Saturday, March 15, 2014

5. Psych Textbooks

My psychology class was absolutely abysmal. The instructor insisted that we cite a source for everything we say, including opinion pieces. This made most of my required responses incredibly drab and uninspired. I did make a good few points about the globalization of culture toward the end of the class, which I think she liked. Among the things that made me dislike the class is the fact that I had to pay for two completely different, but equally important text book.

The first one was PSYCH, which I bought from the Macomb bookstore. This book was pretty solidly written and explained many things in a technical way that really made the material interesting for me. I also like that it included a small "True or False" quiz at the beginning of each chapter so that I could recall information that I had previously learned or heard of. The book did include a number of full page ads for the publisher of the book, which was completely unnecessary in a $90 text book. Unfortunately, Macomb sold me the incorrect book and my return window had closed before I realized so.

This didn't cause much of a problem until one night I needed information from one of the trivial inserts in the official class book. I was prompted, out of desperation of the imminent homework deadline, to buy the ebook version of Mastering the World of Psychology. This is without a doubt, the most absolutely useless piece of tripe that has been written in the history of human civilization. It is dumbed down to the point where I learned almost nothing from the book and only used it to get information that I needed to do my homework and look up answers for the online quizzes. The book lacks any sort of imagination or accurate information. Do not like!

Thursday, March 13, 2014

4. Total Recall

Because my copy of 28 Days Later shipped from the UK, it didn't arrive in time so I printed a copy of the 1990 version of Total Recall from Drew's Script-O-Rama. The 2103 version was okay, but I'm partial to the '90s burly action Gods. It was an interesting read and I picked up some tricks that I used while writing my own screenplay. I did notice that many of the action sequences had been reworked somewhere during the filming process. That's all I really have to say about this one.

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

3. 28 Days Later

One of the assignments for my previz class was to read a screenplay, so I picked up a copy of 28 Days Later on Amazon. I was surprised that even with how frequently I get distracted by my thoughts, it took about as long to read this as it did to watch the movie (just shy of 2 hours).

It was a really good experience for me because I got to think about how what is written relates to what appears on the screen and how that relates to how the audience is presented new information. There were many things in the screenplay that I simply didn't notice in the movie until I watched it again. Despite the fact that screenplays leave generous amounts of detail up to the director and others working on the set, reading this presented a much more vibrant picture of what was actually going on in the movie. I would definitely recommend that anyone who is interested in cinematography read the screenplay of their favorite movies.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

End of 8 Weeks

The first half of this semester was pretty intense. Despite the fact that the psychology instructor was a psychotic bitch, I managed to get an A out of the class and did learn some pretty interesting things. The art class was incredibly easy and even though I didn't learn very much from it, I still found it to be interesting for the most part. On campus, I still have business communication, in which the instructor is an airhead and managed to lose everyone's first assignment, then input the grades for the first exam wrong (showing that I had a 59, which does not happen), and then completely lose my exam. We'll see what happens with that. Also, I absolutely hate group work.

I'm getting a lot out of my previsualization class. I can't draw particularly well, but I'm getting a little better and learning some good tricks. I read a few screenplay and wrote a short one of my own in the class, which I will post more about later. We watched Amélie to showcase good cinematography and I really enjoyed the movie. There is a big project coming up, for which I am still working out the details and may or may not post about later.

That has been my life for the last 8 weeks. I will now attempt to blog at regular intervals and continue with my reading list while catching up on all of the other areas of life that have been getting neglected.