blake » project

Semester Updates

Runeshai — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:03:41 +0000

Hello everyone,
It’s been a while since I last updated this with anything at all, so I figured I’d post a solid summary of what I’ve been up to for the last 4 months or so.

It’s been a crazy semester, packed full of projects and the like, and I’ve done my best to detail the best of them on my portfolio.

Over the summer I had some pretty major things going on, from my trip to Poland to the New Hampshire follow-up project I participated in, which were great projects.

I started the semester off performing in a poetry slam. I came in 3rd place (out of 3 performers), but received very positive feedback. Next I tackled a short film idea that’d been running around my head for a while, and made some good headway with it. No plans for filming or even redrafting the script yet, but hopefully eventually; it was just nice to get into a project like that again after being out of it for a while.

Outside of school I rarely have spare time, but I found myself perusing Instructables pretty often, and entered their Halloween contest. I didn’t win that one, but I did win 3rd place for their pocket-sized contest with my fork-knife-spoon piece from last year. I wore the prize t-shirt last night :).

After that the workload picked up, and the projects got more serious. At the end of the Spring there is an annual all-school-show where each department displays their best work. One of my majors has a Fall show they put on as well, to showcase their department and the variety of work it produces. Much of this is performance-related work (music, theater, dance, sound, light shows), and I was asked to be the stage manager for this year’s show. It’s called the SIM Big Show, and it was a pretty huge event, with over 200 people in attendance. In addition to stage managing, my music video from last year played in one of the video screening rooms, and I had a piece I called Practical Nature in one of the galleries in school.

Following that was the final show for my Food & Art class, the only requirements being that we make food to serve the audience and we make a piece to display in the show that had something to do with both food and art. Mine had some more complex messages to it, and though simple, I was satisfied with it.

Lastly – and perhaps obviously, judging by the trend in my work so far – was my woodworking final. All Sculpture majors are required to take a woodworking 101 class called Projects in Wood. More artistic than last year’s Joinery, we made an experimental carving, another box – simpler than the ones from Joinery – and the final was an “interpretive box,” which I’ll detail more in its post.

Winter Break has been great; I went home for about a week for a period of total removal from everything school- and work-related, hanging out at home for Christmas and much time with no obligations, and it was wonderful. Now I’m back in Boston, tackling some personal and home projects I’d set aside during the semester, and preparing for the semester to come.

Up ahead: casting & moldmaking with plaster, kinetic art, beat research (studying and making music and hip-hop beats), and hopefully being a TA for the Projects in Wood class I just completed.

Aside from that, I’m continuing working at Henry Bear’s Park toy store and as an usher for the Blue Man Group during vacation periods. With the new year I feel more methodical about my approach to projects, and life, which I’m hoping will help ease the next semester, bringing less stress and a bit more time for relaxing between things, be they projects or simply moments in a day.

Hoping each of you are well,
and wishing all happy holidays,
Blake

DIY Lightbox

Runeshai — Fri, 15 May 2009 23:03:47 +0000

I wish I had teachers do cool, simple stuff like then when I was in school. Not only is it cheap and gets the job done, but it’s something the teacher took the effort and initiative to do outside of the classroom in order to teach more adequately the material to their students. In general, I think creative, crafty teachers are some of the best kind, and maybe it’s overkill to applaud them, but after the last year of making fruitless tuition payments, I applaud them whole-heartedly. Way to go, bigtreehouse!

The goal was to make a light box for my students to use that didn’t cost me an arm and a leg. Went to the second-hand store and found a florescent light… ($4.99 with 50% off) then noticed a suitcase/briefcase ($3.99 with 50% off). I got them both and started thinking of ways to put them together.

Instructables via Lifehacker.

Productivity Day #6

Runeshai — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:30:10 +0000

So….the plan?
Yes… the plan. I’m going to bring my dad to work for something he has to do apparently (which he only told me about last night, anticipating I’d not have anything else to do on a day without school or work), and after however long we’re going to be there I’ll bring him back home, and then I’ll get to work on doing something. I’ve started right now working on my sister’s Christmas present, and it’s going to take a while but it’s going to get done. The good part about it is that it happens in chunks of time, so I’ll be working on it just a bit and then have to let it do its own thing, so I’m free to get updated on my email, RSS feeds, or another projects I’m working on. Otherwise, it just takes time.

Next update
I don’t have much else to say, since the past few days have really not worked out in my favor. It seems life’s changing right now and not really in a good way. I’m not going to go into depth here, but it’s not all that much fun. I will update today about the methods I’m using to plan the day and see if they’re more or less helpful than what I had been doing. But I know I don’t like the hour-by-hour method, and I do like the general project outline list method, so I can look at it and determine which ones need working on the most. I’ll update tonight with some ideas for how to digitize the whole thing, if I can come up with any. That’s really the only thing I need to manage now. But we’ll see how it goes.