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The Brief

I think after looking at the previous years works, it’s pretty apparent that the word “card” itself carries no weight in specifications other than the size of the object, and the thickness (i.e. relatively thin). Although in most settings “card” entails a piece of card, laminated or not, or potentially fully plastic, this is not the case - the material is pretty much completely open.

Doing a bit of a google of cards, the main conventional uses for a set of traditional cards tends to be games, and cardistry/magic tricks. There are lots of card sets designed for interaction - conversation starters - and of course business cards are another similar sized object.

One thing that stuck out to me while watching the videos was Ian Bogost’s take on fun - that fun emerges from the mundane, that it’s the breaking down of a rigid structure that we find fun. Golf, for example, is fun (for some) - because not only do you have to put a ball in a hole, but you have constraints, and its the finding ways to work around the constraints that we enjoy. 

I think that one of the difficult things in this project is finding a way to design the cards so that people will want to come back to them - but that’s definitely one of my aims. 

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Cards

I think the thing that fascinates me most and the thing I am aiming to recreate is the group camaraderie and rowdiness that games of cards can bring. From a simple game of Uno played in a hut in the Coromandel, played with 12 people hysterical and in tears over the remaining two clueless players continuing to play false moves, to the wildly violent Irish Snap in a group of 11 in form class in year 10, to a game of Spoons in the warmth of a hut on Mount Ruapehu with 14 other people resulting in sliding over the table to get the final spoon, to a game of Cheat at my 14th birthday party at 1am, cracking up but trying to stay quiet to not wake anyone up as we throw cards over each others heads and sweep piles of cards off the table - cards have been a crucial part of my upbringing. I’m not sure I can think of any friendship or camping trip that has gone without the touch of a good game of cards. 

At the moment I think I’m currently leaning towards creating more of a game of cards structured around the play aesthetic of fellowship - and specifically of the fellowship built on intense competition, rather than on storytelling. However, I also don’t want to be limited by my internal conceptions of what a game is, and will definitely be aware of trying to keep an open mind when brainstorming game ideas and talking to others.

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Thursday - or rather, Friday, 1am

I’ve just finished about half an hour of tinkering trying to make the animal sounds work. It would be fine without them, but it would just be nice to have another layer to back up our message. I was a bit tired and didn’t really want to, but I decided that if this is our final project for semester one, may as well go “all out” than to decide to not do this one thing, and then later be annoyed at myself for not doing it. 

(I can’t actually test if it’s working in the program because the webcam is taped to the walls at uni hahahahahahha but I’ve tested it with another small sketch just to check if the code works, which it does. When I get to uni tomorrow I’ll test if it slows the program down too much).

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Thursday - the deadline approaches

Today, I went from having code that could simply detect movement in the frame, to having code that could display footage that changed depending on whether there was movement or not. However, to sum up the 8 hours I spent on studio today in just one sentence would be to do it injustice.

To begin with, yesterday we had been beginning to have a bit of a crisis, not liking how people’s shadows interfered with the projection. We tried putting it on the ground, putting the projector on a TWall (CAREFULLY - please note we weren’t stupid enough to let go of the projector while it was up there) and eventually deciding to talk to Kim about how we could raise the projector higher so that it wasn’t covered by people’s shadows. Today we got a very tall projector stand, and set all that up in the morning, which was very satisfying and I’m glad we came to that solution.

I’ve been careful to test my code as I’ve gone along, building it up in small blocks to check that it does what it’s supposed to do before I add the next feature to avoid finding bugs at the last possible second. However I don’t think there was any way to realise (except with perhaps a bit more thought on our parts) how much of a toll trying to analyse 48 different pixels within a 160x90 pixel input footage for movement and then playing 48 videos on the screen would take. Funnily enough, even a computer with 16gb of RAM struggles to complete this task, showing about 1 frame of the film every 2 seconds, a wildly unimpressive feat. Even after simplifying this down to only have a 4x3 grid (so 12 pixels analysed and 12 videos played), the video still lagged ridiculously, to the point where it was pretty much impossible to see the impact people’s movements have on the images. This also put a halt on our plan to have the videos play slower where there was movement (as the videos were already playing so ridiculously slowly that there was no visible difference). I simplified the code down as much as I could, but it still was incredibly slow. We stressed for a bit, frustrated, and convinced that our project was doomed to look ridiculously outdated. In addition, the videos all started at different times, so there was no obviousness of videos changing when people moved.

