing to look at.

I had a very good time on the night of the Fireside Chat presentation. I found it very interesting to hear about some of my peers’ beliefs, ranging from the overuse of makeup to procrastination. Susan Sontag, in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others, talks about how all memory (or ideology) is individual. Our own experiences and beliefs influence our art and our presentations. Many of the presentations were artfully done, and communicated their beliefs well. Some were very on-the-nose about their beliefs, as was my presentation. I feel like I didn’t leave any room for error about how I believe that ice cubes are extremely useful. I feel that I took a subject that, in and of itself, could be very humorous and light, and turned it into an informative presentation.

Concerned Citizen Documentary - Jeremy Christensen

Artist Statement

We decided to do our Concerned Citizen documentary on Jeremy Christensen. Jeremy is involved within the community by playing video games for Children's Miracle Network hospitals. Each year there is an event called Extra Life, wherein gamers get together and do a 24 hour gaming marathon, and they get sponsors to raise them money, which is then donated to the Children's Miracle Network.

Jeremy got involved with this charity after Jac, his son, was born with a hole in his heart. They were scared, but they took them to Primary Children’s hospital, where Jac underwent heart surgery when he was still under a year old. The operation went well, Jac made a quick recovery. This was a very eye-opening experience for Jeremy and his wife, who were first-time parents. They didn’t know what to expect, and they certainly didn’t want anything to happen to their little boy. After the whole operation, Jeremy found out about Extra Life by listening to a podcast, and, feeling grateful for the healthy recovery of his son, found the perfect way of giving back to those who are in similar situations. Thus, Jeremy got a team together and has been participating in Extra Life for the past 5 years now.

Jeremy could have just thanked the doctors and gone on his way, but instead he decided that he wanted to give back. The Extra Life charity as a whole raised over $5 million dollars this year, thanks to the generous support from sponsors and other charitable individuals. Jeremy was already a self-professed gamer, and so the combination of raising money for a relevant charity and the opportunity to play video games for 24 hours made the idea appeal to him all the more.

We really wanted this documentary to focus on Jeremy’s motivation for participating in Extra Life, and that is why the story about his son is right at the beginning. We didn’t want this to be an advertisement for Extra Life, but to go inside Jeremy’s head and to see why he was doing it, and specifically what he was doing about it. I found it very hard to boil down the entire story into less than 3 minutes, because there is so much more to say about the topic than that. But I feel that what is in this doc makes it personal and we as viewers understand exactly why Jeremy is doing what he is doing. I thought that it was appropriate to show Jeremy playing games with Jac, and to wrap up the doc by having some shots of them playing games together and wrestling and having a good time. Because, at the end of the day, the documentary is really about the relationship that Jeremy has with Jac.

In ARLENE GOLDBARD’s article on human culture, she states at the end that, “In the grand scheme of things, a [thing] like this is minuscule. Yet just such human stories... provide the true test of our capacity to inhabit the future.” This reminds me of Samwise’s speech at the stone window in The Two Towers, where he says, “...there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fightin’ for.” While Jeremy himself raised only $500 dollars this year, which may seem like a drop in the bucket, it is still a valuable contribution to those who are in need, and will provide a better future for someone else’s child who is in need.

Group Members:

Steven Bills

Travis Clark

Game for Change - Internet Activism

Here's my game: Internet Activism

"Liking Isn't Helping" - Part of a sobering ad campaign by Crisis Relief Singapore

Artist Statement

I decided to choose the social issue known as “Internet Activism,” or “Clicktivism.” I chose this social issue because I feel that there needs to be more awareness about how harmful it can be to the real activists who are actually “on the ground” fighting for a specific cause.  Rebecca Teich, in her article titled “Three Big Problems With Facebook Activism,” states that, “Most people jumping at the chance to use the hashtag #bringbackourgirls had little to no knowledge of the history and politics of the country in which they obliquely advocated foreign intervention. And they [had] no clue that many Nigerians not residing in America are opposed to US intervention due to a history of the negative effects of US foreign aid and meddling there." She goes on to state that, "the viral social issue of the hour floods Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook with content that looks, on the outside, like deeply felt social activism. But for all the pathos running rampant over news feeds and blogging sites, there is little depth to speak of, and virtually no change afoot in the real world."

