Headgraphics.net

Epic Mistery Comics (aka EMC) Presents a comic creation 6 months in the making. High School Freshman and Sophomores worked on examining the current state of Tijuana and it’s connection to Chula Vista by writing two short graphic stories involving different comments on the violence that is occurring. Using research students created two worlds that paint a very real picture of how teenagers deal with fear and violence that is occurring right outside their windows.

Quater Passed: Collected Works from Twenty Somethings Around the World

The art piece, located on page 193 is titled “Off to Work”

The funny thing about this piece is that I did it several years ago when I was maybe a Sophomore in college. I had done several of these black and white doodle art pieces and this was the very first one I had done inside a contained shape.

I walked home the day before yesterday and found the book in my mailbox. I had been contacted by the editor previous to this about my piece being chosen, but I was skeptical.

No longer!

This project just feels right. I love the fact that I am able to work with all of my teams with minimal direction now. It bothers me that we don’t do ACGs any more. But they work SO much in my class that we never have time. Sometimes I really miss circle greetings from the first several weeks. I know that they just need to work.

I really want to work on giving more individual feedback as this project progresses. I also need to role with having to teach to different job roles while maintaining all job roles within the classroom. I am curious to see if it is easier to work with smaller groups of students while having a whole class present. We will see.

The kids seem to really get the project. Today there was some confusion about how to generate topics for dissection. I hadn’t really thought it all the way through just what I wanted for topics. Like what is the anatomy of a good topic?

Anatomy of a Good Topic

• Each member of your group is interested in this topic enough to get through a month and a half long project dealing just with that topic.
• The topic is juicy (something others might be interested in)
• The topic is something worth looking at (why is anything worth looking at)
• The topic meets the project objective

That was relatively painless.

I also need to take out the part of the proposal that talks about “how” to show the piece. Maybe remember to have the artists generate their proposal AFTER the audio starts being compiled.

I have to remember to run a demo for puppet generation for next week. That means I get to build a puppet! I should probably do the whole project this weekend I will ask Marisol if she would like to be interviewed.

“Teachers and Cliques” hmmmm…..

~Mister Y

PS – I TOTALLY forgot to write about how cool it was to see the groups being chosen for the last two days. The Project Managers really worked to make teams be good teams and everyone in the class worked so awesomely to ban together and work with the PM’s for interviews. It was an amazing process to give that power to the kids and I know I will definitely repeat this in the future.

Objective

Groups will be able to create and market a 30 second long animated movie using hand drawing techniques of their choice, Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Adobe After Effects CS3 that examines a topic regarding the social /clique culture and how it works, at HTHCV. *

*All animations will be compiled into one movie for all three classes.

After long deliberation I have decided to free myself from the clutches of the (anti)social networks that I have been on for almost 6 years. The reasoning is simple. They are not productive. They are networking with people, yes, but at what cost? It is rare that I connect with someone on either network that just would like to work with me to produce a project. Maybe that is my fault. Maybe I deleted my accounts to simply see what would happen.

We will see.

For now I am going to keep blogging on this open-source, user friendly, beast.

Contact me. Email. Ask what’s up.

I am always on skype: headcomic

Werd homies

First time playing with After Effects:

Intro to the project:

Outlets for charging, free mobile bus wifi… can you say amazing busline? I know I can. Amazing busline. Best 18 bucks spent to get to south station from easter dinner ever spent. Except for that night in reno. I have never actually been to reno but I wonder why everyone says “except for that night in reno”? its kind of a weird thing to say. Unless Reno just rocks that much.

C&J Trailways!

All hail the new Skype Iphone app! I have been waiting months for thee!

And here are pictures from festival del sol (more to come)

And apparently this is what I listen to on Itunes:

The theme for this week’s lesson is Need. There is an illusion that we all buy into, naturally, because of fear. The Illusion* is that we need to be something we are not.

* I have capitalized the “I” in Illusion due to the fact that the Illusion I speak of is not any mere illusion. I speak directly to the “Grand Illusion”. i.e. the Matrix.

What an amazing thing – need.

Let’s look at that again:

The Illusion is that we NEED something WE ARE NOT.

I am going to examine this using myself as a source, as I am the most available candidate at this time. That being said the sentence now changes to be:

The Illusion is that I need something I am not.

What could I need that I am not? Let’s look at everything I am first and see what is lacking.

The roles I fill in the overall spectrum of who I am as Patrick Yurick are: a Man, a human, a boyfriend, a son, a brother, a teacher, an employee, an advisor, a friend, a part-time aikidoist, and a student.

