The Mystery Workshop

The Mystery Workshop was surprisingly fun.  I didn’t think it was going to be as interesting as it turned out to be.  I really didn’t know what to think because we were bringing in all of that stuff to class… that was weird.  But, in the end I had fun I liked how the white bed sheet was used as a screen.  Although, a bunch of adults sitting in the fort was not ideal.  I felt cramped inside the thing, so I fell that we should have made it bigger.  Even though the fort was the biggest that has been made in the class yet.

The food was very good too.  I didn’t really contribute because I really didn’t know what was going on.  But, thanks to everyone who did… it was all good.  We had everything imaginable.  Pizza, chips, dip, doughnut holes, cakes, drinks… etc.  So I really enjoyed that aspect also.  I brought Combos, for that is my “guilty pleasure food.”  For those who don't know what Combos are… they are basically a cracker rolled up into a cylinder.  They make different kinds, and my favorite kind is the regular pizza flavored.  An episode of Reboot and a bag of Combos, and I’m in heaven.  (For those who don’t know what Reboot is… one of the GREATEST shows ever produced!)

The films were interesting too.  I enjoyed all of them, and for being produced in forty-eight hours they were really impressive.  All of them were very creative.  Some were more cryptic than others, but I liked that aspect.  What was really interesting was that no one had a similar project.  Each one was vastly different from each other.

In the end, I think that the Mystery Workshop day was one of the best/more enjoyable classes that we have had all semester.  It seems that the Mystery Workshop should have been our last class.  It was for the most part, but I think we should have saved it for April twenty-fifth.  I’m not complaining though.  At least we got to do it… regardless of the date.  I can’t believe that the semester is almost over.  It feels like it just started a month ago.  But, I’m ready for summer, so I’m glad that it is coming to an end.  This last week is going to be hell though… so much stuff to do with such little time.  But anyway… only one more blog left (thank god)

Beet Stretch (9v2 m 2)

My thoughts on Beet Stretch… Well, I cannot say that I’m really impressed by this form of music.  I listened to “9v2 m 2” from the beginning till about an hour into it.  In that hour I kept feeling like something was going to happen.  Like it was the beginning of a concert.  The fact that everything is slowed down is relaxing, but I wouldn’t listen to this on an everyday basis.  It’s great that someone can do manipulate this music, but if someone is going to listen to Beethoven’s 9^th then he/she should do that instead of listening to this version.

I really didn’t understand how the process was complicated to do.  Slowing it down without losing the pitch of the music?  It’s not something I would really look into doing, so I really don’t care.  I just think that a person shouldn’t do this to another persons work and try to sell it.  That’s a cop-out… Now, if this person did an original piece and wanted to slow it down, then go for it.  At this point you are just trying to cash in on something that they really didn’t manipulate that much.

Not that this is all bad. I said before this is very relaxing, and I could fall asleep to it.  So, not thinking about this music too much would be relaxing to try to sleep to.  The music itself sounds like I’m looking into the sun setting for the day.  Except in this instance, the sun is taking an extremely long time to set.  The other good thing was that I was cooking while I was listening to it.  I felt like I was a chef... Okay, that was dumb.  But, it was like a scene from a movie when someone is cooking, and they play that crappy music to make it look classy.  That’s what it seemed like.  To bad I was just making Ramen Noodles…

After I stopped listening to it, I pressed stop.  It was like everything was uplifted from me.  Because I had felt like a lot of noise was just being fed into my brain.  The first thirty minutes wasn’t bad, but after that I kept looking at the time to see when I could stop listening.  The music (if you wanna call it that) became noise after a while.  I really couldn’t take anymore than what I heard.

Molotov Man/The Ecstasy of Influence

Molotov Man:

            I would like to talk about the paintings themselves first.  I really like the author’s original paintings.  These paintings remind me of the Ralph Bakshi film American Pop.  This film was rotoscoped from real people to look like an animated film.  American Pop is one of my favorite animated films, so this is why I liked the artwork so much.  The intense looks on the subject’s faces make the artwork stand out.  I particularly love the one with the man on the microphone.  The shading on the faces is so realistic.  I really am drawn to look at these pieces of art.

            I do not feel that the author should feel bitter or mad about other people taking his artwork and making that their own.  Now, I do not feel like the author is mad.  I’m just saying he shouldn’t be mad.  I feel that the author is upset that the “Molotov Man” was taken in the direction of anti-corporation ads like that of Pepsi.  But, the artist should have been aware.  This artwork is similar to what Warhol made in 1960’s.  This idea proves that anyone can take an image and make a piece of artwork.  Others should learn from the mistake that this artist made.  

The Ecstasy of Influence:

            I find this article interesting.  I agree that art is basically a whole if you were to think about it that way.  This idea implies that all artists are influenced by another work of art.  I think that this is true everything that I have ever made or wrote has been inspired by something else.  I also enjoy the beginning of the article in which they use Bob Dylan as an example.  The reason I enjoy this is because I do not care for Bob Dylan, and I’m sick of people trying to tell me how “original” he is/was.

            This article also discusses other ways one can be inspired.  For instance, blues player Muddy Waters talks about how he wrote a song about his girl friend leaving him.  I enjoy this part of the article as well, because sometimes the best art come from emotional pain.  This pain makes the artist determined, and takes the mind off the pain.

            Finally, the author does a great job at backing up their points that they are trying to make.  The article goes as far as using cartoons as an example.  Without The Honeymooners the Flintstones would not exist, and without the Flintstones the Simpsons would not exist.  This idea is odd, but very true.  So, in the end all forms of art/media is influenced by something else

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.

Projections of Sound on Image/Acoustic Ecology

Projections of Sound on Image:

The first reading “Projections of Sound on Image” is an interesting read.  I have heard a lot of people discuss how the silent film era gave better performances than in the sound era.  Some may agree with that statement.  This article seems to argue how sound is a very useful tool in making the audience “feel” what is going on in a film.  The author discusses how the ear processes quicker than the eye.  They continue to discuss how spoken words make the ear work faster.  This idea seems to be over looked by people who argue the statement made by the silent film era.  Those people maybe right, but it seems that they are quick on what they say.  I feel they do not give sound the credit it deserves.

   The author does a great job at explaining how an audience gets an impact on sound.  By using the example of Bergman’s Persona in which a hand is impaled by a nail.  The author talks about if one was to take the sound away the audience may still be shocked. By adding the sound the audience is able to hear the sound of the nail being driven in the hand one, thus making the experience more gruesome and realistic.

Overall I found the article very interesting.  The author discusses more about sound/music with the definitions of “empathetic” and “anempathetic music.”  It was very informative and I hope to read more articles like this in the future.

Acoustic Ecology:

“Acoustic Ecology” was not as effective as the “Projections of Sound on Image” reading.  I felt that this article was not really teaching me anything.  The author basically talks about different ambient sounds.  I know about ambient sounds, so I really do not need to read about what they are.  The article spends almost an entire page about different sounds in different locations.  For example, “the sounds of the meadow and its surrounding hills are subtle.”  Well… of course they are!  Anyone who has been out on a meadow or field can tell you that there is not a lot of sound.  It’s not just this.  The author discusses other sounds in other places.  Why waste my time?  I know what certain things sound like, therefore no need to describe them to me.

In the end, I really didn’t find this article very useful.  If I didn’t know what ambient sounds are… then maybe I would have needed to read this article.  But, I really don’t think anyone needs to have the sounds of a meadow or anything else described to them.  If so, then that person needs to get out more…