The Speed of Light

This project required making an Animated Video Short with Animoto. The URL is:
http://animoto.com/play/UFu1KKgw0ot04SbDb9aEnw

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The story behind this short video is that my daughter had come home for Spring Break and as we caught up with what was going on in her life, she made a gesture that took me back to when she was a baby.The time from when she was 6 months old and gesticulated as she had just done now at 23 moved at the speed of light for me. So much of life is like that, as if you just blinked and then you are somewhere else far removed and that was my inspiration for my story. I didn't want to tell a story of nostalgia since that has melancholic connotations and I was very happy having lunch and girl talk with my adult daughter. I wanted to evoke the urgency of life and say that you have to grab on tight, hence the song I chose to go with the video.

Even though this was part of a class project for my Digital Storytelling course and my classmates were my intended audience, I can't wait to show my family what I did and what it means to me. Because Animoto guides you through the project and gives you a limited range of clips or photos and music to chose from, I do not feel I had much creative input other than my intent in making the video. I didn't know what to expect in making the clip through Animoto, especially since all of this technology is so new to me. However, I felt the project was greatly assisted by their step-by-step guidance.

The slight hindrance I found with Animoto is that I wish there were more clips available for each genre. Most challenging to me was trying to make the clips fill the allotted time, so I got a little confused setting the duplicates to play from the beginning and some were cut off earlier than I would have liked. On the other hand, the great highlight of the project was picking the music and then seeing how it all came together.

I learned to put images and music together, which is quite an experience for me. I know this is old hat for a lot of people but the great thing about being so green is being filled with such an amazing sense of wonder!

South Florida's Coral Reefs in Wordle

This code is the link to my latest project for digital Storytelling and it was done through Wordle, which can be linked using this code:
          <a href="http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3145791/Leonor_Alvarez-Perez"
          title="Wordle: Leonor Alvarez-Perez"><img
          src="http://www.wordle.net/thumb/wrdl/3145791/Leonor_Alvarez-Perez"
          alt="Wordle: Leonor Alvarez-Perez"
          style="padding:4px;border:1px solid #ddd"></a>

The story I wanted to tell through Wordle is about the coral reefs off the coast of South Florida, which are beautiful, unique, and alive. I love to snorkel and get lost in the silence of an entire world onto its own that exists so close to the surface of the water.

Many people are unaware that the reefs are alive, that they are animals with tiny plants inside them, and that they are unique in the United States and singular world-wide in that they lie in shallow waters. Hence, my inspiration in telling this story is to make people realize their singularity and fragility. I wish to awaken in visitors to our reefs a sense of awe and by extension of protection.

I created this story keeping in mind the beautiful colors of the corals as they undulate in the water and the terrible damage people inflict on them as they attempt to reach out and touch them. Sometimes swimmers try to balance on them with their fins or boaters clunk down anchors between them and chunk pieces off. A common belief seems to be that the coral can repair itself, but the reality is that once it is damaged it remains ailing and often dies. Awareness is one of the foremost factors in the enlistment of cooperation.

The challenge of using Wordle is that the project can be easily lost when you are trying to see how the arrangement looks. However, the highlight is how the essential words of the piece are enlarged and rearranged so that it pops out at you in one piece and tells a story instantly without actually having to read the entire article. Personally, I love to read but sometimes you just want the gist of it and this is the advantage of using Wordle to tell a story.

Another One Bites the Dust

I am taking a Digital Storytelling course and creating this blog is one of my class projects. I have never had a blog before so I will be exploring a whole new world. My first story is about something close to my heart, historical/architectural preservation, which I will post here with an image.

 Art Deco was characterized by skyscrapers in the United States but in Miami, particularly Miami Beach, it was low scaled. Some of the Art Deco buildings, especially the hotels along Ocean Drive used the finials and spires of skyscrapers, but on buildings that never exceeded eight stories.

Art Deco style in Miami Beach reflected the ocean liners that were the essence of luxury and travel and were intrinsically tied to our tourist economy by the use of wide, long porches with metal rails and porthole windows. The bas reliefs, friezes, iron ornamentation on screened doors, and etched glass windows reflected the South Florida vernacular. This vernacular of untamed mangrove foliage, alligators, and rare birds of the Everglades must have seemed exotic to the rest of the nation, since Florida is the only state that is sub-tropical, but it spoke to what defined the state.

During the Depression the commission of public buildings was relegated to the W.P.A. throughout most of the U.S. However, Miami Beach saw a flurry of activity with the investment of private funds for the creation of small hotels that catered to the middle class, a virtually unheard of occurrence during the Great Depression.  Streamline Moderne emerged during this time by capitalizing on the aerodynamic designs of Art Deco but simplified, streamlined, and softened by the rounding of corners.

Appreciation for the Art Deco architecture in Miami Beach did not really come about until 1979 with the creation by Barbara Capitman of the Miami Design Preservation League.  Notwithstanding,  it has been an uphill battle to save buildings from the wrecking ball. Two of  the most important examples of  Art Deco and Streamline  in Miami Beach were the The Senator hotel and the New Yorker hotel, both imploded in the name of progress. The Senator was the quintessential example of Art Deco architecture. Built in 1939 by L. Murray Dixon with porthole windows, smooth keystone (as the local oolitic limestone is know) tinted in the lightest shade of pink before it fades into white, etched glass, terrazzo floors (once ubiquitous in South Florida and now almost nonexistent), a bas relief  pelican fountain, straight-line ledges jutting slightly over the windows to provide shade, and a perfume bottle spire in the center. It suffered the ultimate indignity in 1988 when it was demolished to make a parking lot. The New Yorker was built in 1939 as well by one of the foremost architects in Miami, Henry Hohauser. Rising eight stories high on Collins Avenue with perfectly rounded off corners that made it appear to be hugging itself, its back towards the ocean, with a central parapet that reached up towards the skies it defined the elegance and yet solidity of Streamline architecture. Carefully cloaked under the rights of property ownership it was demolished in 1981.

When these structures are sacrificed to the wrecking ball not only do we lose a part of history and an artistic form that is irreplaceable, but we lose yet another of the bonds that create a sense of place for a city that as a tourist destination has often been transient like the dirigibles that had to be tied down with multiple steel cables off the McArthur Causeway, lest they drift away.

Creating this blog was not difficult, it was the images I struggled with. This image of an old postcard sat on the top of the blog forever, until recently when I was able to move it to its appropriate spot. I think it mostly has to do with losing your fear of doing something wrong and then losing the image completely.