However, I did a bit of thinking and came to a solution - the videos were basically just showing a single frame, like a slideshow of sorts (not playing the video at all) - so why couldn’t we just make a slideshow out of images in a folder and play through them? Moana screenshotted individually all the slides from the video, I renamed the screenshots and put them all in a folder and then rewrote my code. The frames played in sync (until you moved, and then it was INTENTIONAL that they weren’t supposed to move in sync) and they were much much faster. We trialled going back to the 8x6 grid for aesthetic reasons (easier to see people’s movements) but decided that that was too slow and went back to a 4x3 grid. It’s still a bit frustrating, and in a perfect world we would have incredibly high speed computers (or better code perhaps...) that allowed us to play videos in the 8x6 grid and slow it down, but as a proof of concept and with the resources that we have, I’m happy with what we have. 

There was also a few challenges in deciding what the images would actually do when someone was moving - the possibilties being very wide. However, we decided on two things - when someone moved in frame, the corresponding image would not go to the next one in the slideshow like all the other images, but it would stay on the same one, as well as the image getting smaller. This was our way of showing that if you move and take action, you can help to pause problems, and make them smaller - but that the second you stop making that effort, the world will keep on going downhill, problems will get bigger again and keep escalating.

We also solved the issue of where to plug in the headphones by deciding to use bluetooth headphones, so that people could put them on and listen to the soundscape while moving around.

We talked to Caitlin at the end of the day to show her what we had, and when she put the headphones on it immediately became apparent to us that what we thought had been self explanatory wasn’t - we would have to have something that explained to people that they should move to manipulate the screen, and potentially to explain some of the ideas that we were trying to express (although not too many - it pays to keep in mind that people don’t want to read a lot - as the creative director from the museum said - and that people can pick up on ideas very fast). Our plan for tomorrow is to do this, finalise the layout, and write up the a4 sheet of paper required for hand in.

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Video of the program I have working so far. In the top right corner you can see a (bit off) grid of the colours of the blocks in the frame. I will use this data of the colours in the webcam to detect motion in the frame which can then affect the videos that are playing. I’m pleased with the progress I have made today - although there was a solid hour that I couldn’t get anything working at all (and ended up asking Gayle to see her code as she had done a similar program to me). I didn’t copy her code, but it was easy to see that there were a few lines she had that I didn’t that had made all the difference. I definitely think it was a good call to ask for outside help - otherwise I would have continued to be frustrated.

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Final Project update #3

Upon going through to the year 2 and 3′s studio space to talk to Kim about the projector today, we realised we had stumbled our way to a sad fate - our idea of projecting things onto a wall with masks on it (based off people clicking on a link) appeared to be much like one of the year 2 group’s projects. Not wanting to seem like copy cats (although please rest assured this was not at all intentional on our part) as well as wanting to give people looking around 2 different experiences, we broke our project back down the main components we wanted to keep: the video, a soundscape, and something changing based off some user interaction. We also narrowed our key idea back down: the idea that people feel like they can’t change anything in the world.  I then remembered Donna saying we needed to be conscious of people walking in front of the projector, as well as the guest speaker Brian Knep and his Drift Wall installation, and we talked a bit more before deciding on our revised idea for the project. The video will play in a grid (basically a repeated video) so that in the beginning, there is a grid of identical square videos playing side by side. However, if someone walks in front of the projector (which they have to do to get to the headphones to listen to the soundscape), there will be a webcam that picks up their movement and the projected squares will rotate (so the ones that are roughly where the shadows are projected pause and rotate 90 degrees) - which will give the effect that people’s movements directly affect the videos - and therefore portraying the message that people CAN change the world and *turn things around* pun intended. My challenge now is to get this working - have the feed of the webcam affect the videos that are projected.

