Friday, June 12, 2009

Monday, June 8, 2009

Video Project-Tokyo Go

Here is my group's final movie, Tokyo Go. The name comes from our focus on transportation in the city. Go also means five in Japanese, which is the number of group members we have. So clever, no? :)

Our group used a different format than other groups by combining our individual pieces into a larger, interwoven short rather than making individual films under a common theme. I created the opening sequence and the train sections as well as filming a little bit of the walking footage.


Friday, June 5, 2009

Big Tokyo LIttle Tokyo

Here is my Japan video. Mark and Amber have been finishing up theirs today but I am the first to post. I am the winner.


Yokohama Spider-La Machine

Dan and I went to Yokohama 8 days ago (Sunday) to visit the Yokohama International Ferry Terminal, previously posted about by Messie. Here are two photos from our visit.



Considering the crazy geometries of the buidling, I think we each did a pretty good sketch of the space.

We then checked out the Y150 expo that is happening all summer to celebrate the city's sesquicentennial (what a great word!). What, from the ferry terminal, we had thought were a flock of birds turned out to be Flogos. When we finally found one that had landed we saw that they're made up of some lighter than air foam. The birds' movement was so lifelike in the way they rode air currents.



Our final stop at the expo was at the giant spider performance art/machine created by art/machine collective La Machine. Here are some snippets from the performance! (Not sure the video will work...we'll see.)



Thursday, June 4, 2009

Just for fun - Japanese Beer


Yokohama Ferry Terminal

During the beginning of this semester, Andrew and I did a project where we designed a sort of deck play space for children. It was pretty awesome. One of the precedents we used was the Yokohama Ferry Terminal by Foreign Office Architects, and HERE IT IS!

It was super beautiful, but really annoying that they put all the guard rails so that you couldn't use your brain to decide where you wanted to walk and where it was a bit too steep. Kind of fun though.

Karaoke, Japan style

As you may have noticed, no one has posted to the blog in quite a while. We've been pretty busy in the evenings working on our project (the video) and doing other crazy things. I will try to post a couple of things now.

A few days ago, some of us went over to Jinbocho, an area of town famous for its old books. It doesn't sound very exciting, but it was. There was some kind of big street festival going on (which seems to happen a lot here...), so we got a ton of delicious, cheap street food and watched some music for a bit. Then we checked out some of the book stores, some of which had hand-printed or wood block-printed editions of manuscripts. Here is an image of one:


Later that night, Mark and I went over to some of Mark's friends houses to eat dinner, and at about 11 we had to decide: do we leave now, or miss the last train home, waiting until 4:30 am to get the first train?

We decided to stay. We went out to a karaoke bar, which is what everyone does in these situations. Here in Japan, karaoke works a bit differently, with small individual rooms that you and your friends cram into. It was tons of fun, but the next day was a complete waste, as we didn't go to bed until about 6:30 am. Here are some fun images of karaoke:


All in all, a fun time.