Embrace the Error

I centered my video art piece on the errors of humans on other species of animal.  There are many people in today's world that ignore the horrors of what the human race can do to other living creatures.  In this video I wanted to show how there may be people who turn the other way, but there are also many who will embrace the errors we see and are trying to fight and correct them.

Golan Levin

Golan Levin's AMA video is fascinating.  He is an extremely intelligent man and I love his use of experimental 3D Cinema on himself as he is answering questions about technology and life.  I thoroughly enjoyed the part of the video when the camera angle changed to looking up at his chin starting at his hands.  The distortion of his detail as a human made the video and what he was saying more powerful.  Levin's ideas about open source government are pretty interesting and insightful.  I loved when he was discussing neurons and the entire atmosphere being connected, as a distortion himself.  Levin really enhanced himself as a person using 3D effects, making what he was saying even more interesting.  The idea of all of our kinetics being interconnected is proven in this video.  The grid lines and black out spots represent us as figures in space.  I am going to recommend this video to others and research more about several topics Levin discussed.   

Musical Artists

DISCO:
Diana Ross is one of my favorite artists, especially.  As a kid I grew up listening to a variety of older music rather than listening to what my generation was producing.  Ross's music videos uses special effects that resemble experiments with a program similar to iMovie with the transitions and such.  In other videos of hers she utilized gray scale and experimented with older camera footage incorporation.  


PUNK:
The Vandals utilize a great deal of technology in their music videos.  They even have a performance art piece for their song "Don't Stop Me Now".  There are special effects, such as cars being thrown through the air.  Many effects were done to skew the normal world using black and white scale, giving the video a very static look.   


NINETIES:
Fountains of Wayne use of technology is also geared in their music videos.  One video in particular is for the song, "Stacy's Mom".  This video is interesting because they project the band playing the song onto books and the television screen, having the actors interact with it.  The video of the band members is scaled to be purple, almost resembling them being drawn with a pencil and colored in.


TECHNO:
Robert Babicz-Babiczmi uses technology to create all of his music.  Everything he creates is using pre recorded sounds from synthesizers.  His music has no lyrics, but the beats and rhythms are his own and they are pretty rad! 


ELECTRONIC:
Amon Tobin-Bricolage uses technology to create different sounds and beats using other music.  There are sirens that go off and drum beats that are repeated and are constant.  Using technology, his sound machines, he can increase the volume of certain parts of his music, utilizing crescendos, but without worrying about specific individual band performers ignoring the symbols and cues. 

Performance Art

The theme for this performance art is happiness. Therefore, I incorporated my love for drumming, being outside, and being around the cats I volunteer with into the performance. I utilized environmental tools as a way to make sound on my wooden cajun drum (the tree sticks and flowers). My greatest happiness comes from caring for the environment around me and admiring the beauty of the organic and inorganic matter that defines the quality of our surrounding ecosystem.  I hoped to inspire others to take the time to stop and appreciate the life around them and dance to their own beat.  The best thing about life, is you define your own path and can create your own rhythm.

Xerox Project

For my project I was portraying the feeling of trying to break through struggles I have encountered throughout my life. When you fall through a frozen lake or ocean, resurfacing is difficult, especially when the hole you fell through originally cannot be found. My face and hands in the center of the collage represents the constant pushing and fighting I have to do to accomplish my goals against the solid, clear surface. As much as I try, mistakes are continuously being made. All of my features surrounding the center face and hands create a rippling effect that water creates when a rock is thrown into it. The rippling of water represents the motion of life and how, even if I need to stop, hopefully I can get back into the current to continue living and enjoying myself while learning. A crack starting at the top left corner extends to the left hand in the center. This crack shows that there is always a way to solve a problem or exceed expectations, with just a little hard work and dedication, the crack can be broken and I can resurface again.

Grid Art

I created my grid art based on the greatest inspiration in my life, Sassyfrass. This cougar has enriched my life, showing me how to forgive and love the simple things. Spending time trying to recreate his handsome face was an absolute pleasure. Featured is the photograph I used to create my grid art. This grid certainly does not do his wonderful face and teeth justice, but his goofiness is definitely perceived.