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It’s easy to decide that you’re doing the right thing, approaching things the right way, and just charge onwards with the status quo. I had been doing this with my idea of “leadership” while creating the buoy, and even partly in filming. I stayed within my own head and didn’t pause to reflect. However, my learning experience was twofold; I learned about my process (the need for external sources to reflect upon), and about the need to listen to others to hear their contributions to build a better team/product.

The experience itself was driven by the reflective journaling - and funnily enough, particularly by reading other people’s. From one blog, I learned that while I felt that I had been delegating tasks well and sharing responsibilities, at least one member of the group felt that they were doing worthless menial tasks which left little room for innovation. One of the reasons that the film project went so well is that people felt trusted to do their own thing - something Kanter explained in her paper “The Middle Manager as Innovator”. “If a company culture fosters collaboration and its structure encourages managers to ‘do what needs to be done,’ more of them are likely to be entrepreneurial” (Kanter, 1982). Not only this, but Kanter goes on to explain that there is great value in abundant communication within teams.

My poster, like my learning, is twofold. It expresses my learning that I need to constantly reflect upon the way that I act within groups. It also expresses my change from “leadership” (sharply telling people while refusing to open my eyes or listen to them), to fully listening, keeping my mouth shut (to hear others talk), and therefore having a much more constructive process of creation with abundant positive communication between me and others.

Reference:

Kanter, R. M. (1982). The middle manager as innovator. Harvard Business Review, 60(4), 95.

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a silly poster idea i came up with while thinking of things i have learned in ctec so far

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Final project: reflecting so far

Me, Jessica and Moana are working together on the final project (we were potentially going to have a 4th member to our group but it ended up working out that it’s just going to be the 3 of us). Already I can tell that this project is going to be better in terms of teamwork than the last one - having 3 means that everyone feels like their opinions and input is higher valued, and it’s much easier to hear everyones ideas. 

Over the weekend we came up with an idea of projecting interviews of 6 people (where they talk about what they think the future will look like) onto a wall of the rubbish the 6 people had collected over the last 3 days - intended to signify our passiveness in creating the world we envision. However upon explaining the idea to Donna, without her even saying anything it became apparent to us that the idea wasn’t going to work as it had in our heads and that it would look tacky.

Our own personally assigned unspoken “guidelines” we followed while discussing ideas for the project were these: we wanted something physical to utilise the opportunity that open studio provided (rather than a film). We wanted something that could split up into different sections for everyone to work one to pull together - Moana was keen on editing, Jessica on talking to people/interviewing/some other assortment of skills, and myself on physically crafting an object or programming something. And we wanted to come up with an idea that didn’t just touch on the surface level - we wanted something that genuinely could make someone think rather than just expressing something they already knew - although it was always in the back of our heads that the idea of changing people’s hearts through our project was impossible, and that no matter how good our intentions, people are resistant to change. And this was an idea that held us back a lot, but eventually sparked our idea (in combination with talking to Clint about our struggles to find an idea).

Our idea: upon focussing on a common ground of animals becoming extinct, we have all found frustration in how hard it seems to be to do anything about it. We are brought up in an age of problems that began decades before we were even born, and it’s difficult to know where to start. Our project thus far is in 3 parts: visual, sound, and physical. Moana will be creating a film with images of extinct/endangered animals telling the story of humans eradicating animal life over the centuries, intercut with someone going about their daily life. Jessica will be creating a soundscape to compliment this and to create a mood of hopelessness - or potentially of hope. I will be constructing the physical - at the moment, we are considering creating a paper mache world that will spin, and the film will project onto it - the film also looping once it’s complete, telling the story that unless we change our actions, things will keep going downhill. This display will be accompanied by a small sign explaining that we know that our efforts to change the world will be fruitless, so we won’t even try to give the audience the resources to change the world (but then we will include bit.ly links or something to link the audience to pages to donate to help save the orangutans, or donate to zealandia, or to explain other actions we as individuals can take). These bit.ly links will (if I can figure it out) go through a webserver that simply redirects users to these pages, and as it does so, it keeps track of how many people have visited the pages. Then the film (which will be running off processing somehow if I can figure it out haha) will react to this - so we will have 4 slightly different versions of the film/soundscape, that all tell a slightly different story, some more hopeful than others - the more hopeful ones playing when someone has recently gone through the webserver, and less hopeful when it’s been a long time since someone has gone through the webserver. The audience will be unaware of this however - all they will see is a video/audio that tells a tale of the past and future of extinct/endangered animals, that varies in hopefulness depending on the activeness or passiveness of the audiences that came before them.