Jill Luke, who authored the article titled "Liking isn't helping: How Facebook is Killing Student Activism," wrote that, "...writing a tetchy status update is a very different kind of political engagement to going on a march or even the old Amnesty approach of letter-writing. Because when you get angry on Facebook, nothing actually happens...liking, posting and commenting makes you feel like you’re doing something without actually making any difference whatsoever."

In the game that I created, the player can do a number of things. One of them is to do the homework that they have looming over their head, and another option is to go cruise Facebook. If the player chooses the latter, they are immediately confronted with an opportunity to "Like" a page that will help out some social cause in a 3rd world country, or to go and do something else. Statistics are presented that discuss the growing rate of poverty in 3rd world countries, and again, the player is given the opportunity to "help," or to get distracted with something else. There are a few outcomes that can occur based on the input from the player, but this game is not intended to be an all-inclusive commentary on the affects of Internet Activism.

Chimamanda Adichie, in her TED talk "The Danger of a Single Story," talks about the dangers of boiling down a major social issue into one thing. When we narrow our focus so much, we often tend to start missing things that are going on outside our scope of narrow-vision. Many (not all) people online aren't being activists for social change: They're being clicktivists for social gain. Rebecca Teich touches on this when she states that, "…issues become labels of political alignment and lend an appearance of social awareness attached to a digitally curated self. They become a means to the end of social gain, rather than of social change."

References

Rebecca Teich Article

Jill Luke Article

Crisis Relief Singapore Image

World Building

Our world: a world where batteries were invented but technology inhibited their ability to become pocket sized.

In other words, all batteries are car battery sized.

Technological Impact

As an electrical grid still exists, massive technological advancement still occurs. Devices such as laptops and smart phones still exist (the factories in which they are produced are run on a power grid) but portable capability, due to battery size, has not been achieved.

This is manifest in many ways:

Portable phones, namely cellular phones, are widely avoided due to the incredible weight of its necessary car battery sized power system.  They do exist in homes, but are plugged into a wall. An occasional individual can be seen lugging a large backpack or briefcase in which a battery is connected.

Laptops are not used in classrooms on a frequent basis. This because most universities and schools cannot afford the massive quantities of power outlets needed to support thousands of laptops.

Portable photography and videography is still entirely analog. Even many film cameras are not used due to the need for a large, cumbersome battery. Analog cameras are relatively large and expensive.

Homes are laden with power outlets. Only wealthy individuals, or middle class individuals, can afford this luxury.

Social Impact

As an electrical grid still exists, modern communication, i.e. text messaging, facebooking (social media in general), still exist and are used frequently. The technology most largely impacted by battery size is photography and its subsequent ability to mold, shape, and meticulously create a self image.

Because the available portable cameras are so cumbersome in weight and size, they are used much less frequently. With this, individuals no longer feel the constant need and desire to create a fantastic life for themselves.

They live where they are through their own lens, not through an artificial lens, making images with others in mind.

Objects have meaning because personal interaction is crucial.

A third party experience (an individual, a camera, then a viewer) becomes obsolete and the world is viewed through the first person. The world is not a construct of pixels and code, but a physical, tangible, powerfully meaningful experience.

However, on the other hand, the magnificent ability of easy record keeping would be greatly diminished.

In Design Fiction, Julian Bleeker states, “Objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, or imagined or expressed. They are like artifacts from someplace else, telling stories about other worlds.”

Without photographs as records, new form of record keeping would have to be developed.

But in the end, as is often times concluded, human ingenuity is the motivating factor in all things. Systems are human, and humans are systems.

