In this confessional age, TV, radio and print rely for much of their content on the sad stories of those 'victims' of life. The story goes something like this: There is the future 'victim' getting on with their quotidian activities and whoosh, they are whisked into a life of gambling, drugs, sex or junk food addiction. After years of struggle, they finally find redemption and become good people again. As in any good tale of redemption, there has to be a 'reason' for why our 'victim' fell off the rails. Take your pick: they were molested, their parents ran away from home, they were denied desserts except on Sundays. Just thinking about it brings a tear to my stony face. How can you not be moved by tales such as these. What is the precipitating cause of the misery in my life? Well, my mother was French and my father was English. And to make things worse, I was brought up Catholic! Yes folks, in today's shorthand of grievance, I'm a half-breed straddling Canada's great language divide and a religious bigot. My hometown was a mixture of French and English-speaking people and the results of their miscenagation. You could never tell by someone's last name who spoke your language (For instance, my good friend P. Arsenault spoke the Queen's English and my cousin Sean Doyle wouldn't have recognized an Oxford Dictionary if you shoved up his nose). As children, we were segregated by language; all the French-speaking kids went to one side of the school where they spoke French all the time. I was fortunate enough to be sent to the English side of the school and got to speak my native tongue. My parents decided my brother and sister wouldn't be quite so lucky. In an effort to bridge the great language divide, they both spent six years learning everything in French and mingling with the French people (My parents did this because it was the firm belief of all forward-thinking families that whatever road you took would be much smoother if you could speak both of Canada's official languages. As it turns out for my siblings and... According to the above context, choose the correct option to answer the following question. Question: what is probably true of the author Options: A. he lives far from family B. he understands english and french C. not enough information D. he lives in Canada
B

When asked to define ourselves we often use broad brushstrokes. Without thinking we consult our internal list of "things that make me, ME" and find ourselves recalling words like "creative, outgoing, photography, guitar" before we've even had a chance to fully process the question. But how much does this internal list define us? I believed that my internal list was the best representation of myself until I read a quote by Annie Dillard that states: "How we spend our days, is of course, how we spend our lives". This quote hit me like a punch in the gut, it's blatant truth so indisputable; how I spent my days, regardless of what I told myself about myself, was ultimately who I was. Or at the very least would be how I had spent my life. This is why, when completing my self portrait, I decided to focus on the everyday. Within my self portrait I wanted to present the viewer with a familiar yet abstract sense of reality through which we get to see amalgamated glimpses of the everyday acts that define me, rather than a linear narrative or a simple re-telling of 'a day in the life'. Thus combining to create a picture of: my daily life, through an abstracted version of 'the everyday'. To create a sense of 'the day' or linear progression of time I segmented my video with four still images of the sky in various stages of daylight (morning, midday, afternoon, evening) that match the lighting seen in each concurrent video segment. The everyday acts that define me were presented in a series of short video segments that include scenes of me catching the tram, recording music and riding my bike. To disrupt the sense of linear narrative the visual segments are bluntly edited together, with nothing linking the sequential shots and a quite abrupt ending. I also attempted to create an overall sense of confounded time and space by overlaying audio from certain video segments onto others. Long, singular focus, handheld shots were also used to enhance the sense of voyeuristic glimpses. According to the above context, choose the correct option to answer the following question. Question: What did Annie Dillard write about? Options: A. not enough information B. How we spend our lives C. Who we are not D. How we spend our months
B

What is creativity? How de we define creativity? Where does creativity come from? How philosophical is the notion of creativity? Is everyone's 'creativity' different? Or is it an ill conceived, simplified term that is used to describe a very specific series of neuronal & bodily reactions to certain stimuli? These are all the questions I've been thinking (and googling, and youtubing) since beginning this Capturing Creativity studio* and I have found some answers or maybe I've just found more questions: Creativity is generally defined as the ability to make new things, or come up with new ideas, it's an ability to think outside the box, to see unique solutions and employ them in inventive ways. In this sense creativity is not always utilised when being 'creative', as to be creative is simply defined as the ability to make or produce something. However I guess that depends on your definition of creative, how different, unique, special, once off, un-influenced does something have to be, to be classified as creative? This is where creativity get's tricky. It's all well and good to be like oh this is what creativity is, so it's easy to investigate it, but what if you don't define that as being creative, maybe that was just following a formula, a somewhat inspired formula, but maybe it is just a formula. Creativity to most people seems to be a random mix of once off genius combined with solid skill and hard work and for us humans these percentages are unique to us. Maybe creativity to you is 90% unique idea, 5% skill and 5% hard work. Maybe creativity to you is 40% unique idea, 50% skill and 10% hard work. Maybe for you creativity doesn't have to involve any hard work at all. For me when it comes to creativity I'm most interested in that unique idea portion; where does that unique idea come from? Is it simply random? Is it a gift from the gods? Is our unique idea just a product of a lot of subconscious effort, only made aware to us in the sense of a 'random' idea? Have we been influenced by something, processed it... According to the above context, choose the correct option to answer the following question. Question: What is probably true about the narrator Options: A. He is a follower B. not enough information C. He is a writer D. He is a simple person
C