Artistically packed morning

It is amazing how packed one morning, let alone one day can get. The morning started off with my Toastmaster club meeting, where I was one of the speakers. The meeting went fine, though I did stumble a bit through the edited form of Steve Jobs 2005 commencement address. After the meeting, I met with other members of the planning commity for the club's anniversary party to finalize the details. Then it was off to do some graphic work for both the party and my friend's wedding, before I started my shift at my paid job. After work, I sat down to finish a costume commission and more graphic work before heading to bed.

Preparing for Toastmasters

My creativity is not just in illustrative form. Sometimes, my creativity takes the form of the public speaking practiced at my Toastmasters club, Norvic. Currently I am working on a Toastmasters advanced manual called Interpretive Reading, where I go through 5 projects to help me illustrate and properly present points written by others, whether the points take the form of a story, a report, or a speech developed by professional speech writers.

The project that I am working on is the final one in this manual, the Oratorical Speech. Here I must choose a famous speech to present, and use all of my skills to bring the speech to life. Upon first reading of the project, I thought that I might do Martin Luther King's "I have a Dream", mainly just because I liked the title. But after reading the actual speech, I felt no real connection to it, and thus I felt that I couldn't do the speech justice. I needed to look at many different speeches and find the one that I felt the strongest connection. That one turned out to be Steve Job's Commencement Address to the 2005 Stanford graduates. I was in love with his message, and since the project never said that I had to choose a speech from way back in the past, I decided to go with the one by Steve Jobs. All I have to do is edit the speech to fit within the time restrictions of the Toastmasters project. And that was my bit of creativity today.

Fun with movies

On Friday the 17th, I presented & recorded a short play at my toastmasters club meeting. It was part of a project in one of the advanced manuals and was my first attempt at portraying 5 characters. If I had given myself more time, it could have gone better.

In any case, I wanted to start recording my club speeches and make them into mini movies. And what better speech to turn into a movie then my first one-woman play. It took just over 4 hours to arrange with music, transitions, & titles, but I'm happy with the results.

But next project, I'll be much more prepared in both speech and equipment. No more shooting with cell phone.