Day: April 27, 2012
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How to Survive Your Capstone in 10 Easy (HA!) Steps
Here’s a quick thesis/capstone survival guide I put together for a talk at Penn last fall. It’s close to graduation time so hopefully it will come in handy to someone!
1. Capstones scare everybody. Face it together.
You might think you are the worst procrastinator in the world, that no one has ever been as scared of a stupid paper, and that everybody else is doing way better.
Nope!
Everybody suffers when they’re working on the magnum opus of their education thus far, the document that could propel them to greatness or banish them to mediocrity FOREVER. It helps to have a cadre of friends or colleagues for venting, study dates, and plain old empathy. You often get tips and insights when you talk through whatever you’re stuck on, that you wouldn’t get plugging away on your own. So even if it seems like some of your classmates have … Read the rest
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Be Your Own Puppet: Miwa Matreyek’s stunning video shadow puppetry
In mid-March I went to Baltimore’s Quest Fest to see a performance by Miwa Matreyek, an animator who I hadn’t heard of even a couple of months ago. I stumbled across her work on some internet afternoon stroll and was captivated by the clips that I saw. Lucky for me, other people from the Pricess Grace Foundation to TED had heard of her.
Her work is heavily inspired by shadow puppetry, and in fact when I first looked at her work my mind immediately went to this exquisite video for the Little Dragon song “Twice” by Johannes Nyholm.
But in her work, she is the puppet. She performed two pieces at Quest Fest, “Dreaming of Lucid Living”, and “Myth and Infrastructure”. In each, she projects an original animation on a screen, but uses a second projector in back of the screen to throw the shadow of her figure into … Read the rest
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