My final project is called “Essence,” because it’s about taking minute things from different days, and recording them somehow.  This allows the days to be separated, by these small yet memorable moments.   The inspiration comes from journaling, specifically when I was little.  My mom would always buy me a sketchbook or a composition book every summer, and she would ask me to spend 30 minutes a day writing in it or drawing in it.  I was 5 when I started doing this, so my writing was pretty bad, and the subject matter was really simple. It was drawings of Mom and Dad, my cats, trees.  When I was 7 it was more clear as to what I was talking about, but they were still very simple.  My mom would take pictures of me and my sister sitting outside in the fort, eating popsicles, chasing the cat, or climbing a tree, and we would cut them up and put them in our journals and write captions.

The journal entries would be like this:  ”I ate a banana flavored popsicle today with Katie. It was so good.  And then a butterfly landed on my light up sneakers.” or “Festus (my cat) took a nap on the couch today, and it got all hairy.”  Not complex topics, but memorable ones.  I still remember the pictures my mom took, and my sister and I sitting in the fort together eating yellow popsicles.  They were great times.  I look at my journals from high school and most of the topics are about stupid things like boys or every single thing I did at school.  They were not nearly as memorable or happy as my childhood journals.  Regardless of why, I wanted to sort of revert back to recording simple things in life, little things that captured the essence of the day.  I wanted to use a variety of mediums.  For me, this project is about capturing little good things, and that is it.

The story is one that goes on over the period of the 7 weeks.  It does not illustrate a progression of time, as much as it just records small moments in time.  It’s telling the end of a story, as college is coming to an end for me.  I’m kind of in a strange place, between the real world and the school world.  This is a way of slowing this down, and appreciating my time more, as things have been crazy with school and work.  The process involved creating and blogging.  I would record something that struck me that day, on any paper I had lying around, or take a photo, or whatever it was that was the inspiration for that day, just in case I didn’t have time to get around to it.  I wanted to make it more that just a photo, or a video, I wanted to put a personal spin on it, especially since this entire semester has been about learning new techniques, and exploring, and inspiration.  Some are gifs, some are videos, some are images.  They all have the visual component, and a written component, but I wanted to try and keep the written part to a minimum, short and sweet; however, that didn’t always happen.

Here is the link to the entries for this final project.  As you will see, it’s just a compilation of blog entries.  There is no specific way to read it, as they are not connected in a plot, just in that they all capture the essence of the day they represent.