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Film reflection

Final film: https://youtu.be/jYOD29iWvEk

I think that our film went very well and I’m pleased with the outcome. I’m a bit less enthusiastic about my acting in the film but there’s only so much you can do with a small amount of time to prepare. I learned a lot from the way that we structured our groupwork - I let the director of photography do their thing when we were filming instead of insisting on seeing every shot, and likewise for the editor. I think this was particularly valuable for editing, as it meant that when the editors ended up with their rough cut, I could watch it with fresh eyes and point out some things that they hadn’t necessarily noticed (at one point there was too many glitch cuts, for example). This definitely benefitted our project, but not just because of me having fresh eyes to look over it, but because by leaving everyone to do their own thing, everyone felt trusted and able to make their own decisions (of course, once we had all agreed on our end outcome) which resulted in people being braver and more likely to try different things than if they had to try and pitch it to the group before making the decision (some of the audio clips, for example, are a lot easier to just put in there than to try and explain). One bad thing about the project that I noticed was that for such a short/small project, it was hard to divide up the work evenly so that everyone felt like the work they were doing contributed to the end goal as equally as everyone else (for example, we had 2 editors, and that ended up meaning that one person did most of the editing). This definitely isn’t good for the creative process, and I think that next time if given the option it would be better to work in a smaller group. 

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Comfort zone pt 2

Oh, and I also for part of forcing myself out of my comfort zone for this final assignment have booked myself into a 7.30am AI thing next Wednesday hahahahhaahhaa. I’m sure this will be a struggle to get up for, and a struggle to force myself to attend because I won’t know anyone which puts me massively out of my comfort zone. I had wanted to go to a tech week event, but was likely not to just because of this exact fear (of not knowing anyone there, not of trying to stay awake) - and I most definitely would not have signed up for this event had I not had to for this assignment, but I guess there’s always gotta be something that forces you over the edge out of your comfort zone - which for me was this assignment. We will see how it goes!

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Comfort zone

One thing that I thought was interesting from intro today was the assumption that going to university was going out of one’s comfort zone. I’m sure that for some people it is, however I also am very sure that for a lot of people, going to university is exactly in their comfort zone - mine included. When I was trying to decide what to do this year, one of the options I looked at was a course called Dev Academy, an 11 week web development crash course. However I decided against that, in large part due to the fact that I was a bit terrified of the idea of going straight out into the world with only that as experience of the world. I fell back to university because that let me wobble on training wheels for three years. And nor was not going into further education really an option - after 13 years of education, the idea of not doing any further education was really just a bit of a stretch. Of course there were many aspects of university that placed me out of my comfort zone - meeting new people being one of the massive ones - but I don’t think that the act of going to university in itself is one particularly out of many people’s comfort zones. 

And I think that for a lot of students of many different disciplines, this really shows - people don’t turn up to lectures, don’t put 100% of the effort into their assignments, half ass everything.... they essentially act as though they came to university because they had to. I think that university has been painted by a lot of society as a pathway, as the only way to get to “a future” (which is a very narrow minded idea of a future really) and that it’s treated not as a choice, but as just the place that you go after high school, just like high school is the place you go after intermediate. But this is a very narrow minded way of looking at life - as one thing after the other, that leads into the next thing - not that I’m shitting on anyone who thinks this way, rather I’m critiquing this ideology perpetuated by society itself. And of course there are people who took gap years, and people who come to university to gain different experiences out of it than I do, and all these different very reasonable reasons why people might be out of their comfort zone and at uni, or having made a conscious decision to be there. And there are people whose parents forced them to be at uni. But what I’m trying to say, is that I think that a lot of people, myself included, have walked into uni as the logical next step after high school, as a comfort zone in terms of structure, without necessarily challenging the linear way that society views life, without actually thinking about what it is that we want to do NOW - rather than trying to figure out what we want to do in three years time and plan a degree around it - and without necessarily considering the fact that maybe, after 13 years of structure and conformity that what we need is to take a break, to do things on our own terms and figure out life for a bit first (which of course many people do when they take a gap year, which I have a massive amount of respect for people who do so).

