Final Responses

Rayogram Response

This was my least favorite of all the things we’ve done in class. It wasn’t all that interesting to me to put a bunch of stuff on a strip of film and turn the light on for a second. I did enjoy, however, processing the film. It’s kind of sad that this is the first time I’ve done anything with film since I’ve come to film school and it’s the end of my junior year. This was also the only project that, before editing, did not create something comprehensible. It was just a blur of shapes running through a projected not given meaning by image or theme, such as the earth, wind, fire, and water project.
The editing section was the best part of this project. Due to its only being offered at 8 am, I have yet to take Markowski’s sound design class. Thus, I have never used a Marantz to record sound before. For this reason, I jumped at the chance to do sound effects for this project. I was interested to see what the picture editors had done because all of the images we had were pretty much incomprehensible and did not easily lend themselves to a coherent story. I would argue that, even after picture editing, it was still incoherent aside from the fact that it had titles suggesting a sports theme. This fact gave Matt and me a fairly wide open sound effects track. So, we grabbed a Marantz and a shotgun mic and went around campus. We recorded sounds of people running and swimming to keep with the sports them. We also recorded cars going by and a plane flying overhead. We then worked all of these in, the plane came in handy for a scene with a guy throwing a discus, and added some heartbeats to simulate adrenaline. I love editing and it was cool to be able to create a mood, that really wasn’t apparent in the visuals, with sound.

Collage Project Response

I loved this project. It was nice to be able to do whatever I wanted. However, this was also, at first, terrifying. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do when we first got the guidelines for the project. I had a vague idea that I wanted to do something criticizing the Bush Administration as they seem to have more and more contempt for the truth and the American public. It was not until I was introduced, completely by accident, to the song Bin Laden by Immortal Technique that it hit me. I would make a music video for the song using found footage.
I thought that, after getting the idea, everything would be easy. However, this was not the case. I was unable to find any real downloadable footage of Bush lying as it was almost all on YouTube. I did not find out about downloading off of YouTube through vixy.net until after I finished the project. Luckily, Google Video had some downloadable content and I grabbed a lot of images off of Google Image. It was fairly easy to match up the images with the lines in the song and cutting on the ends of lines and on the beats helped make the transition between pictures smooth and also helped drive the pictures forward.
I was very happy with the way it all turned out. It was nice to be able to create something voicing my political beliefs that also looked really cool. I was able to find some interesting video clips as well as come clips of Bush being a lying, poorly spoken jackass.

An Update Delayed

It was interesting to see how our animation footage turned out. While it looked kind of cool, I was a bit disappointed by how it turned out. The lighting was weak and it seemed a bit fuzzy and out of focus. Also, it was hard to gauge how many frames to have before moving the pieces. We underestimated a bit, so everything moved by very quickly. Luckily, the images can be slowed down in Final Cut. However, I did like how the helicopter and the mice looked. Their movements were very fluid. I believe that a story can be pulled from the footage that we have, it just needs to be slowed down a bit, especially if we combine it with the footage from one of the other groups that also had a jungle setting.

I wasn't a big fan of the 100 frame animation project. It was a cool idea in theory, but the missing segments hurt the continuity. Also, because the contact printing was so hurried, there were jump cuts and it was a bit off center in places. Also, for some reason, a lot of the project was out of focus. I think my section turned out well and it looked a lot like the way I imagined it would when I drew it.

I saw The Yes Men before a few years ago, but had forgotten just how good it was. Being that they have a lot of the same beliefs that I do, I am very impressed by the audacity of their actions and how well they use other people's obliviousness to get their message to as wide an audience as possible. Also, they are not annoying activists. There's nothing I dislike more than activists trying to force their ideals on you and being confrontational. Though I usually agree with what they're trying to say, I want to believe the exact opposite thing just out of spite. The Yes Men don't, they use satire and visual gags instead of confrontational to get their points across. I thought it was interesting how all of the members of the group were just normal, somewhat nerdy people who took had the guts to take a chance to voice their beliefs when it was offered to them. I think that's a good message to promote: the idea that everyone can do something to try to change the world. They can stand up and use their strengths to change something they don't like. Kind of like Captain Planet, but real and not grating.

