The Night Watcher

Based on your experience in watching The Night Watcher, what benefits do you see in the genre of theater for telling “true” stories?

As these stories in their own respective way try to reach out to us I realized the subtle yet unique method of how each genre does this.

Watching a live theater performance is probably the best time to heighten the senses to which you will be using for engaging in the play. It is because you are preparing yourself and seeing to it that you are analyzing something that is in action rather then seeing or just reading. Watching live theater extracts different conscious thoughts, and those instinctive thoughts manifest into something you would of never realized with simply seeing, or reading something.

What makes a good storytelling? It is not simply learning all the styles of presentations and use of power point but also letting yourself engage in different perspectives; areas of knowledge. It is with your different perspectives along with effective techniques of storytelling which coincide to become something new and different, something with meaning. And it is with Charlayne Woodard’s powerful performance I saw the "pointers" of Ira Glass.

Woodward demonstrates sufficiently the use of anecdote. Like Ira Glass has said, the use of anecdote allows for suspense to happen and in effect brings out the innate desire of a close or how Glass put it "feels like something's going to happen". Not only is this more the reason to concentrate harder but it draws questions to the audience and the answer shortly comes as the play progresses. Another method I saw being used was Moment of Reflection Glass talks about. So the whole play was about how Woodward encountered different children in her life, non of her own. So from the start it is pretty clear that she is telling stories of her live with different people but what is this all accumulating towards? And that is the question that Glass stressed heavily. If there are interesting sequence of events happening but the end doesn't reveal anything new, then the key point becomes dead along with the events prior to the ending and vice versa; if we understand the central question and the reflection part but have trouble putting the sequences together, then the meaning is dead.


So by having a effective anecdote that can be followed by the audience along with a key point that is revealed at the end = engaging and thought provoking story.

Persepolis Q's

a) From the book, "Persepolis," Discuss a page or frame that you find especially powerful. Describe the scene and explain to the best of yourability how and why this scene speaks to you.

Pages 150-151 weren’t necessarily the most powerful but it was the most insightful. Persepolis left us with an open ended ending leaving us with different images and thought provoking understanding. But to continue on about the ending with her grandmother, it was really a culmination of everything she stood for to become finally rooted deep enough for her to feel content for who she was and where she truly belonged to. As Marjane's mother was her support for emotional and physical needs, her grandmother was the support for her intellect and spirit. These Frames helps us to understand that and how the grandmother was even more than just support it was her role to pass on the culture, art, and history to Marjane. The ending showed a mutual fulfillment in that her grandmother was able to leave Marjane without feeling empty and the same with Marjane. This helped me to understand the gap between a child and an adult and their style of communication in a different country and how similar we all are even though we live in completely different places.

B) Compare your experience of reading the book and watching the film. Ifyou were the filmmaker, what scenes would you choose to magnify or omit and why?

Of course watching the film influenced the emotions and even gave an adrenaline rush at certain points but above all the film gave us more of an attachment to what was actually going on rather than reading, where we tend to give a moment to think allowing time to interfere with intuitive judgment. What I mean by that is if we are in a situation where we have to think on the spot that is our subconscious mind telling us what we believe what we stand for but reading gives us more time to analyze what we just comprehended but the difference is that our subconscious mind telling us what we believe in allows for us to analyze ourselves. Everything that I would magnify/make emphasis on, such as the party situation where boys are in the appartment and their running from the police, was already done.

Graphic Novel

I thought that this Graphic Novel would be interesting.
Title: Street Angel
Author: Jm Rugg and Brian Maruca
Call Number: PN. 6728. 5774. R84. 2005 V.1

Alphabet Photo: F for Fustration

Here we wanted to portray a

"fustrated" (our letter was F) situation so in the hopes of doing so we decided that one person would have a blank stare, another pulling his hair, and lastly Randy getting thrusted with a chair. Didn't mean to ryhme. We had our photo taken by the schools photographer so the angle was something we didn't have to change.














Obviously this one is the photoshoped. The photo itself was already set so making our setting of frustration seem more apparent was what I was aiming for. So I mainly played with the light setting, gradient, black and white image, and sharpening of the faces. Using these functions, I tried to center the expression of everyone in the middle by making the bottom and top have the same sort of brightness and everything in between would be more attention grabbing. We chose the word Fustration because of how college students have to deal with so many things at once and sometimes it could be more than just stress.