Video Games

As a child I was involved with many sports starting at the age of two. Playing video games and watching the television were not a priority and I never had much time. Although, when my family and I would travel across the country in our RV, my siblings' and my favorite game, other than looking out the window for punch buggy cars, was to play our Sega Genesis console. Our favorite games included: Sonic the Hedgehog, Aladdin, The Lion King, and a tennis game. I can still remember the video game music and its ability to create suspense at specific points. I also love when different sounds are used to emphasis certain characters and events within the game. Growing up as the youngest of five, I learned how to play a variety of video games, but all of these started out on our old desktop PC computer. I had a game that consisted of this elaborate baking console that connected to the keyboard. You could practice rolling dough, mixing, and using different baking ingredients. The console was connected to the computer, therefore, if you performed the wrong step, the batter would turn out incorrectly. My brother Chris, sister Katie and me would go to our cousins house and we would play Mario Party together, enjoying every minute of spending time together. Mario Party was and still is my all time favorite video game. The duels and the adventures that game lets the gamer experience amongst other players sitting next to them was an ingenious idea. As I got older, my family loved Guitar Hero. My other sisters Anna and Heather, Katie, Chris and I would battle each other. Our mom even played with us. I enjoyed pretending to be a rock star who could actually play music. Guitar Hero is actually where I learned about music, exposing me to my favorite songs and bands. One game that my brother and I loved and would always play together is Gears of War. My brother and I would play for several days, hours on end until we defeated all the levels. Sometimes we would get frustrated with each other, but my brother appreciated having someone in the family who would play games with him and didn't mind wasting the day away. These moments I shared with my family are priceless and irreversible, thanks to video games.

Flip Book Animation

My animations represent certain aspects of my life that have helped define me as a person. I start out with the love of my life, Terk. She was an eleven year old bearded dragon when she passed away in February 2015. I have put my heart and soul into her health and her beauty was extremely hard to capture on paper. She fades into a sunset, which represents her ability to brighten my life, even though she is gone. Spaceships have always fascinated me and the thought of being able to explore and travel is thrilling. The book moves into a green bouncy ball. I collected bouncy balls when I was a kid. I would bowl every week and I would collect change to ensure a new bouncy ball of all different colors. My brother and I bonded while playing games with each other because he would teach me all of the new tricks, whether they were video games, board games, or outside activities. Next, orcas are magnificent and I am infatuated with their ways of communicating and living as the top predators in the ocean. I listen to Christmas music year round, it brings me true joy and happiness-I am able to bring smiles to people's faces with kind cards just to wish them a happy life and a great thank you for their friendship. My favorite nintendo character is Toad, so I made a small mushroom cap to represent one of my favorite games when I was a child. I end the book with a calculus problem. Calculus is my favorite subject. I thoroughly enjoy learning the material and I never have stress while doing my homework.

Hearing to Eyesight

Much of my peace of mind comes from listening to music. Using Pandora allows me to look up any of my favorite songs and create a station out of them. Pandora radio exposes me to new songs that I thoroughly enjoy, and are now my favorites. I particularly enjoy the 50s, 60s, and 70s radios. I correlate many events in my life with certain songs, that, without Pandora, I would have never heard. The website www.otr.com provides access to radio channels that were the only form of entertainment before the television was invented. I listened to a comedy, Fibber McGee and Molly that was five minutes and eleven seconds. This comedy was light hearted and enjoyable to hear. The music involved with the show reminds me of the original Little Rascals soundtrack that I adore greatly. I also really enjoyed imagining the characters through descriptive words. I was able to picture where the characters were, what they looked like, and how they interacted through my own perspective and imagination. What I love most about "I Love Lucy" is the show's ability to make me smile the entire time. I have been watching the show since I was kid, along with "I Dream of Jeannie" and "Matlock". After watching these original television broadcasts, you can see the correlation with newer television series. These new series were based off of the original ideas for comedy, mystery, and drama. Lucille Ball's facial expressions and her actions make the show fantastic. I remember the episode where they were squishing grapes with their feet to make wine and her face as she entered the huge wooden tub was priceless. I enjoy looking back and appreciating the different forms of media that have been innovated and expanded, especially the black and white shows that have been edited and brought back to life in color (although, the original black and white is always truly the best).

Opera

The Birth and Life of Opera was very insightful. I thoroughly enjoyed traveling with the speaker through different locations observing and appreciating the advancements in civilization through a visual art. Overall, I learned quite a bit and I am looking forward to see how opera has transformed society's entertainment. I watched the opera,Tosca and I was thoroughly impressed with the orchestration. The use of sounds to categorize characters showed us who were villains and who were the common folk. This opera was overall enjoyable, even though the subjects, murder, torture, and suicide were used to create suspension and dramatize the situations being portrayed. What makes Tosca interesting is because this opera was made to define the perspectives of the year 1800, from the year 1895. Nowadays we portray the past much differently than the way the past was perceived over two-hundred years ago. I enjoyed learning more about the history and the challenge of deciphering the overall meaning, or moral of the opera. Tosca is an opera that bases itself on events that occurred prior involving war and iconic villains, in this case Napoleon. Watching an opera is something I have never experienced, and I am glad to have chosen Tosca as my first, especially for its incorporation of music to define characters.

