Film Manipulation Reflection

The film manipulation done in the cameraless movie assignment was rather fun. I believe I mentioned in one of my last blogs that I was waiting to get to release my inner destruction since, as a projectionist, it’s my joke to protect and not destroy film. With this project being the exact opposite of that, I felt like a maniac on the loose. It was fun to take the physical frames of an already made film, destroy it with bleach, ink, and a lovely exacto knife and get to call it my own. The project related to me as a filmmaker because it allowed me to get to appreciate one of the beginnings of film, 16mm, while destroying it. So I guess you could say this project is what is currently happening to film in Hollywood. The term “film” is now going to be outdated because when this year ends no more 35mm prints will be produced for distribution. Making movies on film will be all but extinct. So, we were destroying film and changing it into our own image the way that studios are getting rid of 35mm to make way for their view of a digital future. I personally think it is a same to get rid of 35mm, but as a projectionist I’m biased because I love working with film, threading film, and the sound of a 35mm projector is probably one of the greatest things in the world to me. This project allowed to appreciate the origins of filmmaking before it dies out forever, I had fun, got messy and tried to make it as visually appealing as possible. I enjoyed the experience but it is a sad thought to me that I probably will never get to do filmmaking the same way again.

 

Acoustic Ecology

First off I was very surprised to hear that Acoustic Ecology was a field of study because I had simply never heard of it. It was interesting to read about though, because it made me flashback to the mediafast when I could have my headphones in wherever I went so I was forced to listen to natural sound. It was odd to me because I had spent so much time in the past tuning it out because I’m mostly used to hearing girls chat on their phone on campus, or hearing traffic sounds but campus is more tranquil in the summer. To be honest, it made me feel bad to read/watch all this stuff about learning to listen to our surroundings as I flood my ears with rock music and try to ignore the soundscape around me. It caught me off guard in the listen video when he stopped talking; all I could hear was the light tapping of my roommate’s keyboard. Its weird to considerate that we are always surrounded by a different kind of ambient noise wherever we go. But it’s also ridiculous to hear that Harley and Davidson patented the sound of their motors and sued Honda over it. The world of frivolous lawsuits has now reached the soundscape, great. Anyways, it makes me feel sad to realize I am flooded with sound almost everywhere. It’s getting increasingly more difficult to be able to go to a forest and just listen to the sound of nature without some obnoxious city sound seeping its way into your ears. I guess that’s the world we live in, makes me wish there was more silence. Thought this image protaryed the soundscape well:

Synamatics

I already knew a little bit about Synesthesia from watching weird television shows with my mom. For instance, there was one savant who saw all the numbers as different shapes and could name the first 10,000 digits of the number Pi. It was very fascinating to consider that Synesthesia could help enhance understanding and learning. When David Tammet was talking about different ways of knowing, I interpreted it as being able to see deeper into a world most of us cannot enter. Most people just see numbers but he can see shapes associated with them, or be able to dissect a foreign word better than most of us can. I wonder if many the old theory that humans leave part of their brain unused is true and savants just have more strongly connected neural pathways which leads to their synesthesia. On the topic of cymatics, the first thing I thought of when watching the video was another show I saw with my mom about a blind kid who had learned how to see through clicking his tongue. He used the vibrations from clicking his tongue to visually build the world around him in his mind. Still not 100% sure how it worked but the possibility of other blind people being able to use that technique would be great. I never thought of sound as having possibilities of causing vibrations until I saw it used on the piece of metal. I thought of sound as waves we couldn't see or touch that made no real impact on the world around us. The ability for sound to make patterns on metal does open up a big area of research and I hope they find some cool applications for the discovery. Maybe in five years time they'll be artists who create images in galleries using sound vibrations or x-rays that use sound vibration.

Reflection on Day 1

So, stream of consciousness here we go, rather strange film composed of a lot of scratching on film and dying of film. At points I wondered if the artist had painted the film or if he was careful to cut some parts deeper to get a different color. But, that may just be 35mm that has different layers, because a light scratch on 35mm would be white, and a slightly deeper one would green then really deep ones can reach a range of cyan and magenta. Either way it was all very well timed with the music which must have been tricky to pull off. I wonder how he could have been so precise with the tiny dots on the film when they were on the screen by themselves. At one point I thought a song from disney was playing but I'm pretty sure I was mistaken. Makes me excited to start scratching into film, because all this time I've been careful not to damage any film with my work as a projectionist. So yay now I can let out all my inner destruction! Don't know much else to say but I have to keep writing so the dying effects were pretty. The deep red looked nice but I wonder how he pulled off the two toned dying effect. Hopefully I get to learn how to do some stuff like that, ought to be fun to learn rotoscoping and what not. Guess that's all I have to say, the movie was entertaining.