Saturday Long-Take

I have to be honest; I was very skeptical about the Saturday long-take shoot. I wasn’t sure if I was going to enjoy or if anyone was going to show up to it. Luckily everyone did and in the end, I realized my predictions were completely wrong. I really enjoyed the whole process. I operated the camera and it was a little nerve racking since it was actual film and I only had one chance to get a good shot. I realized later that I messed up setting the aperture for the camera. At first I set it around 4 or 5.6 but when we lowered the frame rate to 12, I forgot to close down the aperture more. In the end, the shot still turned out well but it was a little over exposed. I liked how the film looked with the lower frame rate. It almost looked like a Charlie Chaplin movie, which was perfect because that is what we were going for.

I think this one-day brought the class a little closer and allowed everyone to work together and get to know one another. I liked helping out in other group’s shoots. Everyone had good ideas and it was cool seeing other people helping out and offering advice to try to make the best possible film we could in that time.

I enjoyed everyone’s films and thought they all turned out awesome but I think Shaun’s (Shawn?) group was my favorite. I thought their idea of have two people jump from bench to bench with one person creepily following and the other trying to get away.

Rough Theater

My rough theater would be all the films that I make, both for school and for personal interests. I don’t have a lot of fancy equipment so I have to improvise on a lot of things. Also, I don’t have a really fancy camera. It only shoots in 720p and I can’t manually adjust the ISO or aperture. But, I don’t think this hinders my filmmaking ability, it just makes me focus on other things and improve other aspects of my filming like camera positioning, framing, and story telling. I think this is one of the reasons why rough theater is valued so much because it shows how an artist or, in my case, a filmmaker adapts to the things that he or she has and doesn’t have.

When I read this article, I instantly thought about this one filmmaker that I really admire. He has a very unique style and he has really pushed the boundaries of how to make a film. In interviews and speeches, he talks about how he knows he can’t make a film perfect like a Hollywood movie. So instead of preventing imperfections, he highlights them. He often shows a cut of him putting a camera down or picking it up. He also does a lot of stop motion and will occasionally show a shot of him moving the piece of paper or whatever is being moved. I think showing the imperfections works better than hiding them because then the audience can get of sense of his limitations and they can see how he adapted to those limitations and created his own, unique style.

I think our film manipulation turned out well. I liked the way our earth and water looked. While the film strip was drying, the ink and paint was dripping and running down the film. For the earth, my partner and I tried to bead up the ink so it would form small ink balls to look more like gravel. For the water, we used a lot of different brushes to see the effect on the ink and paint when trying to make waves.

I also really like my animation I drew on the film strip. I tried to animate the cycle of water and plant growth. It started with a drop of water falling from the sky. Eventually, that drop hit the ground and seeped into the soil. There was a seed planted in the ground and when the water reached the seed, it started to bud and it sprouted into a big tree. Then, the animation continued up to a cloud where another water drop fell out of. The only thing I didn't like about my animation was how short it was. Since my animation contained a lot information, I should have stretched it out over more frames. Instead of limiting myself to the required 100 frames, I feel like 200 or 300 frames would have made it easier to see and understand what was happening.

Crowd Sourcing

            It is awesome that we live in a time that we can crowd source. I like the idea of crowd sourcing. Whether it is for funding, help, or information, crowd sourcing allows us to connect with so many people and use everyone’s abilities to maximum potential. Interconnected does a good job of demonstrating this in their film. By using people from all over the world and from so many different cultures, it shows how crowd sourcing can bring people together for a greater good. I feel like crowd sourcing was the best way to do this film since they wanted to show how we are all interconnected through the Internet. Some people see the internet as a bad thing, like it is impairing people, but this movie shows how it connects us all and allows us all to grow intellectually and as a community.

I found the Ted talk to be very interesting. I was amazed to find out their business expenses only being about $5,000 a month for servers. You would think that a website that big would have much higher expenses but when you think about it, most of their workers are volunteers which almost eliminates most of their expenses. I was also amazed at the credibility and validity of Wikipedia. Jimmy talked about how German Wikipedia was tested against other forms of news and articles and Wikipedia won every time. I have often wondered about the truthfulness behind Wikipedia, since most teachers talk bad about it but often, Wikipedia has the correct information and more compared to other scholarly articles. It should be interesting to see how Wikipedia’s plan for Wikibooks turns out.

            

It was very interesting reading articles and watching the videos on sound and acoustic ecology. It makes you really appreciate sound, from the very loud noises to the quiet, faint noises. I liked the end of the video "Listen" when he asked, "what happens when my voice stops? What do you hear then?" The silence was nice and almost therapeutic. I wish I wasn't in the library when I watched it so I then the silence could have had more impact of an impact.

When I started reading the “Opening Our Ears to Acoustic Ecology” article, I immediately started to think about people that are deaf or have hearing impairments. In the first sentence, the author claims “sounds bring the world alive.” So is the world not alive for some one that is deaf? I know this is an irrelevant argument, but I found it interesting to say such an assuring statement without considering the other perspective. I agree that sound helps a setting. It’s almost like the icing on a cake for a beautiful scene or setting. This article, in a way, ties in perfectly with the “Listen” video. Just like what the author talked about in the first paragraph, I picture myself standing on top of a mountain over looking hundreds of miles of rolling hills and the thing that brings that whole scene together is the sound. To escape all the noises in a city, or regular life, is a great thing that isn’t appreciated that much. 

Synesthesia would be a really cool thing to be able to experience. It is very interesting to think that the way I perceive a number or letter, a synesthete would see that number or letter completely different. I wonder what they see when they read a book?

I thought I was decent at math but when Daniel Tammet described how to multiply 64 and 75, I was completely lost. If I could see numbers like he did, I bet I would like math even more than I do already.

My favorite part of the R1 media was Even Grants talk on cymatics. It made me really want to try that experiment just so I could see the shapes for my self. I liked his idea that he posed at the end of his talk with the creation of the universe and the immense sound that must have came from that and how that sound must have had some influence on the creation of everything.

I like in the first film how the person made the lines and shapes to represent the instruments. When the guitar was playing, there were horizontal lines to represent the horizontal strings on guitar. Then, when the bass was playing, there were vertical lines to represents the vertical strings on the bass. The artist also emphasized one string by bolding one of the lines if the music was plucking one of the strings individually. In the second film, the artist used circles to represent the drums. When the drums started playing faster, there were more circles that appeared on the screen.

I also liked how it looked like people dancing in the second film. The artist used two silhouettes that would spin around one another and this gave the impression of two people dancing. There were also other shapes that would glide in and out of frame to give the impression of multiple people dancing in a room, maybe.