Pjotr Sapegin's Madama Butterfly Reflection

The depiction of the opera was on cue with the actual ideas of the show. The most symbolic part was the umbilical cord that attached Madama Butterfly with her baby. This incorporation represented the bondage the child and mother had, but also, it showed the bondage of Madama Butterfly to Captain Pinkerton. The endless waiting for hope of return of the captain was emphasized by portraying Madama in the same clothes, in the same location, looking towards the same area of the ocean. Although she had a child to bond to, she still waited for the man who promised her his return. This comical short of the opera represented the depression of Madama Butterfly, while also portraying her endless hope, which makes the short quite wonderful.

Insight from a Microbiologist

Raul Cuero, PhD. is a man with many incredible perspectives on how people should see the world around them. With his background, he has the ability to understand and appreciate different aspects of life that young generations are starting to take advantage of. Dr. Cuero's ideals on how to overcome criticism are applicable to every person with goals: take the criticism and use it as a force to compel you to continue further. This type of mindset will be genuinely useful to my career, because I expect as I continue to be a voice for animals, I will make many enemies. I plan to take Dr. Cuero's advice with me as I live day by day. Being creative allows people to understand themselves and pursue new objectives. I learn to appreciate the people around me for the qualities that make them truly unique. Each person has the ability to conquer their dreams, and fight for their opinions. Through creativity, people can share their thoughts and respectively understand one another without limitations.

Who I am

Hello, my name is Sarah Ballentine and I am a Biology major with a concentration in Pre-Veterinary Science at UT. I am also on the path to minor in both Math and Chemistry. When I first started out at UT I felt a void growing because I had so much free time that I wanted to dedicate towards volunteering. Fortunately for me, my family moved from Maryland to Orlando when I started school at UT in the Fall of 2013, providing me with a car. Now as a Sophomore, I am a current volunteer with almost 2,000 hours of service dedicated to the world's largest accredited sanctuary for big cats, Big Cat Rescue. This facility has become my new home in Tampa and the people involved with the organization are my second family. I enjoy being outside with nature, working towards educating the public on the exotic cat illegal trade and the hardships the current animals of Big Cat have endured before they came into our care. After graduating UT in 2017 (hopefully) I plan to go to veterinary school and work to become an exotic veterinarian specialized in surgery. After that, I am hoping to travel and work with locals in the many countries where animal conflict occurs. By the end of my life I plan to have started and maintained a working animal sanctuary dedicated to rescue, rehabilitation, and release of exotic animals, large and small. I strive to find harmony between the many species of lifeforms on this planet and the superior homo sapien, because each living thing has earned the right to also live and flourish on this planet.

Inspiration for Motivation

Sassyfrass is my inspiration and passion. He was born into a society that chooses to exploit beautiful specimens like himself for its own personal agenda. Before finding his forever home at Big Cat Rescue, the world's largest accredited sanctuary for big cats, his life was quite difficult. His first owner beat him with a shovel in an attempt to make him a "nicer" cat. He was sold to a couple who loved exotic cats and had hopes to breed these animals for a life in a cage. This couple not only owned him, but also owned another cougar named Freddie, and a male lion they hand raised since he was a cub. One day the wife came home and she found her dog mauled to death in the yard and she saw that the lion cage door was open. At that moment she was uncertain of where her husband was, but more importantly, where the lion was. Law enforcement was called and after spotting the lion, he was shot down and killed. They soon found her husband lying in a pool of his own blood, dead, in the lion's cage. The wound on the man's leg seemed to be from a scratch that just went too deep. The man was probably not killed on purpose, even, the lion could have been playing with his owner. But these animals are strong and are not accustomed to being gentle towards companions, especially fragile humans. After several years the wife committed suicide, leaving Sassyfrass and Freddie with no care. They both became extremely malnourished and lost a lot of weight. When Big Cat rescuers were finally able to rescue Freddy and Sassyfrass, both cougars were in bad shape. Their living quarters consisted of dog igloos too small for a cougar, and rubber flooring. Temperatures were low and neither cougar had proper protection against the environmental elements. After the rescue both cougars transformed into healthy cats, but unfortunately Freddie only lasted six months at Big Cat Rescue before he passed away. Sassyfrass is still at Big Cat today and he is doing fantastic! My name is Sarah, I am a keeper at Big Cat, and I am lucky enough to call him one of my best friends, and greatest companions. We are a no contact facility, so our friendship is based on respect and care for each other. Sassyfrass is a very talkative, happy cougar who truly defines the word forgiveness. He has endured hardships from human contact most of his life, until he was rescued in 2010, and yet he still gets excited to see anyone willing to talk with him. Sassy has found his forever home and will continue to live a pleasurable life for as long as he wants. Hopefully he inspires everyone as much as he has motivated me.