Assignment #1

I had a pretty fun time with the first assignment. I enjoy actually working with film as a whole, it is more organic and, to me, easier to use than digital (even though we weren't shooting with film I still like the idea of working with it). Out of all the processes we did with the film stocks I think my favorite thing was a tie between making the rayograms and doing the magazine transfer. After watching the finished product in class on Monday, I loved the effect that the rayograms had, especially what happened when i twisted a film print over top of the rayogram film (it made it look like the film image was falling off of the film). Also, I really liked the effect that the magazine transfer had. It was like a blur of collage images.

I think the hardest part of the process was definitely making the animation on the film stock. The animation I was going for was trying to show a star being born since our theme was going from creation (earth or grass and water) to destruction (fire and wind/black smoke). The star is a blue circle that is supposed to form into a star; different little points begin to sprout as it transforms. Then it comes apart and loses its color. I thought it was a cool transition from birth to the beginning of death.

In relation to the first post I made about camera less filmmaking, I think that it is really fun to be able to mess with film in different ways than expected. Manipulating the film stock is like a fun experimentation, a sort of arts & crafts way of making a film; It allows for more freedom of experimenting and implementing new techniques than one would think. It is also a less stressful way of filmmaking for sure, haha, especially when compared to larger projects like 495 narrative or 495 doc (I'm working on both this semester). While working on this project I felt like it is something that students should definitely learn how to do, since it could provide new techniques that would apply to other forms of filmmaking. I know some films that utilize film manipulation/cameraless filmmaking into their stories for aesthetic or other reasons.

Lastly I really enjoyed using the splicer to cut together the film. I wish more of the classes would utilize this technology, even though for narrative filmmaking at a student level it is probably rare and obsolete. It would be fun to shoot a short, 3 minute film and splice the whole thing together by hand, rather than run it through final cut pro for the millionth time.

Soundz

Sound is such a powerful element in cinema. The reading describes examples such as how things in a horror film wouldn't be necessarily scary because the sound is a major element that works with the overall mood of the film. A jump scare like in the stair-case scene in Psycho wouldn't be nearly as horrifying if there wasn't that shrill screeching soundtrack to accompany the scene. The article addresses this concept as the audiovisual illusion. The sound in cinema is utilized to focus the audience's attention to a certain thing happening in the film. It could be the pop of a balloon or the squealing tires of a police car off in the distance. Music is also used as a device to get the audience to feel what certain characters are feeling such as fear or sorrow. A sad, slow melody may be played in a film like Babel, but Psycho has a shocking score that causes the audience to be as scared as the killer's victim is in the film.

It is crazy to think that the human ear can work faster than a human eye. The reaction time to a sound being quicker than an image at first seems crazy but after thinking of things that have shocked me in my lifetime, usually it has been more from a sound rather than a quick image. The reading goes on to describe how sound temporalizes images on screen, mainly in such ways as tempo, definition, how it's sustained, etc. The examples of how sound can mess with a viewer's mind, such as in the Empire Strikes Back example, really blew my mind. I actually went back and looked at scenes form the film on Youtube haha. Also, the examples of deaf people being able to visualize faster than normal people is really interesting. I've heard true life stories of things like that. I've also heard about how some blind people develop better hearing over time. The article really shows how important sound is in cinema. It frustrates me to know that a lot of student films overlook sound quality and focus more on image quality. A movie could be shot beautifully but if the sound recording/sound mixing/score is bad then the film could end up being a piece of crap.

Animation Theory

Interesting reading regarding different forms of animation. Having worked on stop-motion animations I have some experience with a mixture of orthodox and experimental animation. A project I worked on last semester had orthodox figures and orthodox narration but had a multiple of styles to get different effects and an evolution of materiality similar to how PES uses house hold items for certain things (candy corn for fire). The film had minimal dialogue (only on captions/title cards) but also had a musical element to it, since a majority of what is heard is score. This project was a slight mix of the elements addressed in the reading. I have seen some experimental animations as well, my first probably being from shows like "Kablaam!" on Nickelodeon or "Robot Chicken" on Cartoon Network. Others I have seen are short films by PES and some early animated shorts by David Lynch. I'm definitely excited to work on films in class that are similar to these.

No Cameras, No Problem

I am a camera person at heart. I love everything about cameras and aspire to be a Cinematographer some day. This class interested me because it would put me out of my comfort zone since we wouldn't be working with traditional movie cameras much at all. So far in the class I have had fun, mostly because I feel like camera-less filmmaking is a more free-flowing artistic experience than traditional narrative filmmaking. It allows for more random and spontaneous ideas, probably because it is more of an individual artistic medium (like painting). Because narrative filmmaking relies on collaboration and team-work it is a process where a multitude of ideas are presented but most get de-saturated or are totally lost in the process of the film's production. I feel like although filmmaking is an art form, it is extremely complex when compared to the process of painting, drawing, or sculpting.  Camera-less filmmaking, on the other hand, more closely resembles an art form like painting because the artist is manipulating the film negative like it's a canvas or a ball of clay. The experience is more direct and organic.

!!!!Synesthesia!!!!

I found the articles on Synesthesia and Cymatics to be really cool and thought provoking. I had heard about Synesthesia previously, since a friend of mine was actually working on a screenplay about the condition a year ago. The idea of seeing colors when hearing a sound or looking at a sentence is crazy. It is really hard to fathom for someone that has never experienced the condition or done drugs that provide a similar experience haha.  I thought the "Synesthesia in art" article was great, getting to see and hear about pieces of work directly inspired by the condition; I particularly liked the story/process behind Vision by Carol Steen, probably because I have always been intrigued by acupuncture and also because the painting reminded me of a still frame from something Stan Brakhage would have created. While reading the articles I was thinking about films that I have seen that remind me of Synesthesia, a few of these films off the top of my head are Enter the Void, The Text of Light by Stan Brakhage, and some of the crazy shorts that we saw in Professor Kase's Avant Garde cinema class last semester. It was also crazy that as many as 1 in 23 people could have some form of Synesthesia! Although short, the article on Cymatics was also pretty cool, since it was all about another way to visually interpret sounds. All of these articles definitely have given me some ideas to incorporate into the projects I will be working on in this class.