6 by 1 Ratings

Projects:

Film Manipulation - 2
Media Fast Interpretation -6
Crowdsourcing - 3
Anaglyph 3D - 4
Multiplane Animation -1
Bolex Long Take - 5

This is my rating of all of my projects. The multiplane animation was my favorite for a lot of reasons. I really liked the soundscape we used, I enjoyed making all the cities and characters, and it was the most fun I had out of any of the projects. We knew what we were doing but along the way we kept coming up with new things to add and it just kept getting more crazy and we still ended up finishing early with over 600 frames. My only complaint on it is that it is hard to hear the dialogue in the final product. The film manipulation was my second favorite because I appreciate the fact that film is a dying art and I'll probably never get to do something like that again. I didn't know what to expect but I think it came out really cool in the end. My next favorite was the crowdsourcing cause I enjoyed drawing all the frames and seeing how it looked all together. My soundscape had room for improvement though. It was timed to the original video but the cues didn't show up in the final crowdsourcing video so I was sad to see my timing didn't translate. I see something new every time I watch the video and its really awesome. The next one was the anaglyph 3D, obviously it was awesome to get to make a 3D film I just feel like we could have done more with shot variation and depth. I did like how my backdrop came out. After that, I enjoyed the bolex long take. But, I think a one minute film is always longer than you expect and I feel like we could have done more in the plot and I wish the film hadn't come out overexposed. My least favorite one was the media fast video. This is because I thought the red string idea was cool to show how we are tied to technology but I wish I had used ribbons instead of actual string because it didn't show up in the film at all and just made the whole video seem rather strange. Overall, I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of lessons about what works and what doesn't.

Rough Theater

The idea of rough theater relates to me as a filmmaker because I also happen to be a double major in Theatre Tech and Production. So, I've always been a believer that film strives when it uses aspects of theater or incorporates theatricality into its storytelling. Specifically rough theater relates to my filmmaking so far because when you're a college students all your films become low budget and you have to rely on what you can get. So, using things like cardboard for a set makes the film campy in a fun way and also saves a lot of money for people who just want to make films for fun and are not aiming for the next Citizen Kane. As a theatre student however, I would say that all theater has a roughiness that the article describes. Broadway doesn't seem like it, but I've seen a moustache fall off someone's face mid show during a broadway musical (luckily it was Spamalot so they laughed it off quite well). All theatre has techies running around backstage, sweating and stressing as they make the fly system work, keep the actors on point, move the set around, etc. Theater is always rough, the trick is just making it look good when there is an audience watching. But, it is fun not to aim for perfection and make a joke out of the roughiness that can't be avoided on a budget. Thats been the fun of this class so far, improvisation and quick deadlines gives our projects a spontaneity they wouldn't have achieved otherwise. So, rough theater to me is a fun campy form of art I would like to continue in my free time.

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.