Crosley Spelman

 Blog posts combined points - (38 points)  Classes attended - 7/7 (7 points) Total Points: (45 points) Coming into this class I had not been exposed to many Gothic and Horror works. However, I have thoroughly enjoyed the many different genres and types of literature we have covered so far! I look forward to the remaining works.  

    The Night Circus caught my attention by the very premise of the story, "a circus that arrives without warning." One that only appears at nightfall and leaves at dawn, the next location never pre-determined. While I found the overall concept to be imaginative and original, as well as the characters unique, the back and forth jumping of the story often left me going back and re-reading certain parts. I usually don't like it when books and in some cases documentaries use this technique of jumping back and forth in time. I prefer a more linear approach where it progresses forward in time throughout the whole book and or documentary. In the end though, the character of Prospero and the dynamic between him and his now motherless daughter Celia. I found the way he viewed her at first to be a very telling factor of the time setting in which this story took place. He showed no interest in her because of her gender, that is until she started exhibiting the same magical powers t...

      I had only had the privilege of seeing The Hobbit movie prior to taking this course. So naturally I was excited to read the actual book to compare how accurate the movie was to the original text. I found the sheer world building and hyper descriptive nature of Tolkien's writing to be like nothing I had experienced prior. I am a Motion Design major here at Ringling, so a large part of my job in many projects I take on is to create a visual narrative to represent lets say a voice over of someone, and how that would be animated to connect the viewer to the narrative on both a spoken aloud and visual level. So naturally, during the course of my reading, the visuals of what I was reading were popping off the charts! More important than that, what also relates to what I do as an artist, is story telling and developing a satisfying arch to a visual story that leaves the viewer feeling that everything was well connected and conveyed. One aspect in The Hobbit that I found to...

     I thoroughly enjoyed reading Akata Witch , I found the flow of the book to be easily digestible and kept me engaged by not going into "hyper detail" even in the scenes with the most action taking place. Obviously, any concept that involves a young protagonist outcast that one day learns that they posses magic powers through witchcraft will always be compared to the likes of Harry Potter . Along with following similar tropes of that construct through a similar dynamic between the young "leopards" of Akata Witch  living in an alternative world from the rest of society that consists of sorcery and magic spells. However, I believe the author did a good job of minimizing the potential comparison between the two stories.      First off, Harry Potter took place in a very "western setting" and through a "western lens." While on the other hand, Akata Witch takes place in Africa among characters that have a completely different world view and live in...