I’m not really too sure where I’m going with this but I found it interesting to think about the idea that for me, university in itself hasn’t really forced me to go out of my comfort zone (although I would say that moving to Auckland and not automatically having a set of friends that I knew all through high school to retreat to, has forced me out of my comfort zone a lot).

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Reflection on filming so far

Over the weekend our group filmed all our shots. Doing the reflection for ctec502 made me a lot more aware of how overbearing I can be in a situation. Although I didn’t particularly write about it in my reflection, I definitely became aware of it after reading some of my peer’s reflections - not that they talked shit about me in particular, but there were some of the things that they said that I could definitely draw back to the fact that I hadn’t listened to people as much as I could, and my “leadership” had been more of a dictatorship rather than a democracy. During the filming I was very aware of this, and I think that the other thing that helps with filming is that it’s very easy to define roles - director, writer, cinematographer, editor etc etc. I felt that in the filming I was able to let the everyone do their own thing in their roles as I focused on my roles - writing and acting, meaning that I allowed myself to trust in the process and in my teammates. I think that this worked out really well - once we had decided on the idea as a group (which I think I was still a bit loud in declaring my opinions in), everyone was able to stick to their roles, which meant that the process went a lot faster as we all trusted each other to make the right decisions off the bat - which in turn meant that any disagreements or challenges that came up were a lot more meaningful in the way that they were addressed because it was no longer a matter of everyone feeling like their ideas were being done a disservice because nobody was listening to them. Rather, when there was a disagreement everyone took it on board and proposed ideas to solve the issue, properly listening to each other, rather than shutting each other down and trying to get our own ideas heard. 

The idea of everyone as an island is an important thing here, but I think that in some cases, everyone working on their own piece of the project without constant collaboration has its advantages - everyone feels that they bring value to the project, everyone feels trusted, and problems are addressed with the idea at the forefront, not people’s egos. During the idea stage of course, it was more of a collaborative effort between the group - although it should be noted that there was more input from half the group than the other half, which I attribute to loud personalities (myself included of course) not necessarily taking the time to actively listen to quieter personalities. 

I think that in the film context, it’s a lot easier to use these roles than in other contexts. For example, in our previous project it was hard to define roles as there were no predefined roles for our project type - it wasn’t like there was a guide on how to make a buoy as a team. So what are we supposed to do in looser contexts? I think I still have a lot to work on in terms of not constantly trying to be the loudest in the team - there’s a lot of value in being a leader who makes sure everyone is heard despite some people being quieter than others, rather than a “leader” who just tries to get everything done their way - which is an error that I made the previous project. And I think that maybe once everyone in a given team is given the opportunity to be heard and is contributing, then people begin to naturally designate themselves to roles and take leadership roles up themselves too, which is an incredibly healthy thing for a team and the idea that they are shaping.

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Reflective Journalling

Just after semester break, we were asked to get into groups of 15 to discuss ideas that we had for our next project, as well as any research that we had done over the break - and our general predictions for what 2050 might look like. The majority of my group from the previous project stuck together, not really too keen to move tables, and we ended up joining with most of another group, as well as a few other people.

The session began with us sharing some ideas as a group and chatting about what we thought the future might look like. Then Yvonne came and spoke to us about what we had been thinking. After she left to talk to the other groups, we talked for about 5 more minutes before someone said (nearly verbatim) “right, that should be enough to present to everyone”, and everyone dissolved into our smaller groups as we began to chat more loosely about things unrelated to the original topic.