I am not however all those things at once. Right now for instance I am a boyfriend who is typing on his computer in his apartment. The physical things I am are I am dressed, I am tired, I have a light headache, my eyes are somewhat sore, my fingers hurt from practicing my guitar, I am sitting, I am breathing, my mouth is sticky with saliva, and tastes a little bitter because I haven’t brushed my teeth, and my hair is poofy and bothering me because I usually don’t let it grow out this long.

So what could I possibly be lacking? I have a headache so it might be nice if my head felt better. I feel weak so it might be nice to exercise. I could brush my teeth. I could get a haircut, write a comic book, read a novel, go for a walk, plan my week out. I could do all of those things.

But: They are all things that I could do that I am not doing.

They are not things that I need to do.

So the question that comes from the sentence “I need something I am not” is:

What do I need?

How do I determine that when all the answers I have available to me are my “wants” and “coulds”? What is a need? My friend Phil and I have been talking at length recently about Laws and Theories. A Law is inflexible. Phil defines it a little better than I do:

“…A Law is a “what” of the universe (e.g. things fall down) and a Theory is a “why” of the universe (e.g. Space Time Curvature)” – Phil Wagner, Feb. 19th

So that implies that a Law is guaranteed, inflexible. Is a Need a Law? Let’s find the definition of need. Basically “Need” is defined as something that is wanted or necessary. (Oxford American dictionary) I would like to make a stance on this for my own sanity and define Need as the moment before an inevitable occurrence. Such as “the apple needed to fall down”. In fact this is an interesting concept because the word Need seems to imply that an inevitability, a law, is within control.

This is the Illusion. When I use the term need, as it was modeled and defined to me upon my upbringing, I have always equated “need” to “want” and “necessary”. Need is paradoxical in this way. A “want” has always been defined to me as being within my control. Desire, or want, is to be suppressed, acted upon, or analyzed. Which means that everything in which I do “want” is expected to be within my control. “Necessary”.

… interrupted by conversation …. ok now I can start writing again …

In doing this I have concluded that The Illusion has it’s base in reality, much like the black portion of the “Yin-Yang” symbol is part of the whole. Which means that when I say “The Illusion is that we need something we are not” what I am saying is true.

The following equation may clarify:

The Illusion (part of the whole) = Me + Something

This means that:

The Opposite of The Illusion = Me

Which leads us to the actual equation I was trying to get at in the beginning:

The Whole = The Illusion + The Opposite of The Illusion

This is all very confusing and I may elaborate later. Basically what I have discovered is that I am simultaneously whole and lacking fullness, but the space that is empty is also full and therefore I am always “Whole”.

Ask me questions.

Inspired to do art and I am not too sure exactly why. I am doing a project with the kids using photoshop, which inspired me to look through the news today and create a piece using an excerpt, picture and headline from a single news story. I also grabbed a painting online to create this.

The News Story:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-02-17-obama-denver-stimulus_N.htm

The Quote From the News Story:
“It’s a hodgepodge of government spending,” said Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., his party’s chief vote counter. “Every single bit of this is borrowed money.”

The Painting:
http://pupples.blogspot.com/2008/03/black-oil-painting-for-sale.html

Happy Sunday from Chula Vista! I am at school working on chopping away at the endless list of “To Do’s’”. Yesterday I went to Torrey Pines to do a little hiking and get some sun. It was a great day. The sun was out as it had not been much this week.

I am thinking a lot about the role education plays within society these days. I have been thinking a lot about how we live in a world that is fortified with mass communication and asking myself, if I was John Dewey or Paulo Friere, Thoreau, Myles Horton – heck even Paul Revere and had access to the technology of today would the innovations they had made within their cultures be different? Changed? More effective? What I do see when I look at the world around me is bountiful shades of Hope for the future.

We have already expounded upon the leaps in communication that Gutenberg started with the Printing Press and now it is the job of current educators and social revolutionaries to use these tools for more than just that of advertisement and economic growth, we now need to use these tools to access, or even facilitate, the realm of spiritual growth.

The human spirit can, and already does, work in conjunction with modern technology. Look for any song on Youtube and you will find another video of a fan who has just spent hours learning to play this song just so he could video tape it and expose his successes to the communities all over the world. This is the power education and exhibition happening in the most simplistic forms and it has access to a community that a classroom may never have. This is the real world.

My biggest concern in the way things are going is how are we, in Peter London’s words: “Drawing Closer to Nature”. Technology must facilitate the human experience and to do so it must allow us to be connected to all realms, even that of the flower in the middle of the forest. I am excited at the leaps forward in Cellular technology and its merge with mobile computing. We are going to be there quicker than people realize.