Loie Vaughn

So I’m a little late on this post- busy days… ya know. 

I haven’t had much time for reading, but I have read a little of The Secret of the Golden Flower, which is the basic guide for Buddhists and Taoists. The Golden flower symbolizes the opening of the light of the mind, the release of the spirit, enlightenment, the discovery of the true self, etc.  Written simply and poetically, The Secret of the Golden Flower verbalizes that which is very very difficult to verbalize. How do you write about awareness and being without giving concrete statements and directions? “Naturalness is called the way. The way has no name or form; it is just the essence, just the primal spirit (pg. 9).” How does one write about simply and naturally existing? I have already found the only way to read this book is to read a little bit at a time, read between the lines, and try to let myself gain a sense of the material instead of concrete ideas. “The beauties of the highest heavens and the marvels of the sublimest realms are all within the heart: this is where the perfectly open and aware spirit concentrates (pg. 11).” If your heart and mind are not open to the world around you, good and bad, how will you grow? Anyways, I am really enjoying this book and will continue to read and use these ideas to keep my mind in the now.

As for my animation, Monday I re-shot a few seconds of my hand-drawn scene (the world tilted too quickly) and moved more cut-outs across my mind in the second scene. After shooting, I tried to export my clips to quicktime, and failed miserably! It was VERY frustrating. I’m pretty sure I had all the compression settings correct, so unless there was one big step I was missing, something was not working correctly. When I checked the box to process the images before exporting, Dragon would process the images, and then tell me it failed to export. Then, when I did not check the box, Dragon would go ahead and export, but the video clip would come out black with an occasional flash… I will try to find the animation intern to help me today. 

Tuesday I met with my affinity group and we gave brief presentations on the progress and basic ideas of our individual projects. Everyone’s footage looked great! Even without the HD quality they filmed with, Jeremy and the LA water group’s footage was striking. Almost all of Jeremy’s footage was still shots, which I thought has potential for an interesting style. Jason showed us the first two scenes of his experimental documentary on peace consciousness and we discussed the possibilities for the transitions between his three sections: titles, no titles, audio overlap, segue images etc. I can’t wait to see the final projects. I showed the few clips of scenes that I have, and received some great feedback. I was wondering if the smiling lips were too subtle, but everyone agreed it was just right and they could tell what was happening.

The rest of the week was been devoted to drawing and making cut-outs (I have decided to incorporate some minor cut-outs in my hand-drawn scenes).