Jerry Tai's Weblog

Urban Intervention- After Thoughts

Jerry Tai — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:12:32 +0000

Yeh! The third project is finally done! I’ll be honest right now; the urban intervention project is my least favorite project so far in the class. I feel the concept of the project is very…how should I put it? Flat and static? The concept just doesn’t offer enough complexities to fully express my thoughts and creativity. In the end, it’s really just a piece of vinyl stuck on a flat surface. But anyway, what’s done is done. I was actually having trouble coming up with an idea for that project, so I just did some location scouting on Granville Island. I came across something of an abandoned factory in the Railspur Alley under the Granville Bridge, so I thought to myself, “Hey! What if I did something that is very against the nature of Granville Island?” Then I went ahead and did the mock up.

Initially, I wanted to stick the vinyl on the rusted steel, but that obviously didn’t work out during installation. I wanted print the image on the red vinyl, so the red would contrast against the green, moss-infested glass window.

Overall, I feel this is definetly NOT my strongest work, but then I didn’t expect that much from myself, because I have never done anything like this before. Oh well, I’ll redeem myself in the next project, the Google Map. I’m actually having a lot of fun doing the Google Map, but I will write more about it on the next post. Oh, and here’s a little composition that I did today. Enjoy!

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Urban Intervention- Personal Definition

Jerry Tai — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:22:09 +0000

What is an intervention? When Suzi first introduced the third project to the class, I felt I had the need to come up with my own definition of the word. Without making this too wordy, I will just get straight to the point and make my explanation as simple as possible and easier to understand, just to make everyone’s life easier.

Intervention is a “connection.”
- Example 1 + 1 = 2
  - Intervention is the “+” sign. Environment is the “1.” Spectator is the other “1.” Outcome is the “2.”
    - Intervention is the connection that both connects the environment and the spectators to create an illusion, a situation. Intervention is the connection that connects both elements to create an emotional feeling and a response from the spectators.

Panorama Project Part III

Jerry Tai — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:59:19 +0000

Well, the first project of DIVA 200 is over (second if you count the blog). Overall, the entire process went really well. Of course, there were a things about the project I could complain about.

The weather on the day of my shooting could have been a lot better. It was pouring rain that day, and I wanted to do something adventurous outdoor. Obviously that was totally impossible…We are living in Vancouver, after all.
Second, my camera. I wasn’t working with an SLR, so it was hard to control some of the things manually (lighting, shutter speed, focus…etc). It was a pain in the ass, to say the least. So this was what my panorama looked like after I put all the pieces together (NO other refinements).

garden-panorama-original.jpg

And this was the final product.

garden-panorama-final.jpg

In the end, I think I have achieved the vision that I had when I was starting the project. I wanted to do something different. I wanted to express the “claustrophobic” feel of a very small space, which is VERY different compared to a scenery, so I decided to take pictures inside my garden storage in my backyard. The next challenge was, “How do I express a pleasing emotion in a place that is full of…rat and plant poison?” I staged a few things, such as the garden decoration in the background and the headless fairy figure in the foreground. Then I took the pictures in black and white to give that extra polish. In my eyes, I think the panorama scope exaggerates the “compacted” feel of the place, which is fascinating considering panorama usually exaggerates the “large and open space” feel of the subject.

Panorama Project Part II

Jerry Tai — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 01:01:17 +0000

I wanted to post some pictures up in the last post, but there were simply too many of them, so I decided to make a short video (a slide show is more like it). I wanted to make sure all the pictures look consistent, so this is like a test, really.

Panorama Project Part I

Jerry Tai — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:46:04 +0000

For the panorama project, I want to do something that is different from the usual conventions. Of course, most of the time, that is easier said than done, but one thing I’ve noticed about panorama photographs is that they’re always dealing with landscape, or any LARGE and OPEN locations, so I thought, “What if I take pictures in a really small and compacted space? When I put all 12 pictures together, will the panorama scope exaggerate the space and make it seem bigger?” That’s what I want to experiment with this project.

So I took the pictures inside my tiny, garden storage space in my backyard. Whether the panorama scope really does exaggerate the scale of the space, I don’t really know yet until I put them all together.