Reactions to Music Video, Installation, and Farewell

Overall, I thought that all three of the videos were great and it was interesting to see how each group took a different approach. I thought ours turned out really well, although, it feels more like a very good video that could've been great. As you know we had a narrative running through our piece that didn't really have a resolution or a redeeming conclusion. That's because the ending that we thought we shot didn't make it through the developing process. I was supposed to take off the monster mask at the end. It's too bad because the video and the impact of it could've been so much better if that ending had made it through. I predict that it will cause a very mixed reaction with a lot of people because it shows a lot of ambition, style, and fun, but it gives off a negative vibe at the same time. However, I still think it's very good.

As far as the installation is concerned, I thought it turned out all right. I liked the idea of projecting images on a blank surface and letting the audience participate by having them paint on that surface. Everybody seemed to be having a good time with it and that's what counts when you execute a participatory piece. I liked the other projects as well. They showed so much ambition and imagination. I also enjoyed the 6x1 and doc projects too. It looks like a lot of interesting and creative progress was made in all the classes this semester.

That's about it for this semester. I had a lot of fun working alongside all of you and I'm sure I'll you again next semester. It will be my last. I'm taking Contemporary Avant Garde, Sound Design, Advanced Editing, and the Looking At Movies DIS with Monahan. Then I'm done. Farewell, have a nice break, and I'll see you soon.

Cucalorus Week

I had a great time at Cucalorus this year. It was my first film festival experience it was interesting to see and experience the atmosphere of it. I saw a bunch of films in the two days that I spent at the festival. The first was a really compelling documentary called, "Love Lived on Death Row." It followed the experience of the children of a Middle Eastern immigrant (who was convicted of stabbing his wife to death and received the death penalty) as they try to reconnect with their father and save him from lethal injection. The film humanizes the father and makes a strong argument against the death penalty as well. Very moving. I also saw "Control" the atmospheric biopic about the troubled life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. I liked the film a lot although I wish they had shown a little less of Curtis' personal problems and more of the creative process. Then there was "Mackety Mack: The Philosopher King of Space" which made by local entertainer Matt Malloy (aka Mackety) who was also the emcee who played the guitar. Malloy did everything on this movie but that doesn't impress me in the least. The movie is eighty-three minutes long and I was ready for it to be over after ten. The next day I started out with "Rocket Science" which was the best film of the festival, about a socially awkward kid who recruited to join his high school's debate team by an overachiever who could be sympathetic towards or playing a dirty trick on him. It's one of those movies where most of the laughs reveal more about the characters. It's a high school movie in the same league as films like "Rushmore", "Election", and "Welcome to the Dollhouse." Next up were two more docs. "Kurt Cobain: About a Son" juxtaposed in-depth, personal interviews with the late rock star with footage of places where he grew up and lived throughout his life. It is revealing, funny, sad, and fascinating. "The First Saturday in May" follows six horses and their owners as they aim to race in the Kentucky Derby. The personalities and ways in which each of the owners goes about their daily life and work, and the methods they resort to in order to enter into the race is very entertaining. I'm not even a horse racing fan and I really enjoyed this movie. I concluded with the "Rump Roast Shorts" on Saturday night which were all amusing but the best one was "Sniffer" which dealt with the stench of body odor instead of sex which made it seem a little out of place with the rest of the group but whatever.

Video Shoot and Installation

Well it's been a long time since my last post so I hope you don't mind sitting down for a while. The last time I wrote about the class my group was planning on shooting some footage during the upcoming weekend, which we did. We ended up shooting an entire role on the following Sunday using James' super 8 camera after realizing the one we had checked out was a piece of junk that was never disposed of by Tony. The group decided that Travis and I should appear in the video which was both fun and tedious. None of us had any extensive or prior experience with shooting on super 8 which made for a lot of waiting and deliberation before shooting any given shot. The hardest shot we accomplished was a tracking shot of Travis running down Front St. in his monster costume. We ended up trying it about two or three times before we finally got it. Then we got up on Monday morning to shoot a scene where Travis takes my shirt and a bunch other shots of Travis as the monster. Wednesday we shot the final roll with the band and also more monster stuff and ended finishing a week before the footage was due. We had an exposure issue that night because the light meter in the camera was giving us a different reading than the split. We ultimately made the wrong decision by going with the split which was unfortunate and from then on we hoped that the footage wouldn't be too underexposed.


For the final project we have decided to try VJing which is something that neither one of us has done before. We are still discussing everything that we want to do with it so I have nothing more to report other than that. We'll make it a surprise.

