ellagillmor-blog - Tumblr blog

[ellagillmor-blog]

Myself the Artist

I am an artist. I believe I was born an artist and to the day I die I will make art. I come from a lineage of artists on both sides of my family, who pull from various mediums and genres of the art world that inspire me to always explore. I can’t recall a time in my life where I haven’t used some form of art as meditation, relaxation, academic aid, etc., because art has always been a huge part of my life. From kindergarten to 8th grade I went to a public charter school called “Creative Arts” where arts were integrated into almost every aspect of our classroom and out of classroom education. As a person who inherently loves to draw, creatively write, listen and make music, I was consistently supported by faculty and my family to pursue my creative expression. Over the last year or so I have picked up the habit of journaling. At this point, I have filled 4 moleskine blank page journals with drawings, notes, confessions, and overall, documentations of the my life. I find this routine an artist release as I feel I can hone in on how my right brain and left brain interact by freeing my hand to draw when words won’t come out of my mine. As a kid I was fascinated with realism and how artists were able to replicate something in photo realistic quality onto paper. The skill fascinated me as a bugging artist and over time my portraits looked more and more real and then suddenly, I grew tired of reality. My doodling in my journal has allowed me to free my mind by freeing my line work and letting myself explore rather than replicate. Art is the most important thing in my life right alongside my loved ones and I think it will always be there for me. I have included some images, a peak inside my current journal: 

[ellagillmor-blog]

Book Brain Map

My book brain map for my Writing 1 class, featuring some influential book covers from my life. 

[ellagillmor-blog]

Blog Post: Myself the Reader

When I think about my relationship with reading and my evaluation of myself as a reader I am reminded of the joy and the struggle of the activity. As a young kid, I started reading very early on and found excitement in picking up new books from the local library. My passion for reading pushed me to move on to harder material and by the time I was four I was reading chapter books like Harry Potter. However, once I started reading more fact based material like school textbooks and non-fiction material, I struggled to maintain focus and lost a lot of my enthusiasm for the activity once it became a task for school. I also realized later on in life that I struggle with dyslexia that as a kid I learned to work around without specific advisement and that probably contributed to my inability to retain fact based information like historical dates and titles of legislation. If I were to want to enjoy the leisurely activity of reading I would usually leans towards choosing a book of the fiction drama as I enjoy becoming immersed in a more fantastical world. However, I have enjoyed many bio-pics and pieces of non-fiction that I have been assigned in school in the past including biographies like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I think it is ignorant of me to think that reading could ever not be an important part of my future as literacy is so crucial to the modern human existence. As a filmmaker, I will have to read and sort through written material and will work closely will scripts, screenplays, and collections of source media for my projects that will strengthen my contributions. The reading skills that I am learning and strengthening in my college Writing 1 class are related to writing because to know how to write good material, you must read good material.

[ellagillmor-blog]

Where/How I Write

To be able to get into the right mindset to write I usually need to work somewhere other than my room but in someone else’s or in another indoor setting. I think I get distracted by the various possible activities I know I could procrastinate with in my own space, so I have adopted the habit of working in one of my friends dorms, even if they aren’t also working. I have found that I actually focus better around people who are doing something else other than school work when I am on the clock because I feel pressured by their ability and speed. I am a very slow writer with ADHD who constantly jumps around as my mind branches out my thoughts faster than I can type. But when I am surrounded by a little bit of chaos that doesn’t compare to the subject of my attention, I can truly focus on the mechanics of what I am doing that frustrate me. It also helps me to talk out my ideas with other people and especially my closest friends who understand the manner in which I express my thought more than anyone else and who can help translate them to page. Sometimes, however, my friends can distract me and I will need to isolate myself to collect my thoughts but as a person who is used to being surrounded by people constantly, I am able to go into my own world in the presence of many with more natural ease at this point. When I need to go into my own head space is usually at the being of my writing process during the brainstorming and outlining phase so that once I have a vision of what I want out of my work, I can then present it to my peers and make sure what I envision is understandable. I like to write out my initial ideas on the topic I am tasked to write about first, on paper, and then translate a more fully fleshed out outline on my computer than I can build the meat of the piece off of. 

Pictured above is my dorm room bed that I can’t get any work done in. 

