You're a wizard Harry

It always seems that when there’s a vacation or a break from school coming up, the days in between you and that break seem to stretch on forever. I’m going home tomorrow afternoon, but I’m guessing today will be the longest day ever.

The other night I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with a bunch of girls from the house. It's lucky that our college colors are the same colors as Gryffindor so we all wore our USC scarves that can easily double as Harry Potter scarves. The crowd was so tame for a midnight opening show. We got there around 10:15 thinking we'd be beat out and there'd already be a huge line formed, but there wasn't a line. People were already in the theater but it was only half full so we got pretty good seats. We spent the time playing trivia games and hanging out. I know that all the people who are devout harry potter fans are going to knock the movie for all the things that it left out, but overall I enjoyed the movie a lot. It didn’t bother me as much as the 3rd one. I thought the special effects and animation were well done and they fit in most of the important stuff. My favorite scenes are when they have something going on in the great hall. In this movie, they were having the Yule Ball and all these ice sculptures were everywhere and snow was falling. Let’s face it, I just want to become a wizard and go to Hogwarts myself.

I had a rather unsuccessful invite last Friday. I ended up going with a few girls in the house because all the sororities were having invites that night, which made finding a date even harder and we were too burned out to bother. I wish I had tried though because going with a group of girls…not so fun. Also, I was getting sick so I spent most of the night sitting outside at one of the tables on the patio sneezing.

I downloaded a trial version of Adobe After Effects, which is one of the professional software programs used to create lettering animation so probably most movie intros you see where it has cool effects with the cast names is created with After Effects. I am seriously considering buying it before I graduate and Final Cut Pro, which is $299 at the bookstore at the student rate. That’s really good considering it usually about $1200 for Final Cut Pro Studio. If I practice at that, I might be able to eventually get a job at The Cimarron Group or somewhere like it, which does almost all the movie trailers created.
I registered for classes a while back, but yesterday decided to take advantage of the fact that you can take 18 units for the same cost as 16, so I added a 2 unit class just for fun that I’ll probably take for pass/fail. I'll be doing a lot of studio type classes so I feel like I'll have a really productive semester. So here’s my finalized list of what I am taking in the spring and I couldn’t be more excited:


*Advanced Design Projects (4 units) Advanced information design within a flexible curriculum. Emphasis on team-oriented projects.

* The World of Visual Effects (2 units)- Introduction to the expanding field of visual effects; topics include magic lanterns shows, stop-motion fantasies and animation combination films employing the latest digital technologies

*Printmaking (4) Introductory course in various printmaking techniques; necessary skills and inherent expressive qualities of different printmaking methods are explored.

*Advertising Design and Production (4, Sp) Production of advertising materials; emphasis on the creation and design of advertising elements.

* Writing 340 (4 units)- topics involved with arts and humanities