Record carton 33

Overview "In this collection of short stories, a nearly-blind grandfather drives around town guided by his grandchild; a woman struggles to communicate with her demented elderly mother while trying to keep her marriage from falling apart; a teenager who blames himself for his mother's death searches for the perfect funeral flowers; a Puerto Rican woman living in Boston recalls her childhood on the island while awaiting surgery; a man literally meets God; another finds his calling as a sperm donor...

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"Ark is an experimental documentary about a cruise ship at the end of the world. In this film we tour the ship and discover through anonymous voices that the present is actually the future." -- Abstract

Overview "After discovering that the all-female performing troupe founded by her mother is out of money, Sophie Hamilton decides to spearhead one last effort to keep the show alive. They travel to a ramshackle theater in New York City and attempt to build their show from the ground up. Sophie finds herself torn between the troupe that has been her family and her entire world for twenty years and the pull of the outside world, particularly in the form of Samuel Ackermann, the son of one of the...

Overview "The aim of this project was to repackage Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic novels: 'The Secret Garden,' 'A Little Princess,' and 'Little Lord Fauntleroy.' I updated and designed all three books as a cohesive box set and additionally planned out and developed a layout for a board book version of 'The Secret Garden.' The purpose was to study how designers make decisions to repackage classics, what choices they make while designing new formats, and what demands different formats hold. This...

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"The collection of short stories explores the themes of addiction, fear and greed. The complex characters struggle to find their place in life. The protagonists range from a struggling musician trying to kick a drug habit to a woman trying to forgive her father. Throughout the collection there are many twist and turns. The suspense unfolds slowly giving hints of the protagonist's future. Regrets and life lessons are at the heart of these stories." -- Abstract

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"No Future is a collection of linked short stories set in a near future in Bakersfield, California, chronicling the lives of Raphael "Raffi" Veras and Louis Palko. Each story is voice-driven and unified by the idea that spectacular ambitions and technological advancements are always marred by an escape from messier, more fundamental human conflicts." -- Abstract

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"Colour is a twelve minute still image short film. The film portrays a unique relationship between a young girl and a toy seller and the influence of his tales with moral lessons on the girl's outlook to life. She breaks the shackles that is imposed on her by her parents and learns to embrace life and especially youth." -- Abstract

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"Underside is a short narrative film about Oliver, a middle-aged man who lives out of his car. The film follows Oliver as he struggles to maintain his secret from everyone around him and keep his dignity intact. The film explores themes of anger, shame, and identity in contrast with what one person presents to the world and the reality of their life." -- Abstract

Overview "The purpose of this study is to investigate the tendency of mainstream media when reporting Tibet independence related stories as well as measure its ability to influence college students' perception of Tibet's independence. The three targeted research areas of this thesis are students' exposure to mass media affected by technology improvement; U.S. mainstream media's tendency when reporting Tibet's independence related stories; media's ability to influence students' perception over Tibet's...

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"A heretic and a genie. Drowning and burning. Can a heretic convert her coworkers to heresy? Can a genie grant wishes and make life less boring? In these two stories, both characters know that sometimes we need the fantasy in order to tolerate the reality. They also know that metaphors are fun and real life is hard. But knowing the facts doesn't make their worlds any easier." -- Abstract

Overview "What our minds label as "foreign," we tend to regard as exotic, threatening, or irrelevant. Our instinct is to neatly compartmentalize and hold at arm's length that which we have separated from ourselves. But what happens when the division between the foreign and familiar becomes ambiguous? Painful are the times in life when we discover the defection of the familiar to the foreign. A relationship with someone we love, an aspect of our own identity: it is disorienting, jarring, and unnerving...

Overview "This sequence of poems works to embody the experience of finding, making and even abandoning ground—the poems move from the seemingly individual to that of the collective. With a range of prose poems and haiku threaded among a majority of free verse poems, the collection aspires to synthesize the abstract with the physical. Who are we outside of the constructs of this world—race, gender, time—how do we acknowledge a reality, while rejecting it altogether? Full of influences from the...

Overview "This collection of short stories and flash are the best I've written during my graduate education at Emerson College. These stories follow a style distinctly my own, examining the human condition of individuals in their 20s. The men and women represented in these stories are adrift, not successful or happy, and are living inconsolable lives: a man starts digging to China to find his estranged wife, a young woman tries to find solace by accosting her favorite musician, a filmmaker attributes...

Overview "Charlotte, or Charlie, becomes a drifter and leader of a women's street-art movement called "You Go Girl" after her apartment burns down, her relationship with long-term lover Bellamy ends, and she checks out of McLean Psychiatric Hospital with PTSD. With her boyfriend and all of her belongings gone, Charlie adopts the cause as her life, moving from city to city every few months, living on insurance money, sleeping in shelters, on couches and floors, in beds that come with monetary or...

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"Terrorismo is an animated graphic narrative about three friends who decide that they can no longer live a life of poverty and discrimination. They decide that their only course of action is to gain the attention of terrorist in hopes of joining him in his crusade of violent social change." -- Abstract

Overview "Does a Bear Need Many Glasses? is an eight-minute fiction short film. It tells the story about a man who always wears a bear costume, which does not have a smile on the face. He goes to a craft store to buy some drinking glasses and falls in love with the woman who runs the store. When he gets back home he cuts his bear face to make a smile. The next day, he catches a thief who is stealing from the store and fights the thief. But he is defeated and the woman thinks he is attacking the man....

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"This collection of linked memoir essays explores themes of race, masculinity and identity. By focusing on moments of compromised agency and subsequent emotional crises, the larger conversation taking between place between each narrative sheds light on the experience of a "middle man" tasked with navigating the dualities and contradictions that seem to define him." -- Abstract

Overview "This paper discusses an approach to considering the affect 'awe' as a pedagogical tool and an inciter of cognitive and affective processes. Utilizing qualitative research on the topic, as well as educational, cognitive, psychological and neuro-psychological theorists, the paper argues that an educator can harness and utilize awe stimuli to allow a learner to simultaneously experience affect automaticity and a need for accommodation, making it possible for awe and awe stimuli to act as a...

Overview "Melinki Lander Arena is a science fiction video game in the low poly flat-shaded style, with role playing and real-time strategy components. This game is played on maps that are actual 3D objects, which is a new approach in mobile device gaming, and unique to this application. This project combines multiple elements from different gaming mechanisms to synthesize a whole. While thematically similar to individual science fiction space games that preceeded it, the principal challenges of this...