[ellagillmor-blog]

Myself the Writer

When I was a kid, I used to dream of becoming a famous author. Throughout elementary school, I filled notebooks upon notebooks with short narratives, fantasy stories, script ideas, you name it. However, I did not always possess such a passion for writing, in fact, I used to despise it. Before my family and I realized I was dyslexic, I had a lot of frustration with writing and reading that I had internalized and made me hate the process. I learned how to get through the mundane tasks that strengthened my writing abilities in my formative education but it wasn’t till the third grade that I actually found the joy in the activity. That year a new teacher named Brooke was hired at my school and became my teacher. Brooke was the most kind, smart, and inspirational teacher I had come across at that point in my life and she pushed me to explore the creative aspect of writing that could and does bring me so much joy if I look past the digression with the technical skill. She let me ignore spelling and write words however they made sense in my head as long as she was able to get the point. Since that point on I have had a passion for creative writing, a passion that led to my future in filmmaking and storytelling in the artistic world as a whole. I think that your skill as a writer is always going to be a benefit because to know how to convey your views and your more importantly, your questions, is power and independence.

[ellagillmor-blog]

Blog Post--Favorite Films

For the majority of my developmental childhood, my favorite movie was Pixar’s Monsters Inc. I was so obsessed with the animated film, I would request that my mom put my hair in identical pig-tails to match the main character “Boo’s” hair. As I progressed through elementary school I claimed a strong bias to 1980’s coming of age stories like the narratives explored in films like The Breakfast Club and Stand By Me. Reflecting on this time of my life, I think as I came of age I gravitated towards media that reflected my experience. As a film fanatic, I am inspired by the masterfullness of Quentin Tarantino’s work including one of my favorite films to date Pulp Fiction. The 1994 release is a given classic and I fell in love with it’s experimental flow that has significantly inspired my creative cinematic explorations. One day, I hope to direct my own films of the drama genre, more specifically slice-of-life type stories of realistic mundane narratives. I want to create art that people can relate to and gain something from in the same intrinsic way I gravitated towards the cinema and gave my senses to the will of the artist for 120 minutes.

[ellagillmor-blog]

Album Analysis Example

For my Writing 1 class, I have been tasked with writing a concept analysis paper on the album of my choosing. To prepare for this assignment I researched other analysis’ of albums and came across an hour long interview with Tyler the Creator on his album “Flower Boy.”  While this album analysis is not a written paper, it caught my because of the interviewees extreme preparation for breaking down the work of art with an artist. The interviewer, Jerrod Carmichael, presents his ideas of the concepts and themes of the songs as parts of the system that makes the album function which helped me greatly in my own analysis and understanding. 

Here is a link to the interview: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrcwcMIYpQg

[ellagillmor-blog]

Blog Post #2: Music

I am a lover of all genres of music and have a hard time finding a sound I that I can’t appreciate. I was raised on classic rock by the influence of my parents and the influence of rap and hip-hop from my older sister. My dad is the biggest Beatles fan in the whole world and owns every purchasable piece of Beatles memorabilia that you can order on Amazon Prime. The Beatles will always be my favorite artists/band of all time because they were the greatest musical influences of our modern time and the writers of my favorite song “Hey Jude.” Here is a link to my favorite song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_MjCqQoLLA. My favorite current artists, however, are rappers Tyler, the Creator and Frank Ocean because I think they are some of this generation's most prolific lyricists. A few years ago, Tyler the Creator and Frank Ocean released a song together called “She.” I have listened to the song more than any other on my Spotify, Here is a link to the song “She”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sRcOrHNsx4. It’s one of my favorite of all time because of the complexity and detail of its narrative structure and the fact that the two rappers  were able to write about the horrors of sexual violence and infatuation with such elegance. For my rhetorical album analysis paper I have chose to analyze Frank Ocean’s “Blonde,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tT32VTll5M).

[ellagillmor-blog]

by me

[ellagillmor-blog]

ABOUT ME

Hi I’m Ella Gillmor and this is my blog I am logging for my college writing class. I was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 2000 before moving to California when I was a toddler. I grew up in San Francisco surrounded by it’s heavy influence on art and self-expression that inspired me to test out various mediums of art in and out of school. From a young age I was drawn to studio art, specifically drawing, and over time taught myself how to do photorealism. I also dabbled in music, partaking in an all female rock band that played small festivals as a kid. I discovered early on, however, that I am not a performer, but someone who enjoys the creation process of art more than the display of talent. At the beginning of high school, I picked up filmmaking in a revelatory derivation of photography. Filmmaking quickly became my main mode of artistic expression because films require the utilization of every artistic medium. Art aside, my favorite food are burritos but I am extremely biased to Bay Area burritos over every other kind. I am constantly listening to music and have a wide range of taste that includes practically every genre except country. My dad is the biggest Beatles fan in the world and raised my older sister on Abbey Road and the White album. He taught me that there would never be any artist or band like the Beatles every again and that there would also never be anyone like me. Currently, I attend UCSC and am majoring in Film and Digital Media.