Crash Course lesson plan

A Crash Course in Story Telling

• Story telling is an ancient and powerful communication tool that communicates the truth of life rather than the mere facts. Often taken for granted, there are formulas, techniques, themes, and craft to successful story telling.
• What is the importance of story telling?
• The structure of the lesson is basic and can be tweeked for any audience. This particular lesson will be geared to an audience of artists and future teachers.
• The first step of story telling is to exert control of your environment. Do what ever you need to be comfortable. The story teller is in charge. A story is then needed to "activate the space". This gets everyone into the mind set and leads into an explanation of "story", the mutiplicity of story, the scope of story and the difference between the truth and the facts. The snake story is then given as a model which can be adapted to anyone. It is important at this point to stress that this is not a written story, three ways of memorization are introduced. The only thing left then is to tell stories.
• Most of the lesson is conversational allows for dialogue between teacher and audience. The students follow with the instructor through the steps of building a story and finally the students are given an oppurtunity to tell.
• It is very obvious with the stories if the students understand or not. Story telling is universal, it is already understood the lesson is to gain more control and a deeper appreciation of it.
  
• Because of the personal and flexible nature of story and the univeral theme of the snake story this lesson evolves organically each time it is given depending on the audience. Question can be directed to students to promote a more fluid dialogue, to engage the audience.
  
• It is necessary to understand the structure and the power of story in order to exchange large ideas in safe, closed but uncontrained way.
  

mixing two images for a Symphony

i found a bunch of pictures of the vatican which were screeming to be used for something. then during a toyally random search i ended up in a personal photo album. this was one of the pics. the gentleman is Monkey. the last pope had a run-in with a dove before he died and there are tons of pics of him swatting at the bird (lots of wings to choose from). this is such a needed visitation.

trying things out

this is one of my favorite pics. my biggest problem was i didn't want to ruin the photo. but once i figured out the reasons i like the photo i could tweek those and play from that point. the boy's face in the crowd is fantastic!

pedestrian throughlines

1. the artists describe this as street sculpture. how else can one include the formal elements of 2D in 3D work?

2. how does a a radical change in vantage point affect the viewer. what other vantage points can be played with? to what effects?

3. how important is the narratives of individual characters in the pedestrian clips. at what point do they become individuals?

illustrator empathy

i have been playing around with oak leaf images for a couple of weeks now. when we had to pick an image i thought that it would be a perfect chance to lay claim to one of my favorites. then i found out what we were doing. when others saw my image i got all sorts of sympathy and empathy. for a moment i had a doubt...

Throughlines based on Noah Wardrip-Fruin's "Screen"

1. Should there be absolute control over an artists finish product or should there be room for participant alteration.

2. Letter forms. What happens to a letter or a whole word when it becomes a 3D object.

3. Can the first time you spelled your name? (The circumstances and the effect it had on you.)

Throughlines based on Henry Kaufman's "The Memory of Your Touch"

1. What are the health and safety concerns of a publicly handled artifact?

2. Memory and touch are played with in "the memory of your touch" of the five senses which acts as the strongest trigger of memory. Can we manipulate particular memories by tweaking the other senses during remembrance.

3. Do these impressions fade? How can we (erase? diffuse? realign? reverse? clean? ) these impressions?