The whole experience was a bit frustrating for me. It’s incredibly difficult to communicate in a group of 15. I enjoy being able to contribute to the conversation, particularly when it’s something I’m interested in. Being in such a large group made it difficult for me to feel comfortable with sharing my ideas - for example, most of the group hadn’t done a lot of research over the holidays, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call what I did “research”, I had read most of a book speculating about the future (mainly because it was interesting, with the added bonus that it was relevant). However I was hesitant to share this fact with the group for some reason. In the past I’ve done quite a bit of discussing with my peers about this phenomenon - of wanting to appear as though you haven’t put in the work, when you actually have. It seems to me to be pretty common among most people in high school (and apparently university too) - people want to seem effortless, whether they’ve succeeded and want people to assume it was sheer talent, or whether they’ve failed and would rather people assume it was because they didn’t care (not because they weren’t “good enough”). In my case, I would place myself under the “perfectionist trying to appear effortless” category (which is no news to me).

Upon doing some research on the topic, I found an article called Perfectionism and narcissism: A meta-analytic review, which outlines basically exactly what I had suspected; “nondisplay (sic) of imperfection [is] predominately (sic) related to narcissistic vulnerability” (Smith et al., 2016).  Vulnerable narcissism is defined by Smith et al. to be “characterized by a defensive and insecure grandiosity which leads to feelings of worthlessness and negative affect, as well as a hypervigilant readiness for criticism or failure (Cain et al., 2008; Pincus et al., 2009; Wink, 1991).” This strong link between “nondisplay of imperfection” and vulnerable narcissism in practice translates to people being unwilling to share any moments they weren’t perfect - for instance, while working on something. It’s unfair to call everyone narcissists, but the majority of people do have narcissistic tendencies, and a lot of the time these come through in school/university settings. So why is this?

From my point of view, vulnerable narcissism is simply frustrating. Seeing a group collectively deny the fact that anyone put any effort into something is pretty disheartening (although I’m well aware I do the same thing). While perhaps they all walk out with their egos in tact, it seems to only add to the bar of perfection in the room - you don’t want to be the only one to put in effort, for fear that you seem to actually care about the course that you will spend 3 years in and a minimum of $14000.

However, I suspected that it does more than simply add further desire for perfection to the room, and decided to do more research. Research Advances in Conformity to Peer Pressure: A Negative Side Effect of Medical Education discusses the concept that when confronted with an idea, medical students in particular “may be inclined to agree, in an effort to maintain a positive affiliation” (Tanya Beran, 2016). While Beran’s research pertains specifically to medical students, she does mention the fact that it also applies to students in other fields of higher education. To paraphrase Beran’s conclusion, the consequences of this conformity is that students are more likely to take on information without thinking about it, and therefore have a lesser understanding than if they had questioned it.

To bring this all back to the original experience, this research not only applies to me not wanting to necessarily shout out the fact that I had read the book, but also applies to everyone who was a part of the discussion. The fact that the discussion split up shortly after Yvonne left can be explained by the fact that nobody wanted to show too much interest in the subject (whether this was because they genuinely had no interest, or just pretended so, is hard to say). In addition, the fact that we had groups within our larger group that we felt more comfortable in was a bad start. While in the beginning we felt more comfortable being surrounded by people we were comfortable with, having the option to retreat to these groups was detrimental to the conversation - in part because of perfectionism. It’s easier to share ideas within smaller groups, and being in a group of 15 was to our detriment too, as in such a large group there are a very limited number of people actually speaking, which means that more people are just sitting there and not actively participating. This leads to a echo-chamber effect - those who disagree don’t speak up because they want to seem likeable, so the same people just keep bouncing the same ideas around until everyone is convinced that everyone else thought that in the first place.

