This was a fun and interesting project to do as video editing is one of my favorites things to and elevate me to my video editing career. For me video editing is always putting a story together that the audience will enjoy and understand. In this project I had to go back to my family’s origins with their cultural upbringings from Ecuador and bringing that to the states. As I was gathering old pictures of my parents from when they use to live in Ecuador and seeing them now is a huge change on how much they overcame and how I am grateful for the life I have now. That is how I based the video around on their upbringings and where they live on how that has impacted and influenced my life growing up and how I see things artistically. I didn’t really have any problems creating this video as I used Adobe Premier Pro and I kind of knew the direction I was going for, so I was just putting footage together making sure they flowed nicely.

Growing up I was a huge Jay Z fan as a kid hearing his songs on the radio like “Empire State of Mind”, his collab songs with Justin Timberlake and Kanye were listened to a lot. So, when I went to this field trip to see “The Book of HOV” exhibit in the Brooklyn Museum I got instant nostalgia seeing all the Jay Z memorabilia and his history. Some exhibits that stood out to me were his 2X certified platinum album plaque of “Jay-Z Linkin Park Collision Course”, the Fender guitar he used at the Glastonbury music festival in 2009, and “THE BLUEPRINT III” album recreation exhibit. 

Linkin Park was always one of my favorite bands growing up as a kid and when Jay Z collaborated with them it was huge for music history. Linkin Park at the time were in their peak with their first 2 albums and Jay Z was already a huge rapper. I was really young when that album came out but it broaden my music taste of loving rap and rock music and that album brought rap and rock fans together to show that music has no boundaries. Unfortunately, the singer of Linkin Park Chester Bennington passed away in 2017 and Jay Z was on tour and he honored Chester by singing “Numb/Encore” from that album every night. So when I saw the ”Collision Course” album plaque it gave me so much memories of listening to that album and it made me go back and listen to that album on repeat that next day. The artwork of the album is very early 2000s (it came out in 2004) so it uses brown and white artwork graphics to give it that early Y2K look. 

The next exhibit that stood out to me was the Fender guitar that Jay Z used in the Glastonbury festival. At the time Glastonbury was a primarily just a rock festival in England. In 2008 it was announced that Jay Z would headline that year’s show making him the first rapper to headline that festival and not a lot of people were happy. A British rock artist Noel Gallagher called out Jay Z as to why a rapper is headlining that festival when he doesn’t even play guitar. So when it was the day of the show Jay Z opened up the set with a guitar in his hand and played “Wonderwall” trolling Noel Gallagher. This changed the way music festivals would be ran today mixing variety of genres all in one board. So when I saw the guitar in person I was seeing a piece of history that Jay Z made by just going out on stage with the guitar to prove a point, “To me, music is music. People were saying hip hop couldn’t play Glastonbury” (Jay Z). It is also a very nice guitar a nice cream color. 

The last exhibit that stood out to me was seeing “The Blueprint” III album sculpture in person. When I think of Jay Z that album is the first thing I picture because I listened to that album a lot when I was kid. It is a very iconic album artwork with all the instruments all white and the three red stripes that go across the album. The three red stripes symbolize that it is the 3^rd Blueprint album, and the overall album artwork means “these things are like the forgotten pieces in hip-hop. It’s still about music” (Jay Z). He is talking about all the instruments that are all stacked up in the album. The album artwork was created by Nicola Yeoman and Dan Tobin Smith in 2009, it was recreated by them again in 2023.

Pink was “recognized as a concept in 800 B.C. in Homer’s Odyssey. The term was coined in the 17th century by a Greek botanist for the ruffled edges of carnations. In the mid-18th century, pink was a fashionable color among male and female aristocrats as a symbol of class and luxury” (Hunterlab.com). Baby pink is “a shade that comes from a combination of red and white. The baby pink hex code is #F4C2C2” (Vistacreate.com). According to the book “The Secret Lives of Color”, it states “Pink is, after all, just faded red, which in the era of scarlet jacketed soldiers and red robed cardinals was the most masculine color” (Kassia Clair). 

I choose baby pink because it is a unique color that takes time to achieve for hair purposes. I’ve had baby pink hair before because I had platinum hair at the time and my hair stylist suggested I try it because it went well with my skin tone. I’ve also seen celebrities rock the baby pink hair color before so that made me want to try that hair color. Also, with cars I think they stand out and look vibrant and unique when their wrapped in baby pink. 