Group Members:

Mark Leavy

Steven Bills

Aaron Hinton

Bryce Bolick

Textual Poaching

One aspect of my identity that I wanted to explore was my “blue collar” working identity.  You may be wondering, “But you’re a college student! You don’t have a blue collar job!” In addition to attending school full-time, I also have a full-time job working at a radar company to produce their marketing videos. This is out of necessity, as I have a mortgage, and it isn’t going to pay itself! Thus, I need to work in order to avoid losing my house. This is why I feel that I identify with the blue collar workers in the photo that I chose to remix.

The photo that I chose to remix is the famous 1932 photograph commonly called, “Lunch atop a Skyscraper.”  The photographer is unknown, but it was taken on September 20, 1932 on the 69^th floor of the RCA building, and it shows eleven men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling 840 feet above the New York City streets. The men in the photo aren’t wearing any safety harnesses, which is possibly due to the time when this happened. 1932 was at the height of the Great Depression, and men would commonly take any job they could in order to feed their family, regardless of safety issues. I noticed that the man on the far right of the frame is looking at the camera with a unique expression on his face, and so I chose to do the manipulation on him. The manipulation that I made to the image is that I added a safety harness and safety rope to this man, but none of the others, and then I added the OSHA logo to the photo. OSHA stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and it was formed in 1971 to, “assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training, outreach, education and assistance."  If OSHA was around in the 1930s, then this would NEVER have happened. They are very strict about safety regulations, and sometimes inconvenience people in order to keep them safe.

I feel that I am a safe person in general; at least I try to be. When I was younger, I was that kid who didn’t want to try the back-flip on the trampoline, because I thought it’d break my neck or something, so by me adding the safety harness and rope and the OSHA logo, I feel that I’ve connected the image back to myself. I don’t go over-the-top when trying to be safety-conscious, but I don’t want myself or others to get hurt doing something, either.

In the article “How Texts Become Real,” the author states that, “…such intense interaction eventually leads many fans toward the creation of new texts, the writing of original stories.” In 2012, director Seán Ó Cualáin directed a documentary film entitled, “Men at Lunch,” that tried to identify the men that were in the famous 1932 photograph. In doing research about the film, I came across the quote, “In the era when the Empire State Building & Rockefeller Center were built, developers factored in one dead worker for every twelve floors.” This is a horrendous fact, and further points at the fact that working conditions in the 1930s were extremely dangerous. Hence, the safety harness and OSHA logo in my remix.

Webspinna Battle

Webspinna Artist Statement

One of the things that we were striving to show in our Webspinna Battle was the disconnect between the baby-boomer generation, and the millennial generation. We have found that there are many things which these two groups don’t particularly agree upon (such as technology proficiency, embracing new things, etc…), and we chose to emphasize the differences in  music during our Webspinna battle. Steven represented the millennial group by listening to 1990s Pop Hits such as Brittany Spears’ Hit me Baby and N’Sync, among others. Parker represented the baby-boomer generation by at first criticizing the millennial music, and then coming  back with his own music. This music battle went back and forth until the millennial realized that there indeed was something cool about the older music, at which time he switched over to a 1970s hit song, September, by Earth, Wind and Fire. The baby-boomer then threw the millennial a drink, which they then use to toast, having reconciled their differences, and the battle was over.

This experience is not that far from being true. One day I (Steven) was doing homework in my bedroom, and listening to music, which happened to be Earth, Wind and Fire. My dad walked by and poked his head into the room and asked, “What are you listening to?” I replied, “Earth, Wind and Fire. They’re cool.” My dad, surprised, said, “You do know that this is the music from my generation, right? These guys were popular when I was in high school.” I replied, “Yeah, and I think it’s cool.” My dad just laughed and left the room.

During our Webspinna Battle, we created something that had never been created before. The combination of music and audio that we pulled from the web was used in a specific way that had never been done before. Jonathan Lethem, in his article “The Ecstasy of Influence,” states that, “Blues and jazz musicians have long been enabled by a kind of “open source” culture, in which pre-existing melodic fragments and larger musical frameworks are freely reworked... Today an endless, gloriously impure, and fundamentally social process generates countless hours of music.” The open-sourced culture that he speaks of is very available with the internet, where anyone can grab anything and create something totally unique. This is constantly happening today, and a good example of this is the website “Everything is a Remix.” This website, curated by Kirby Ferguson, is the host to a web series that explains how everything we view, read, and take in is a remix of something else that has already happened. We reuse the things that we know work, and make them into better things, and into “worse” things.

