Long Take

Saturday was fun.  I really enjoyed shooting the sequence.  The process of developing the film was really interesting also.  Our group really did not have an idea or what we were going to do, but we soon came up with something that worked.  I really did not have much to do with the idea.  There was not any input on my part of the story.  The only thing that I really did was act in the film… if you wanna call it acting... Anyway, I really enjoy my art.  It was nice not having to come up with something.  Sometimes it’s nice by letting someone else come up with the ideas. 

The idea was funny for a one-minute long take.  But, the story does not make any sense I must say.  Overall, the film is enjoyable.  Especially being that our group didn’t know what we were going to do until the minute we started blocking.  It was a very physically demanding shoot.  For my character I had to do a lot of running.  There is even a point were I stop running because my character is out of breath.  By the time the final take was shot I was really out of breath so I’m sure it looks realistic enough on film.

The other group that we helped out had a good idea too.  Their long take was chaos.  It was not chaos in the sense that they did not know what they were doing.  It was chaos in the sense that so much random stuff was happening.  I really liked that they used so much stuff in their take.  Their long take seemed thought out… at least more than our group had.  It was also fun that our group was apart of their project.  The monster that was in our project was originally part of their shot, but they did not use it so we worked it into our project.

Overall it was a lot of fun.  I have only seen a quick negative of the other group’s projects, but what I saw was good.  I think we all did well on transferring the projects… especially considering that we did not have a teacher there.  The only thing that I really didn’t like was showing up to school on a Saturday.  I had other things going on day; so I would have liked it better if we would have did the project on a weekday.

48 hr video race

I really feel that I need more explanation on our assignment.  I have read the paper that was given out, but I don’t fully understand it yet.  From what I do understand; this assignment is going to be rushed.  I have competed in a forty-eight hour race before, but our group filmed it.  That took way too much time to try to make the film good within two days.  Now, this assignment is supposed to be without a camera?  I’m not looking forward to it.  For me, I’m a perfectionist when it comes to film projects.  So, this assignment is not made for me.  I felt that we should have had more time on the “cameraless” project.  The fact that I only have two days to make a project without a camera is not going to be fun for me.  I felt like I was drained with the cameraless project…  And, I didn’t think it was going to turn out good.  That was when I had a couple of weeks of work put into it.  But, I liked how it turned out, so maybe this project won’t be that bad.  Either way I’m not excited about it.

As far as ideas go… I won’t have an idea till I have the prop.  It would be like writing a paper in the dark.  So for now I can’t say what I will do.  I already feel stressed about the project.  Until then I will think more about how I’m going to make a film.  Maybe upload images on a computer and edit them together…?  I’m sure when the pressure is on I will think of something good.  I really don't want to go through scratching on film again… I liked doing that when it was new to me, but I feel that’s all I did on the cameraless project.  Plus I don’t want to rush through the film manipulation (being that I only have two days).  That idea of filmmaking is fun, but I don’t want to burn myself out on it.

I also have other projects that I’m working on (in this class and others).  I really don’t like thinking about more than two or three at a time.  I will wait a couple of weeks before I truly have something that I want to use. I really don’t have anything definite, but I will come up with something good… I know it.

 

Thoughts on cameraless filmmaking...

            At first I didn’t think that our project was going to turn out well.  But, after seeing the finish product I was really happy with the final result.  We ran into problems with the printer that was going to print directly onto the film.  So, at that moment we didn’t think we were going to pull off the animation part.  We were going to animate fire, so we ended up printing off our animation and putting the film overtop of it and tracing the animation with a sharpie.  I actually liked how it turned out more than I liked our original idea.  The animation looked hand drawn… because it was hand drawn.  It made the film look more hands on.  So in the end something better came out of the final result.

            I was confused on what we were supposed to accomplish the whole time that we were making the film.  This confusion was also another reason I felt that the project was not going to turn out well.  I really did not understand how to show elements like wind or earth.  For earth we took the rayograms and colored brown, blue and green to represent the look of a globe.  For wind we used bleach on the film that already had images on it.  This experiment turned the film blue, but we were still able to see the image on the film.  We were able to do the magazine transfers for water.  We simply took images from a surf magazine and transferred them onto film.  We were struggling to make everything work, and in the end it all worked out fine.  I thought we was not representing the elements good enough, but my partner told me not to stress so much about it because this was an experimental project.

            We waited till the last minute to splice the film together.  There was three other groups waiting to splice their project too.  We were organized though so we got in there and spliced it quickly and got out.  We did mess up on the fire though… it’s actually upside down, but (again) I like this better.  In the end our “mess up” become (what I thought) the more interesting aspects of the project.  I do not think I could reproduce that again.  I mean I could do the project again, but the next time it would be more polished.  I think the fact that we did not know what we were doing helped make the project better.