Pop-Up Reasoning

Pop-Up Reasoning
Britni Vrbensky
11-2-09


    I decided to take a very creative (and possibly too crazy) route with this assignment and I am not really sure if I followed the guidelines to a "T" but I hope that the outcome makes you laugh a bit or possibly scratch your head in wonder, " what was she thinking." Either way I think that my goal will have been reached. I will now begin trying to explain how the process my brain took for this really does make sense. I think.
    I first must say that my source for this assignment was the last blog that Zach wrote on adapting books to film and the comments that were made on his blog afterwords. I picked Zach's as my launch pad because his blogs are always filled with laughter and entertainment along with an academic argument which I enjoy and look forward to reading on Tuesdays and Thursdays. He has honestly come to make the rest of my days enjoyable with his witty remarks. I knew from class on Thursday that there were quite a few people that commented on this post as well and I have combined those as well as Zach's blog into what I would like to call a pop-up conversation.
    I was unsure as to how this assignment was wanted to be done so I thought to myself why not take a crazy, out of the ordinary approach to it and hopefully redeem yourself in the explanation as to why you did it. So now with the pop-up part of the project done I now have to come up with a reasoning for why I chose to do it this way.
    I did my pop-ups as the comments that were made on Zach's blog inserted into the blog itself and in a way made it look like a conversation was being made (possibly this could even be compared to, say a script for a play or a movie). I got the feeling that this was supposed to be more of out own voice as the pop-up's, but when compared to the Pop-up Music Video's you see that more than one person was the contributor for those as well. I simply placed the quotes where they seemed to flow with the original blog. 
    I think that my goal was to be a little bit more on the humorous/creative side than the academic/serious side of things. I wanted to use something that people would be able to relate to and understand and I thought that a fellow blog-post would do well with that.
    I would be interested to see this as a video with the people just popping up and interupting in a way, as the character of Zach goes on with his reading as if nothing has happened out of the ordinary. I think that this idea of a video also had a lot to do with how I wanted things to go for my assignment.
    I wanted to take something and turn it into a composition that could be both read and acted out. This is also what was being discussed, in a way, throughout the comments and blog and was my reasoning behind picking this specific post as well. The topic at hand was dealing with writing books and the adaption process to film. As I went through the comments that others including myself made on Zach's blog I attempted to understand what peices and sentences and ideas that people were referring to and placing them in, what I thought were the appropriate spots. 
    This was an assignment that I came into not really knowing what I wanted specifically to happen. I think that I did what was asked of us, but threw a lot of my self into it as well. I enjoy making others laugh and I think that Zach has a way of doing this in his writing. I wanted to bring in the comments that were made about his post in such a way that would add to the humor that can be seen through out it. I wanted everyone that was included on that page to have a more equal ground covered instead of the main focus to be on what Zach was saying and then our responses to that. I think that by placing the commentes through out you get the idea taht we all were contributers in where the train of thought and conversation was going.
    Although it was really Zach in control we are able to see that with the pop-up comments he could have been influenced in other ways. I am not really sure if I did this assignment right and I am not sure if my explanation makes any sense but I had a lot of fun writing and creating this piece of artwork. Thank you Zach for being a good writer and also to everyone else who commented I hope that you guys don't mind that I used you like this.



Here is the Assignment as well:

Zach
Whitney
Rachel
Jenna
Andrew
Miswarc
Britni

    Have you ever told someone about a great movie you saw that weekend and
they looked back at you and said "The book was better"?

    Yes, that has happened to me. I always appreciate people trying to coax
me into reading great works of fiction, but I don't appreciate them
being hostile about their opinions, so I know where you're coming from.

    It has happened to me too, the wow I hate that movie but now the book...thats another story.

    This has
happened to me a few times and every time that it has I came out of the
discussion feeling a little less prideful in my reading lexicon then
when I'd came in to the discussion. "Oh, it was a book?" I'd say, only
furthering their likely suspicion that I'm some sort of unintelligent
drone in a mass of "sheeple" (that's a sheep-people hybrid, I retain
all rights to the use and distribution of my new word).

    I love your new words and I do feel that same when I discover that I
have never known that a movie I just saw was a book.
    
     I found a picture of a sheeple. http://www.pollymorgan.com/images/black-sheep-poster.jpg
    
    My favorite
respondent is the self-important one that goes on to lord over you how
much greater the book was and how you MUST read it because the film is
"oh-so-drab in comparison." I get it, you read a book, congratulations.
(No one's actually said "oh-so-drab" to me, frankly my circle of
friends probably doesn't know what drab means, in fact, I don't think I
even know what drab means.)

    At the same time though I do know that there are some movies out there
that I have not read the books of that I think are very good.

    This does raise an interesting
question for me though: can film really compare to it's
novel-equivalent in the first place?
    
    Truth be told, that's how everyone is always going to perceive a novel
adapted to film. It's inevitable. If someone read and enjoyed a book,
doesn't matter how good the movie is, they'll always say the book is
better.

    Before reading these articles I
always thought that a film could be better then or at least equivalent
to it's source material.

    In some cases that's true, but while we would like film to stand on its
own, it never will be able to because it's been preceded by something
that set the standard for anything that's affiliated with it after.
 
    I feel that No Country for Old Men represents
the book well, I feel that the television series Dexter is much better
than the books, and I feel that the movie version of Eragon should be
erased from history.

  
 I think that I have to agree that the film version of Eragon can
seriously be forgotten and wiped from the face of the earth.

    After reading the articles I've come to understand
that film can never really equate to the book, and that's because they
simply are two very different mediums, one cannot be equivalent to the
other.
    
    But as I am
becoming more of a avid reader I am making up for my lack there of and
indulging myself in the novels. Of which I always like better.

    Simply put, a film is usually focused more on how things
happen then anything. In a film people tend to get caught up in how the
actor portrayed a character and how the director filmed a scene. Novels
take a different focus, which is usually more about what-type
questions. What did the proganoist think, what did they feel, that sort
of thing.
    
    This is what people think about
during the movie, I too fall guilty to that most of the time while
watching a movie.

    As is indicated in the article about how to adapt a
novel, film is prone to showing emotion and thought through behavior,
dialogue and facial expression, where as novels are given the luxury of
entering a chracter's mind directly. Though film can achieve this to
some degree via a narrator, it's still not quite the same thing. Film
is also limited in scope; most people won't sit down and watch a film
for much longer then two hours, where some (myself included) are more
than happy to pick up a book and read it progressively.

    I think that it all depends on how we go into things (as someone said
in our discussion) we need to view books as books and movies as movies.

    Ultimately,
after reading the articles I was left with the feeling that a film
can't be the novel, which is obvious, and in that sense a film can
never really be above and beyond the novel's source material. That
doesn't mean that a film can't aspire to be something different, or to
be something greater as a film then the novel was as a book (i.e.
Godfather's widely considered the greatest film of all time, the novel
is far from considered the greatest book of all time). With that said I
feel that the film version of a novel should be critiqued as a film and
that the novel should be critiqued as a novel, and that all discussions
of how close the book is to the movie should be nothing more then
discussion as opposed to judgment.
    
    This
is something I completely agree with. People really need to recognize
films and books as separate entities and critique them as such.

    This is easier said than done, but I believe that if we could do this it would make things all better.