Group:
Steven Bills Parker Davis

What follows is a list of possible songs I will use for the Webspinna battle.

Start at :00:00:59: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-u5WLJ9Yk4#t=57

Start at 00:00:32:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68ugkg9RePc#t=32

Start at the beginning.

Start at 00:01:06:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Eo-KmOd3i7s#t=66

Begin at 00:01:51:00: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=6M6samPEMpM#t=159

And, to be played last:

Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQf9dtrc26A#t=156

Glitch Art

Medium Specificity - Filaments

Artist Statement

The medium that I chose for this assignment/experiment was photography. Photography has been around for over a hundred years, and I set out to capture the essence of what photography was. In order to begin, I had to boil down to the brass-tacks what made photography photography, and the answer that I came up with was light. Light is the most basic element of photography, for without it, the camera (and by extension, us) would not see anything. There would be nothing to sculpt, nothing to expose, and nothing to admire about a photograph.

In terms of the function of taking a photograph, one of the things that sets photography apart is that when you take a photo, it freezes a specific moment in time, never to be repeated again, but captured in the form of a photograph.

In the “Understanding Comics” article written by Scott McCloud, he walks the reader through what makes a comic a comic. He uses the phrase “sequential art,” meaning that when taken as part of a sequence, the art of the image is “transformed into something more…” With photography, there can likewise be a sequence of images generated, with each image capturing a specific moment in time.

Wynn Bullock, one of the masters of early 20^th century photography, explored light using photographs. Among his famous “ColorLight Abstractions,” we can clearly see an experimentation process that shows the essence of what photography is and can do. Of his abstract photographs, Bullock has said, “I love the medium of photography, for with its unique realism, it gives me the power to go beyond conventional ways of seeing and understanding and say - This is real, too.”

Bullock discovered a side to life that many people don’t see, and that is the moment in time that gets captured by a photograph. In my experimenting process, I photographed the filament of a light bulb, first with the power off, and then with the power on. I used a 100mm macro lens, and I got as close to the bulb as I could before the camera couldn’t focus anymore. I personally really like the photos of the bulb when it is lit. While we all have seen a lit up light bulb before, I feel that I have captured something that is not seen every day. We usually turn away quickly after looking at a light bulb for a second (if that). What the camera provides is the ability to get in close to the bulb and freeze the moment in time while the power is passing through the filament, thus lighting the bulb.

I feel that I have captured, in a way, the essence of photography, in that without any light, we wouldn’t be able to make any photographs at all.

Historical Story

Artist Statement

Our Historical Story takes place during the 1914 Christmas Truce, when the fighting briefly stopped between the English and German soldiers and they celebrated the holiday together.

The main protagonist is Private Frederick Heath. He was an actual English soldier in the trenches during World War I, but he was not a famous person. Not much is known of him other than his name, rank, and that he was a writer of some sort. His letter depicting his experience of the truce was one of our sources. We decided to use this letter as a frame for our story and flash-back to the truce. During the flashback, the English and German soldiers play a friendly game of poker while getting to know more about each other. The story ends with each side having gained a new respect for the other, even as they resume shooting. While staying true to the 6-page limit, we feel that there is a good balance between the descriptions of the action, the character dialog, and the other action.

The story and setting are historically accurate, as far we we know and researched. The soldiers actually traded many things with each other, including buttons, photos, letters, patches, etc… We only had the space to include pudding and a photo at the end of the story. We don’t have any specific research that soldiers played poker during the truce, but setting the story with poker (presumably something they all knew) as the background made it a less-threatening environment in which they could interact and enjoy themselves, a foil to the backdrop of war.

