SM2289 WRITING DIGITAL MEDIA

ASSIGNMENT 5_B

SEMESTER A

21/10/2014

A) Writing about one selected project in WMC_e5

Selected Piece: Jess LAU - THE FADING PIECE

The reason why I like Jess's piece, is complex, but is all about the way he interprete the process of - building, drawing, trasporting, moving, re-constructing, a city, and a piece of black crayon.

The first idea came into my mind was the application of stop-motion animation technique. Both two video clips were made with this method which is amazingly consistent and suitable for visualizing the theme of this piece. Construction of a city cannot be done overnight; a city must grow bit by bit over time; this is the same with a piece of crayon: if it is gone in a second, we call it disappearance instead of being used up or deconstructed. And the time duration, through which the city view on the paper was built and the crayon gradually came to zero, reminds me exactly of the grow and dilatation of a city. Aren't the short straight strokes similar to the buildings seen from far? All the same, all straight-up and box-like, big and stable as well as stereotyped, repeating. This echoes with the way the crayon was consumed: all we see was the process of it getting shorter and shorter. How it was used up can be easily assumed, but the process of consumption was UNSEEN, UNREVEALED to us. I can't help thinking about the procedure of stretching up a new building from the ground: materials get to the site, workers build up scaffolds and cranes, hang up green safe gauzes, then continuously ding-dung for several months, and a building just stands up! Seeing from the perspective of the view in this work, it is not possible to see how the view was implemented but rather, we see their growth; this can further be deduced into that, ordinary citizens do not really participate in the physical construction of the city but they go through the grow together with the city. This cannot be ignored as a new discuss and illustration about citizen-city relationship.

Also, I would regard the crayon as a epitome of human beings. To some small extent we are indeed using up ourselves to build cities; the only great thing is that we can continuously produce more human beings. The city view, similar to what shown in the work, can be "manufactured". Then what is the material?

The last point I came to think about was derived from the textual promotion and introduction material obtained on-site. In the paragraph describing this piece, one sentence caught my attention: "他們攜手建立也消滅了城市。(they built up, as well as demolished the city, hand in hand.)" Interestingly, the sentence can only be found in the English version of the paragraph. Why there is the word "消滅(demolish)"? The explanation, or say, point of view, of mine, is that, if seeing from the perspective of space, which refers to the spatial area of a city, indeed the city is gradually being "demolished": with more and more buildings built, what the concept of the city refers to is gradually changed into the human-made beings, instead of the space, or even the geographical area. This phenomena is typically obvious when we come to think about the problem "what will people precisely use to part Mainland China and Hong Kong?" I bet some of them will come up with the answer "Lok Wu MTR Station" or "Lok Wu port".

The only thing I am confused about this work is: can it be included in the collection as a piece of text-based work? Obviously it is not text-based, and has nothing to do with literature.

B) Imitating one of the given sample writings

The excerpt I am imitating: The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien


Their carrying are largely decided by what course they are having today and what assignment they decide to finish. Lilian often carries a red Kingston USB flash disk and a long cotton wrap while the big water bottle is often in her hand: shiny, coffee-cup-shaped, Starbucks; The bottle thing is not the same for Dorothy: her bottle met her in her in junior 3 and now she is year 3 in college. A pair of off-brand earphones, a refillable notepad and the used auto pencil all have their own positions; her bag is not big, so she hold her cumbersome ASUS laptop in her arms, but recently it was replaced with a brand new MacBook Pro. If not the Mac, then the biggest package will be a pack of Canon DSLR camera and lenses plus a foot stool, carried on her thin shoulder. Sarah's bag is tiny, there is only her Samsung phone, charging cable and glasses inside, being social like her means herself is her best carrying. Coffee, a slim girl, always has take-outs from different restaurants. Alice has a wooden comb, which was a expensive birthday present from herself for the eighteenth birthday, and a mirror. Before Pioneer finished her hardware hacking course, she always takes a white plastic bag with the messy wires, mainboards, switches and LEDs; when her animation course started, she instantly said goodbye to them and changed the filling of the bag into a peg bar, animation paper and pencils. To avoid forgetting things she just put everything into her bag, no wonder her iPad cover has been very worn only being used for several months and she is able to dig out a dozen of supermarket receipts. Joshua, who loves judging singers, wears a big Bang&Oflusen headset plugged into his tiny iPod Shuffle; he still loves music but has been too busy entering year 2, then the headset and player was gone, his backpack contains nothing more than his laptop. Cici carries a camera for photography course, hanging it over her neck. Aneta stuck with her iPhone: WeChat, Facebook, and Temple Run. Until she quitted university, she has never brought her own laptop to class: carrying such thing is not allowed for a lady like her.

