Where the world of tomorrow exists today
Welcome to the Justin Meltzer Homepage for the class Theatre 216: Introduction to Visual Interpretation. This site's job is to give an outlet for the different forms of media that I have created this past spring semester in '07. The class has been an amazing experience in understanding how new media works and functions for everyday things. While in the past I considered myself very competent in video editing, this class allowed me to further push my editing skills and take pervious ideas for that I had for movies and finally put them to work.
For the first project, the slideshow, I was able to develop my skills in Photoshop, which I recently learned before the beginning of the semester. Thanks to my previous knowledge of the program and some new techniques picked up in the class, I was easily able to create a clever collage, which incorporated my face on some famous pieces of artwork. I received a great amount of positive feedback for it and was even so fortunate to get kudos from some friends who work with Photoshop on a day-to-day basis. This project gave me a sense of what graphic designers do for a living. It truly changed my perception on the difficulty and talent it takes to use Photoshop and create even a single altered photo.
The following project, the slideshow, gave me some liberty with crafting a story using multiple pictures. I essentially based the story around the song and my interpretation of the song. Having to use iPhoto to make the slideshow was actually more difficult than using the complex and diverse program of Final Cut, but when I finally figured it out it turned out to be a breeze. This experience furthered my relationship to new media mainly for its simplicity. In essence the use of iPhoto for slideshows is simple and it is supposed to be, allowing the consumer to be able to easily manipulate many different photos and put them to music. The problem is that when one tried to “fine tune” aspects of the project, it can be troublesome because of the lack of customization.
The penultimate project of the semester was the Movie and for this one I knew that I had to break boundaries. Not to sound conceited or anything, but being a part of the television station on campus, having a history of experience with other short films I’ve made, and wanting to at some point in my life break into the movie business, this project was to become my undertaking. I had a plan for this movie for some years now and through this was finally able to initialize it. Through this project I was able to understand how new media can allow more detail and ingenuity in project such as this.
The final assignment was the website, which you are right now reading. This might have actually been the most difficult learning barrier for me, sadly because website design is one of the few mediums I am less familiar with. But thanks to some help from my friends I was able to get this off of the ground and onto the web. This piece of work has taught me the vastness of opportunity for new media and the amazing things that can be accomplished on a website.
The know it all,
-Justin Meltzer
The know it all,
-Justin Meltzer