Justin Bieber, Bad Bunny, Me with G Eazy in LA, J Balvin, Lexus RCF

The meaning of baby pink can be described as “this soft, light shade of pink symbolizes innocence and youthfulness. People associate it with childhood innocence and the beauty of life before it becomes complicated” (rhinestonesu.com). I agree with this because it is a really soft shade of pink and it can be seen as a innocence but I use it as a way of being creative uniquely. According to the article “The complicated gender history of pink” it states “If you go back to the 18th century, little boys and little girls of the upper classes both wore pink and blue and other colors uniformly,” said Valerie Steele, director of the Museum at FIT, the Fashion Institute of Technology, in New York” (CNN.com). It has always been a debate of whether pink is for boys or not but I think anyone can rock any color and it doesn’t matter what other people think. 

Album that uses the word Pink, “Pink Tape” by Lil Uzi Vert

3 Sketches

Sources

“Baby Pink RGB, CMYK, Hex Color Codes and Color Meaning.” VistaCreate, 4 Apr. 2023, create.vista.com/colors/color-names/baby-pink/. 

Bhattacharjee, Puja. “The Complicated Gender History of Pink.” CNN, Cable News Network, 12 Jan. 2018, www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-girl-gender/index.html. 

Clair, Kassia St. Secret Lives of Colour. Hodder & Stoughton, 2017. 

Ken Phillips                                                                Mr. Philips has spent the last 30 years in product development and management. “Ken Phillips.” Color Measurement Spectrophotometer Supplier & Manufacturer, www.hunterlab.com/blog/the-color-pink/#:~:text=The%20color%20pink%20was%20recognized,symbol%20of%20class%20and%20luxury. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023. 

“Pink Color Psychology: What Does the Color Pink Mean?” Rhinestones Unlimited, rhinestonesu.com/blog/pink-color-psychology-what-does-the-color-pink-mean/#:~:text=Baby%20Pink,life%20before%20it%20becomes%20complicated. Accessed 6 Nov. 2023. 

For my visual quotes project, I picked the lyrics from the song “Where Do We Go?” from the British rock band Asking Alexandria, one of my all-time favorite bands. The lyrics go “Where do we go from here? I don’t wanna say goodbye yet”. The reason why I picked this quote is because before the semester started, I was in Europe for 3 weeks and Asking Alexandria just dropped their new album “Where Do We Go From Here”, and when I heard that last song, I got instant nostalgia. I was having a good time in Europe enjoying the many different cities and people. I didn’t want to come back to the states because I knew it was back to reality and being my last semester, I know my life is going to change after college. I’m always looking forward to the future but there’s a part of me that is scared because of past events and changes that I don’t know what to expect. So, this song is helping me throughout this semester and also this is a band that I’ve been listening to for 10 years, so they’ve always been a part of my life. 

I got inspired by the quote on the right of the front man Danny Worsnop singing and the lyrics over him from the song “A Lesson Never Learned”. I’ve always liked this fan edited lyrics picture because the front man Danny just looks badass with his outfit and his posture singing. The lyric is also one of my favorite songs as it is a very catchy chorus to listen to and it makes the image powerful as if he was singing that song in the moment. I recently saw Asking Alexandria at a concert in Manhattan and snapped a photo of Danny up close since I was in the barricade. My photo and the other one look similar as they kind of have the same posture singing with one hand on the mic and the other up in the sky. I made the picture black and white and put the lyrics “Where Do We Go From Here I Don’t Wanna Say Goodbye Yet”. I positioned the lyrics over his body like the other image and made the letters wide so it could be wide.

The photo on the left is a banner from Asking Alexandria’s live shows they used in 2012 and I always liked the skull they used of the Queen. It inspired me to get a tattoo of a skull but instead it would be a king with a crown on it. I found an image of a skull with roses around it and liked it (the one in the center). I showed that image of the skull to my tattoo artist in Ecuador and told him I wanted a crown on top of it and we removed the wording the face. The end result is the picture on the right of the tattoo I have right now on my right arm. This tattoo means to me my rebellious youth growing loving rock and metal music and also the perception of death hence the skull but with a crown and roses. So I put the original vector of the skull that I found and put it in the center of the image, then I put the quote on top of the skull and wrapped it around it. For the font I used “Iron Maiden” a legendary British metal band one of my favorites.

For the third design I got inspired by the UCLA Master Cover image by Fa Pash in where they took a photo of a sunset in Los Angeles with palm trees and a beautiful pink sunset. I then used a photo I took when I was in a beach in Rome, Italy where I took a picture of the sun setting and the water and that is also a beautiful image. I was given feedback that the text should go where the sand is and not in the sky, I reluctantly agreed and placed the font there but do not know how to blend the text in the sand. I looked at tutorials on how to blend the text in the sand but it did not turn out the way I anticipated it to be.

These are previous sketches ideas I had before using the images instead, the only idea that made the cut was the one with the skull idea.

“PILLOW”

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