Wednesday, February 29, 2012

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.


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