It’s hard to speak up when you disagree, for fear of being wrong, or just of being different. It’s a lot easier in hindsight to say I should have just said exactly what I was thinking, but in reality that’s something that I’ll have to progressively work on. As a university course we need to become more okay with people being honest about what they think, not just about their work habits but about their opinions too; we need to take the shame away from putting hard work into what we do. However this issue is a lot larger than me deciding to become more truthful about my opinions. It’s more about how a lot of us millennials/gen Z are forced into a culture where we all have to be perfect all the time, and we all have to be better than the people next to us. A lot of us have been brought up through the school system where we are compared with the people next to us (although of course this has been happening for decades - it’s nothing new), as well as the internet where some of the best aspects of the best humans are showcased online - the 12 year old who did such and such, the 14 year old scientist who cured cancer... we’ve been born into a rat race, and it’ll take more than one person deciding to share a few more of their opinions in class to change that. But what I do think will help is having these conversations with people, where we are blatantly honest about what we really think, and discuss the pressure that is being placed on us to conform and be great - because I think that most of us feel it. However effortless someone may make something seem, however little care they seem to place on their work, just about everyone in this generation (if not everyone ever) is poisoned with this idea of some mystical ticking clock that we have to beat, and some number of friends and amount of praise for our work that we have to earn before we die. And I think that rejecting these thoughts, beginning to share our thoughts despite what people might think, is the key to sparking creative thoughts that wouldn’t have emerged from conforming.

References:

Martin M. Smith, Simon B. Sherry, Samantha Chen, Donald H. Saklofske, Gordon L. Flett, Paul L. Hewitt (2016). Perfectionism and narcissism: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Research in Personality, 64, 90-101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2016.07.012.

N.M. Cain, A.L. Pincus, E.B. Ansell (2008). Narcissism at the crossroads: Phenotypic description of pathological narcissism across clinical theory, social/personality psychology, and psychiatric diagnosis. Clinical Psychology Review, 28, 638-656. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2007.09.006.

Beran, T. (2015). Research Advances in Conformity to Peer Pressure: A Negative Side Effect of Medical Education. Health Professions Education, 119-23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hpe.2015.11.004

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Film project

Yesterday halfway through studio we had to present our ideas to the class. However this was more difficult for us than we had anticipated; on Wednesday we had come up with what we thought was a solid idea - a mockumentary made in a very low budget style that explored ideas of gene splicing and growing animals that had previously been extinct (basically like Jurassic Park). However, as we came up with more and more gags that we wanted to include in the film, it warped more and more and began to become a mish mash of concepts that would take very clever scripting and much much longer than a 5 minute film to express, which was something that we realised when talking to Donna yesterday and trying to explain our idea. To an extent, we went back to the drawing board, trying to narrow down the specific areas that we wanted to focus on. However, we didn’t really have enough time before having to present to nail down an idea. During presenting we had a lot of interesting conversations which inspired a lot of thinking, so we decided to come back together as a group today (Friday) to nail down an idea. Being able to get together and just chat about ideas uninterrupted for an hour was really great, and we’ve nailed down our idea now and have a really strong idea of where we want to go which will be good for starting to do the storyboard and script on Monday.

[andreaclarkbct-blog]

Taika Waititi on creativity

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL71KhNmnls&feature=youtu.be

Good old Taika from a 2010 ted talk.

“To stand out I would have thought I would have had to ~invent~ movies” 

- I think this was really insightful and hit home for me because there seems to be a lot of pressure on having to be THE BEST, the top of your game, inventing something new, before you get to be recognised as someone important/worth paying. But I don’t think that’s the point. I don’t think you have to change the entire world before you get to have the privilege of being acknowledged as someone who has done something important. 

I think really the crux of the matter is that it really hit home to see someone who, 8 years later, is so so massively successful, but at the time was really nervous about being worthy enough to be on a ted talk, who didn’t necessarily feel like he was in the right place, felt a bit of imposter syndrome perhaps. There’s something really strong about the idea that someone that successful feels the same way. 

A couple more kind of great quotes:

“I happen to be a filmmaker but it’s not my job. My job is to express myself and to share my ideas and my point of view. It happens to be that I’m using filmmaking right now but throughout the years I’ve done lots of different things...”

“Art. What is it? Is it important? I have no idea: move on (...) Can it save the environment? No, it can’t, unless it’s made of food. Can it bring about world peace? Only if it is actual world peace.”

Overall, definitely a video that’s worth a watch