/*The above paragraph was created on 26/11/2014.

/*The below paragraph was created on 18/10/2014, also for this assignment, but not based in HK. I like this paragraph, so I keep it here.

The sound of the motorbikes got closer. Gradually someone riding on the leading bike showed up: a middle-aged man, sunburnt face, uncleared mustache, wearing in a old jacket, riding on the leading bike. Wang is one of the starters of this motorbike team: he came up with the idea "going back home by motorbikes instead of train" when more than half of workers of their construction site failed to get themselves train tickets before the Spring Festival. Messy and dusty hair stuck out beneath his helmet. A pair of hairpin with sleapy, gingerbready plastic beads and fake dimonds were pinned to his coat's collar. They should not be there indeed, but indeed they are what he could afford to buy for his youngest daughter, 7 years old, studying back in the village primary school. She had never been to Shenzhen, never able to see the skyscrapers built by his father. Ping, Wang's wife, was sitting behind Wang, holding a big bag in her arms, carrying another on her back. We'd better say cloth-bundles instead of bags. Their all are in there: new clothes for their three kids to wear in the fifteend days of Spring Festival, children snacks, cold steamed bun, unfinished packed pickle, bottle water, bare tissue, two ID cards, cell phone charger, a towel, a small remainning piece of soap, shower shampoo, two big cans of infant mild powder, Ping's gold earings warpped by a piece of newspaper, both persons' 3-year contract contained carefully with a used shopping bag of Juicy Couture, and beneath everything, a pack of loose bill and coins together with a stack of 100 yuan notes. Wang and Ping were pretty sure that kids' new clothes would be successful in showcasing how much wealth the family has gained in last year before the relatives. Li and Mei were the second couple of the team. They did not have much carryings with them, but it was so eyecatching that Mei was holding a fully loaded white plastic bag carefully with both arms, inside are several kinds of medicine for waist strain;on her left shoulder hangs a brand-new bright-pink backpack with paintings of dancings Barbies; this is the best thing they can think of for Li's niece after her father passed away due to industrial injuries. Li was on a phone call, he talked with high spirit, despite his bare hand holding the cellphone the cold wind. Maybe this was caused simply by the his new phone, though it was only a cheap copy of the newest generation of iPhone. Third group consisted of only one old man and one bike; Xu's wife, Wen, had to stay in the city to serve the family's new born baby and its mother. He was not happy even with the fact that the family had finally promised her to pay 2 times of her regular wage for serving January. He could not help stretching the bag on his back closer to him: his year-round savings are all in there, totally counts up to more than six thousand yuan. There were bunch of people depending on him: his solitary 80-year-old father, paralyzed younger brother and finally, his secondary-school-student daughter. Oh yes, he forgot, but why can he forgot? He should have think of her in the first place! Poor girl, she is so young for him to remind himself of the fact that it have been more than five years since her last staying, crying in front of her mother for only several hours, don't even mention her father...his face got more sombre, he was again thinking about how can he help the poor neighbor girl with a, at least a little bit warmer, well-spent Spring Festival, a good New Year's Eve dinner and some part, "yes that's of course a small part but I indeed do not have much to give," -of her next year tuition. ......

Notes

1. This writing pieceis a fast shot of the highway journey of a bunch of migrant workers, going back to their hometown, before the Spring Festival period arrive, by their own motorbikes (usually the majority of migrant workers choose train as their main transportation because it's relatively cheap; some also choose bus. Motorbike home-returning is a kind of transportation developed by the group themselves in recent years and had caught a lot of attention).

2.What I try to imitate is the third given example excerpt.

3. I'd say this is a really a bad imitation. I simply have no idea about how to simply jot down clear object names without using any adectives or any descriptive sentences on them.

4. The original excerpt does not contain really direct descriptions on the characters themselves; on the contrary it indirectly let readers know about the characters by focusing on their carryings. I know this, I think that was fantastic and I admit that I was instantly absorbed by the paragraph; I simply can't do anything like that.