Self Critique:

The title of my piece is Going Off. My idea was to recreate the social experience of being inside a video game arcade to spark enthusiasm and captivate the viewer. The idea came from childhood and recent memories of going to "Fun Arcade" with family and close friends before it was torn down. It was the last arcade in New Orleans. 

The exposition begins with a bird's eye view of New Orleans followed by flashing images of a hot sausage po-boy and snowballs-food symbolizing my home and childhood. Next is the conflict. A caution sign appears followed by a sequence of young men wearing hi-tops. I wanted to use them to represent nostalgia and the 90s because most of my memories of visiting arcades take place during that time period. After the hi-top shots, the images build up into a rapid succession of movement making up the conflict. At this point, I want the viewer to feel as though they have been taken into the loud and busy atmosphere of the arcade. The flashing images come to another brief halt showing a b-boy upside down on his head, creating the climax. The shots following the halt form the resolution. The timing in the climax and resolution mimic the way that arcade matches intensify as players are near victory/defeat, and the way that arcades become busier and louder during late hours. 

After finishing this project, I see that it has a lot of breakdancing images. I see connections between b-boying and arcade gaming. Both spark public/social gathering, and competition between familiars and strangers. Also, both cultures seemed to have died out. As I mentioned before, there aren't anymore arcades in New Orleans, and breakdancing isn't popular there either-it also seems to be underground on a national level as well. 

Some strengths of the project are how most of the images connect and create movement, and the placement of the text juxtaposed with images ex: "aight", "kick it" followed by the succession of kicks. The concept is not obscure. Other strengths of this project are organization, and brainstorming. The Brainstorming/freewriting process helped me relax and generate grounds for exploration without over thinking and being too complex. I see the freewriting process as a potential tool for future projects.

I increased the timing of the images. What I presented for critique was too literal. The repetitive button images took away from the aesthetic moving images making the piece less about the social experience and more about the individual and machine/arcade. Some images were irrelevant such as the old man smoking and the young man with the string in his mouth. The pictures of time square, placement of the concert,/crowd  were also irrelevant. Overall the editing needed to be tightened and more specific to the social aspect of the arcade experience. I increased the timing and focused on creating movement because it is the strong point of the piece. 

I used a different method of converting my images to 720x480: File-Scripts-image processor

At image processing window: choose source folder and location to save processed images-type 720X480 in width/height box, and check resize to fit images-click Run. 

Photoshop will then create a new folder with your resized images.

Open resized images: File-Scripts-load files into stack