Artist Talk

    Hello this is Xinyi. Today I'm gonna introduce my capstone project.

This is my history and some of my projects. I mainly focus on photography and video. I have taken a lot of photographs before. I also have experience in using a projector to make a project. And here I just show some photos I proud of.

    I want to talk about my personal history — I’ve done this kind of work, here are some of my last projects.... Most of them are photography related. I am better at shooting land field. my motto storytelling through empathy

    When I looked into other project I was inspired by Steven McCurry's work. The main style of his works is color contrast and light and dark contrast. I think this style can easily express emotion for creators. The huge contrast can make the audience more resonant.

    Another inspiration is haiku. My minor is Japanese, so I have some understanding of Japanese culture. I really like the expression of haiku which corresponds to the picture. So in my project, I will use photos, text, and audio to show the inspiration I got from haiku.

    I titled this project because as it literally means, this is a project that records my memories about boulder. I hope that through this title, the audience can watch my project with this impression from the beginning, so that they can better understand the emotions I want to express.

    A bit about my process. I want my audience to have an immersive experience when viewing my photos, so I want to record some related sounds to promote such a simple immersive experience. After I determined the general direction of the project at the beginning, I first started to take a lot of photos and record audio. Because in my production process, a lot of inspiration is not at the beginning. In the process of obtaining materials, I am more likely to be inspired by the surrounding environment. The entire process of collecting materials lasted about two months. Although the process is very long, I have collected a lot of interesting sound materials and photo materials. When I was making audio, at the beginning, I inserted some copyright free music to enhance the emotion I wanted to express. This is the website where I found the music. But in the process of communicating with classmates and professors, I found that the added music obscured the environment sound that I originally wanted to reflect. Most people think the music part is redundant. So at the end, I separated the music part from the environment sound part. But I don't want to abandon this part easily, because I think music is part of the communication between creators and audience. In order to better show the emotion I want to express, I finally put the selected part of copyright free music at the end of the playlist. This allows the audience to choose whether to listen to the music part.

    When I reflect on this project, I think I actually have a lot of room for improvement. Because of the epidemic and personal reasons, my coverage is not very wide. Only limited to the Boulder area. And because most of the collection time is winter. The main colors of my photos are a bit monotonous, and I have to use some of the photos I took in the seasons to improve the overall color style. If I had the opportunity to create the project again, I would want to take some more colorful photos.

    When I think about the role this project plays in relation to my past at CU and my future, I think this project can make me think more about how to use the medium to convey my ideas to the public. Because sometimes pictures and audiovisual can better promote communication between people. The text may be a bit complicated, but the pictures will be easier for people to understand. I think this project has allowed me to improve my performance ability and provided myself with an opportunity to show myself.