Tuesday, September 26, 2006

Welcome to RISD!

I'm finally updating my poor, neglected blog. Here's a huge update for everyone who has been wondering "What the hell is Jessica doing at RISD?!!"

The first weekend of school was Welcome Week, a three-day event sponsored by the school to get students acquainted with the school and with one another. Some of the activities were lame, but I'll spare you the boring details and get right to the fun stuff.

There was a block party held on Benefit St. where all of the school clubs tried to recruit new students. There were also several food vendors, 'sumo wrestling', and kangaroo and panda.







Also present was RISD's bizzare school mascot, Scrotie. I took these pics especially for you, Echo. :)



There were two people doing free screenprinting for the students too. I got a shirt from H&M and had it printed.




Artist's Ball was fun as hell. I had four shots of rum, dressed up in a turntable costume, and danced my ass off. The DJ freaked out when he saw me, came down from the DJ booth, and took his picture with me.




The workload here at RISD is pretty intense. The majority of the students here are competitive, highly opinionated, and very self-motivated. It's good to work among more intense artists; they really motivate me to push myself. RISD is more of an 'idea school', so some majors focus less on technical education and more on developing concepts, especially in the junior and senior year. This can be a good or a bad thing, depending on the student.

Lately, I have been working furiously on final projects for animation, painting, and video. I am really getting into DJing, VJing, and creating music videos as a career option lately.

More pics and info soon!

Monday, September 04, 2006

I GOT MY DJ EQUIPMENT!

I have been listening to records nonstop afeter I got my DJ equipment in the mail over the weekend. The experience of listening to music on vinyl as opposed to CD or Mp3 is, in my opinion, far superior. Some great things about vinyl are that you can manipulate the pitch, start easily from anywhere in a track, and best of all, SCRATCH!

I have been practicing slip-cueing a lot, since I haven't recieved my second deck and mixer yet. Slip cueing involves scratching over the first beat of a track so that it starts right on beat. The most difficult thing about slip cueing isn't getting it on the beat, but getting an instant start. It sound really shitty when a record is started so that the vocals seem to 'bend'--it sounds a bit likte the audio on a old video tape.

I got the most amazing pair of Technics headphones. They have ridiculously broad frequency range--5 Hz to an ear-bleeding 30,000 Hz. They make everything sound as if you're in a stadium hearing the music. I will definitely be using these in video editing and sound classes!

Only a few days left until school! I am so excited about the opportunities I will have there to improve as an artist and work my way to a great job! I can't wait for the freedom and not having to ride the stupid bus to class anymore!