The change in Private Heath within the story is subtle, but it’s there. In one sense, when the story begins, Heath has already undergone the change, as is later revealed in his letter home to his parents. In his real letter home, he wonders if they could have stopped the war had they been given enough pudding to share. He goes from fighting the Germans, to wondering if they could have been friends under different circumstances. We decided to juxtapose those sympathetic thoughts with the orders from his senior officer to charge that the enemy, who just hours before, were their friends.

Another depiction of this event is the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s 2003 Christmas Concert, “Silent Night, Holy Night.” Narrated by Walter Cronkite, it tells of the truce with words and music. The finale of the segment is an all-male rendition of “Silent Night.” At the beginning, two men are singing a capella: one in English and the other in German. It’s a beautiful blending of two languages that symbolizes the blending of cultures, and we wanted that communion to come through in our story. We also wanted to communicate the bittersweet irony of a moment of peace surrounded on both sides by war, the way that Persepolis juxtaposes childish innocence with adult fears and politics. As Private Heath and others have reflected, the Christmas Truce had the idealistic potential to become a true peace, but the reality was war and the magic of Christmas ultimately came to an end.  

Historical Sources:

Brown, Malcolm and Shirley Seaton. Christmas Truce. London: Pan Books, 2001. Print.
The Christmas Truce: Operation Plum Puddings. www.christmastruce.co.uk. Web. 9 Apr. 2012.

Group Members:

Steven Bills

Sarah Foley

Process Piece - Making Bacon

For our process piece, we decided to record the process of somebody making breakfast. This breakfast just happened to include bacon, which, as we all know, makes scrumptious sizzles and pops as it cooks, so much so, that you can almost taste it while it’s cooking.

We tried to vary the distance of the microphone to the subject in order to record the best sound. For instance, the bacon was sizzling and popping very loudly, so we didn’t put the mic as close as, say, the person washing their hands at the end. We didn’t do this perfectly, however, because when the person gets the pans out of the cupboard and sets them on the stove, it’s a very loud “clank!” sound, and we should have backed the mic off of that a bit.

We recorded over 14 minutes of audio for this Process Piece, and only ended up using around a minute and  a half, meaning that 12 ½ minutes went unused. Not that the audio in and of itself was bad, but we chose to just use the process of cooking the bacon and preparing the breakfast. We chose to assemble the clips in a logical order, so that it would be easy to identify what was happening in the process at any specific time. We feel that all of the sounds that we used are “everyday sounds,” meaning that most people would be able to identify what is going on at any given moment.

Our process piece is a very observational piece, what Broderick Fox calls “direct cinema,” with the uninterrupted actions are the focus. There is no human voice-over, dictating what’s going on. It’s up to the listener to observe what is going on, and to then make the proper connections to the visuals in their minds.

More than anything we just wanted to make something that sounded interesting. We wanted to take regular, everyday sounds that everyone is familiar with but focus in on them and make something deeper. We recorded over fourteen minutes of audio; however, we meticulously went through each clip and selected only the parts that we felt were interesting to the ear. So even though our sounds might be everyday sounds, our first aspect of stylization is that we specifically chose to not include uninteresting sounds. Another way in which we stylized our process piece was by using the vinyl sound of a record throughout, in the background, almost as if we’re listening to a record of somebody cooking breakfast. We thought that it was a good way to give the piece some poetic texture, in an effort to “seek new ways to represent reality,” as Broderick Fox calls it in his book on documentary media.

Group Members:

Steven Bills

Aaron Hinton

Round Robin Assignment

What follows are the five tiny stories:

1)

There once was a boy named Ted. Ted was very very tired, so he went to bed.

2)

And after Ted’s eyes were shut, he heard a noise that he knew not what!

3)

He sighed and closed his eyes. He had been locked in the basement for 8 years now; he could only speculate what was going on above him.

4)

He called for his friend Maurice, a little grey mouse, to spy on the family upstairs (and bring back some dinner). Maurice declined and told him he was too needy.

5)

A family of five sat down to their dinner, they could hear banging up stairs but ignored it. It was just the Michael's family, stomping as usual.

