Section 4 Openings Essay

            For the final section, things were done a little bit differently. For the first openings, I had to play a demo of a video game while listening to an album on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums. I then had to watch a 60-minute video of Walter Murch talking about sound design. For the second openings, as per usual, I watched three TED Talks. It seems to me that the overall theme of this section is creativity, and being creative. To begin, the Walter Murch video featured him talking about different movie scenes and how the sound works in them, and how he had to be creative when designing the sound. The album that I chose to listen to was #1 on the list, which is coincidentally my favorite Beatles album, (if not my favorite album of all) Sgt. Peppers’ Lonely Hearts Club Band. That album is the most creative of the Beatles’ albums, I think. It’s the greatest leap they took; it’s something entirely unique. It really is a great album, and I was thrilled to get to listen to it as homework. The game that I had to play, Machinarium, was based on creative thinking. As a robot, you had to find random objects in the stage to get to the next one and combine them in a creative fashion. The TED Talks that I watched were “Your Brain on Improv,” by Charles Limb, “How to Engineer a Viral Video,” by Adam Sadowsky, and “Your Brain on Video Games,” by Daphne Bavelier. The first one was clearly about creativity, as improvisation is one of the most unique forms of creativity. The second one talked all about a Rube Goldberg machine, which could be called creative thinking in physical form. The final video featured a woman talking about how video games strengthen our brains by forcing us to think of creative solutions. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the openings in the final section, and I enjoyed the overall theme of them.