Various Thoughts On A Sunday Afternoon

I'm very happy to go to class on Tuesday. Not that I generally don't like going to class, but this week's class happens to the be the only class all week in which I do not have a midterm. The class is a kind of oasis of enjoyment in a week of hellish studying and memorization. Plus, the Yes Men is an excellent movie.

The idea of a Humument is an interesting one. I like the quote on the front of it, "That which he hid I reveal." It's a lot like some of the points made in The Ecstasy of Influence article about how art should be in the public domain so that artists many years later and come along and take the original and change it into a completely different work of art with a new meaning.

I'm not sure what job I'm hoping to get in class next week. In a way, I'm terrified of being a rough cut editor because I would have to create a story out of everything that we did on Tuesday, which would take quite a bit of careful planning and thought, but, on the other hand, it would be a cool thing to do. I think the two jobs that I wouldn't really like doing would be the log and capture or print to video, while an easy job, it doesn't seem as if either one would be anywhere near as interesting as the other possible jobs. Whatever happens, I'll be interested to see how it all turns out and what my role in that creation will be.

Hand Processing

It was a bit strange to go to class and sit in a room with a only a red light illuminating it for two and a half hours. The Police kept running through my head. It was strange how much better our film turned out when flashed with overhead light instead of the cell phone. When we used a cell phone, our film was much darker and the slinky didn't even show up on the film.

It's hard to imagine what kind of film the class can craft from what we created. I can't speak to what the other groups did, but our film strips involved a slinky, Aquafina and Sun Drop labels, beads, rice, grits, and little people (cloth people not midgets). When flashed with the overhead light, the slinky looked really cool and had a neat bands of light effect that I had not expected to get. I think it would have been nice to use some more refractive and reflective objects to get more interesting patterns of light on the film like the ones created by the slinky.

I did not like the contact printing. While it will help in tying together all of the projects into a, probably barely, coherent storyline, it just doesn't create anything as interesting or individually unique (to each group, anyway) as the rayograms.

The No Logo video was interesting and I am looking forward to finishing. I read AdBusters a fair amount, so the ideas presented in the documentary were already a bit familiar, but still annoying in that I hate the idea of a hugely evil consumerist company like McDonalds (I am a vegetarian, so I object to them on many, many levels) trying to appeal to the youth by branding themselves as cool, edgy, and in touch with youth culture by having cool young people eating burgers and driving around listening to rap music. Florida appears to be a strange state. I had not heard of Celebration before, but I now know that Florida houses both a town run by Disney and a town run by Scientology (Clearwater). Disney does appear to have won the race to the top by creating a town where they are the only brand that exists. It would be strange to live in a town like that. It seems eerily close to the vision put forward by Stepford. I wonder if the documentary will mention Buy Nothing Day or talk more about culture jamming. My only complaint with the video is that it is too much talking head with only one person. It would have been nice to see more people interviewed as well as more examples of ads done by big corporations and the culture jammed protests of those same ads.

The Week In Review

The earth, wind, fire, and air project turned out better than I could have hoped. On the air section I used a portion of film smeared with some roll on sunscreen that I drew over with silver sharpie. I was unsure how it was going to come out, but, when projected, it appeared as if the film was being projected in a heavy fog, which was an excellent look that I hadn't even expected when I was putting it onto the film.

I also really liked the look of the acrylic paints that Matt used for his sections. It really captured the feel of something burning. It was an interesting and effective idea that one of the other groups had to actually burn the end of their fire element. It would be nice to see a slower version in Final Cut because, when projected, it all went by so fast, much faster than I had anticipated. I'm still trying to get the hang how fast things actually go by when shown in class.