Artist's Statement

In his essay entitled “Totems without Taboos: The Exquisite Corpse,” DJ Spooky asserts that “the remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script — anything else, simply put, would be boring.” During our Round Robin exercise, it seemed as if everybody was “flipping the script” as each group member continued the previous person’s story, this led to some drastic tonal shifts within the narratives. On the flip side of that, there are some stories where a thread is woven finely throughout all five of the mini-stories, making a (more or less) complete narrative, with each story complementing the last.

This technique of starting a story and then passing it on to another to complete is nothing new; there is a game called “Photoshop Tennis” during which one person introduces a photograph and then sends it off to another person to add a visual element to it, who then passes it on to another person to edit. This goes on indefinitely, unless a specified  number of edits has been pre-agreed upon. Examples of this include:

“The “text” is never inanimate — it’s the human imagination that gives shape and meaning, the elixir that breathes life into the golem.” In some ways, pieces of art that we create and “finish” are never really done. Unbeknownst to us, somebody could pick up that piece of work that we created and add to it until it is unrecognizable from the work that we created initially.

Another art form that can be remixed is music. Famous artists create and release music that then gets into the hands of the remixers, who then make the music their own by adding and removing musical elements. By doing so, they restructure the song in a way that was never meant by its original author.

In our Round Robin storytelling experience, each of the tiny stories stand alone. However, combining five of the stories together creates a collage of different ideas that all spring from the same seed. Each contributor used a different vocabulary to try to make sense of the unusual and limited information they were given. In a way, one artist’s choice to use “the hardiest of folk” to describe a group of people that a previous artist described as “notoriously rowdy bunch” differed in verbal texture as much as water colors and oil paints do. Thus, even if all of us tried to preserve the tone and content of the story, it would inevitably change over time.

Our individual pictures added an extra element of expression and another opportunity to leave our mark on the story. We had varying styles and a wide variety of framing to suggest plot. As mentioned earlier “The remix, as always, is what you make of it. Juxtapose, fragment, flip the script”. On occasion, an author would create a juxtaposition, fragmentation, or script-flip between the picture and the text, thus creating an odd precedence in the mind of the next author. Close-ups versus wide shots, color versus monochrome, and other such aesthetic decisions all added something different to the mix.

Group Members:

Morgan
Jesse
Steven
Bryce
Helen

Bill Draper Forum Response - Extra Credit

Today was a special forum with Bill Draper, an executive at Warner Brothers. This was very educational and informative, and made me think very hard about having a future in the entertainment industry.

            Mr. Draper talked about how working in the entertainment industry isn’t an 8-5 job, it’s a lifestyle. He talked about how he had to turn his phone off for the forum, or else it would ring off the hook. He talked about how he can be whisked away across the world at the drop of a hat, and how he won’t be able to see his family for weeks and weeks at a time. He also discussed how his wife and family deals with his long hours, and he even told a story of how his wife and kids went on a cruise to the Mediterranean without him, because he had work obligations. He talked about how it’s a very tough industry to be in, and how you need to work hard, have lots of talent, and to have a thick skin. These things really resonated with me, because I love my family, and I love spending time with my wife, and I want to be around for my kids. It doesn’t sound like Mr. Draper is around much. I wonder if he has missed seeing his kids grow up, and to hit their milestones and to attend their baseball games…?

            Another thing that he talked about was the money. He talked at length about how “it’s all about the money,” or, “it’s all about the bottom line.” He mentioned that it’s called “Show-Biz,” and not “Show-Art.” When he said that, I felt a ripple go through the audience, and I thought that was a very interesting statement, because here at BYU we focus very much on the artistic aspect of the film industry, and not so much on the business side of the film industry, or the production side of things. I feel like that was a stinger for the TMA program, coming straight from the “horse’s mouth,” as it were (a high-level executive with 30+ years of experience). He also talked about how BYU had gotten rid of the BFA program, and how that was, in his opinion, a mistake. He felt that film students weren’t ready for the entertainment-industry world when they graduated, and even called BYU students “sheltered,” which we are, to a degree. 

I very much enjoyed learning from him, but I don’t think that I could live that life myself.