My mom and I went to go see an exhibit of Ai Weiwei's art this Saturday. It closes today so you all missed it. Which is too bad because it as a really good exhibit. And Ai Weiwei is a really good artist. It was at the Hirschhorn which is also a really cool museum. So all around it was really cool.

Basically Ai Weiwei does a lot of protest art against the Chinese government, so he gets put under house arrest a lot which means he has even more time to make art I guess. A lot of his art involves taking an object that is pretty meaningful, and giving it a new meaning. Like he has this one piece called Straight, where he took metal rebar pieces from collapsed schools from the 2008 earthquake and then turned them into this sort of map of a division symbolizing both the earthquake, and also the division in society. It's pretty cool looking.

A lot of his art, at least in this exhibit, was influenced by the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. It killed a lot of people, many of them children. This was because many of the schools had been really badly constructed so they just fell down pretty much. And other buildings nearby hadn't just fallen down like that, so that pointed to cutting corners and really bad construction where that shouldn't have happened.  And then the one-child policy meant that a lot of families lost their only child. So basically it was a really big, terrible horrific thing. Something like 5,000 children died due to the terrible schools. One of Ai Weiwei's most moving pieces, for me at least is this one giant snake that he made. At first you're like oh wow that's pretty cool it's a giant snake. But then you see that's it's made out of backpacks, one for each child who died in the earthquake. And it's a really big snake, too.

Well those were some of the newer Ai Weiwei art pieces. Of course there was the one where he drops the ancient Ming vase, and all the other Ming vase desecration pieces (they're really cool). If this art sounds interesting to you, I would recommend the documentary "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry". It's on Netflix instant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdNZ5vXWMxQ

I have to give you the link because that's the only way I can get it into the video. Sorryyy.

This week the British kids are here, and they're leaving on Sunday, but it was really fun. I had one stay at my house, her name is Emily, and we're totally best friends now. So for film class, we did this project where instead of continuing on with our boring documentaries, we worked on these new fun projects. Everyone got into groups, and then each group got assigned a prop. Our prop was this postal service box filled with tubes and beakers and some weird clocks and also some fairy wands.

So then we had to brainstorm ideas. Most of our ideas revolved around aliens or spaceships or something like that, but seeing as it would be really complicated to actually film a 60 short set in a spaceship and make it look believable, we decided that instead we would go with a mad scientist who makes an android, then falls in love with the android, but the android doesn't know what love is, so the scientist teaches the android how to love with computer coding and a montage, and so the android finally learns to love but once it does it dumps the scientist for some other guy. And then we had to write our script.

We decided that our film was going to be silent because that's just so much easier. So we wrote out a basic script that was pretty much all just description of what was going on, then we did our shot list, and then we did our storyboard and it all turned out beautifully. So then the next day, we borrowed a room from the science teachers, and I got a lab coat (it was so much fun to wear), and then we set about filming. We had to come in after school to film the rest of our movie because it took us a while to figure out how to work out Katie's mom's complicated camera, but once we did, everything was fine.

So we had all our film, and then we set about to editing. We decided to use color correction, so that as the android learns to love the colors slowly turn from colder colors to warmer colors. I'm really glad we thought of that, because that made our short look so much nicer. We also had this thing where after the robot leaves the scientist, it goes to black-and-white. That also looked really cool.

Everything turned out really nicely, and I'm really glad we got a chance to do it. It was a nice break from the documentaries, and it was also just really fun. So after this we go back to documentaries, and then from there on to CAP Hollywood which I am quite excited about. Second semester in general sounds really fun. We could make really amazing films for CAP Hollywood if we put the effort into it, and that's exciting to me.

Anyway, hope you liked the short, and I hope I wrote about everything I was supposed to write about in this post.