My father used to develop pictures in a dark room we had in the house, but I had never been exposed to the idea of "flashing" film and developing it before. It was interesting to see how the different textures and items turned out. I wasn't a big fan of contact printing the other film images onto the unexposed film. It didn't really seem all that interesting. I am much more interested in putting different objects onto film and seeing how it all turns out. The bubble wrap looked a lot like cells in the bloodstream, but were really dark and didn't look as good as the refracted light from the beads. I also like the look of the contact printed stars. It would be interesting to try to use the rayograms to show a night sky. The rice looks a lot like explosions and could easily be made to resemble comets and meteors flashing across the sky.

I'm not sure what items I am going to bring to class. It seems as though the trick is to bring things that are fairly clear and can refract light in different ways to get a fairly unique look for each different thing.

The 100 frames animation project was much tougher than I had originally expected. While I had a beginning and an end point, it was hard to come up with the number of transitions and new shapes necessary to make the animation work well. The idea of using the 6th, 12th, and 18th frames as midpoints in each of the four 25 frame chunks was an excellent idea. It was very helpful in making sure that the shapes actually flowed into eachother. It was very awkward to try to transition an outline of the number one into something else. I am looking forward to seeing how everything turns out when spliced together.

The Animation Article

The animation article, while incredibly long, was also interesting because I know very little about animation, so the majority of it was new information. I had no idea that there were so many independent animation festivals worldwide. I guess, with the preponderance of film festivals now, it makes sense. I had just never thought about it before.

It makes a lot of sense that many of the first animators came from the avante-garde. When you're doing stuff like the things we do in class and scratching, painting, and drawing on film, eventually, you're going to start creating animation. It's pretty crazy how many different options there are to animators: the multi-plane, which I just learned about this week, obviously all the various drawing animations, like project 3, and, then, in an extension of the multi plane, using a camera to take frame by frame shots of something changing slowly, plus a whole lot more options as well.

I found it interesting that avante-garde animation is a very solo endeavor. Most of filmmaking is inherently collaborative, but avante-garde animation, as described in the article, conjures the image of a lone artist hunched over a 16 mm camera or a strip of film drawing on it.

I agree with the article that artists who do cameraless animation tend to be interested in movement and kineticism. Artists like McLaren have a lot of lines that flow into other lines in the work. While his results kind of justify his means, it seems a bit lazy of McLaren to do one work and then use it 2 more times and just re-name and change it a little bit each time. It's kind of like using the same essay twice, but just changing the phrasing and some of the words.

Collage animation sounds intruiging, the idea of taking found footage and images and making them new again (another reason for relaxation of copyright laws) and animations like La Jetee sound a lot like what we did in Intro to Film Production.

A final form of animation that is fairly new and not discussed in the article, but is interesting nonetheless is rotoscoping. Richard Linklater has done it for two of his films now (Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly) and it is a very distinct form of animation. He shoots the entire film on digital video and then has a team of animators animate over every frame of film giving the film both a realistic and surrealistic tone that works especially well when used to visualize Phillip K. Dick's reality blurring story about a drugged out undercover cop who's brain splits on him.

Multi-Plan Animation or Tedium Tripled

It will be interesting to see how the stuff we shot yesterday will actually turn out. Whether or not we are actually able to tell a coherent short story, it will look a lot like the old top down Grand Theft Auto videogames as there was no change in camera angle. Thanks to Sarah's bringing a plethora of stuff to use for the project, we had a lot of options to choose from when creating our story at the beginning of class. Eventually, our group settled on a jungle scene involving mice, crocodiles, humans at risk, cruise ships, and helicopters.

I don't know how Pes manages to have enough free time to create the work that he does. When I left class at 6:15, we had shot around 400 shots, which is less than 1/2 a minute of actual footage, and our scene was nowhere near as intricate as his stuff is. It seems that, while the end result could be really cool, the sheer tedium of moving things incrimentally over and over and over again for hours could be really worth it.

The Super 8 camera that we used seems really impractical. It has the awkward focusing mechanism that involves focusing until a cluster of dots goes away. Also, to take a shot, we had to get a pin and insert it into a hole in the side of the camera. One would think that there would be a more efficient way to design a camera. However, all in all, it was a fun assignment, I just can't see myself taking up stop-motion animation as a career.