Videos

Below I have posted ten videos that contain certain techniques, ideas, and effects that are relevent to the assignment and the class. Enjoy and use them for inspiration at your leisure.

Interpol - NYC

Girl - Beck

Nirvana - Come As You Are

The Strokes - Hard to Explain

This is just a test to see how this works.

The White Stripes - The Denial Twist

R.E.M. Daysleeper

Beck - Devils Haircut

Pearl Jam - Jeremy

Peter Gabriel - Sledgehammer

Interpol - The Heinrich Maneuver [Full]

Self Portrait and Music Video

I enjoyed working on the self portrait as much as I dreaded it. It's hard to put so much of your personal life on-screen for any number of people and requires a lot of courage. For mine I decided to use a lot of family videos from my early teen years and combine it with some footage from the modern day. It was kind of hard to transfer the old footage to mini DV because the videos were so old and the quality was very poor. I was going to go back even earlier in my life to when I was eight or nine to give myself plenty to work with. But those videos were in the worst shape of all and couldn't be used. What I did with all the footage I used was distort it using the fisheye filter combined with other stylized effects (ripples, solarization, desaturation, etc.). I also sped up most of the shots and ended up compressing about a half hour of video down to three minutes. You might call it the self portrait on several shots of adrenaline. It begins with a shot of people waking up in the morning and ends with nap time. The images were so hyper-stylized that I opted to not include the soundtrack I had created for it. People might feel as though they have been in combat if I had left the sound in there. It gave me a headache after I viewed it once so I decided to make it a silent film because everyone is going to be working hard enough to look at what's there. Apart from that I met with my group to discuss ideas for the music video and we made a lot of progress in the past two weeks. We have already shot a roll of film of the band performing

Still Gallery

I felt like this project was more of a challenge than the sound design assignment. It's more difficult to create when something when you have to work off of someone else's work. To a certain extent it limits the imagination. We were given the track "You Can Have Any Colour As Long As It's Black." One thing we noticed was how subtle the track was. There was a lot of silence, moments of loudness, and repetition of different vocal effects. We tried to arrange our stills around the track in the form of a symphony. There was a feeling of different movements in the track, each one was devoted to a different kind of sound (Dialogue, Echoes, etc.). We used the spiders (rotating each one 180 degrees about 3 or 4 times) as a transition point between movements. We tried using a bunch of different video and transition effects throughout. We used a wave filter on the first spider, but the most effective parts occur during the echo section where we took a shot of an alleyway and used a mirror distortion and reflected the image four times. We also used a ripple effect on a motion shot and a picture of me looking through a cone. Unfortunately, we didn't get to use as many transitions and filters as we wanted to. They worked for some stills but wouldn't work for others. I'm not that impressed with how our project turned out but I could be proven wrong like I was on the sound design assignment.

Light Observations

Over the weekend I chose observe environments with low lighting conditions. The first was a bar and grill. There are lamps over every table that shine just enough light to make out the shadowy faces of the customers. All other light by the booths shines in from outside. The lights at the bar are mostly neon beer signs in different shades of blue, green, and red which cast their colorful but limited glow on the faces of the bartenders and whatever drunks are still sitting on the stools. The pool table and some of the area around it are illuminated by a fluorescent lamp that hangs overhead. The karaoke area is only lit by a desk lamp, a computer screen, and TV monitor with a little bit of light spilling from outside.

While I was working on another project on Sunday, I observed the conditions of the projection booth that I was shooting in. The booth was really just a long dimly lit labyrinth that was illuminated some flood bulbs (about one every ten - fifteen feet). There's are about two or three flood above each machine so the projectionist can see what he's doing when he has to thread the projector. These bulbs remain off most of the time to keep excess light from shining through the window and onto the audience. The halogen glow from the projector bulbs filters through the windows and bounces off the glass a little bit barely illuminating the face of whoever is standing next to it. The only other light visible in the place is a lamp at the desk and the exit signs.

35mm Photography

Sound Recording and Design

Alright, so I got behind this semester. It kind of sucks having a virus on your computer for a couple of weeks.

After hearing the complete library of recordings I was impressed with the amount of creativity that the other groups put into the different projects. Some sounds that stood out to me included the jet engine, the guitar scratch, projector, the lengthy electronic music, chimes, and a lot others. There's a wide variety of effects, voices, and ambient sounds to choose from. The design part of the assignment was very challenging because my partner and I are both brand new to FCP. Luckily I'm in a slightly better position than my partner, as I'm learning the program in another class. We got a pretty hard title to conceptualize I think: In the Land of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King. The track was constructed as just a constant wall of sound that ended up resembling your worst nightmares. We did a lot of speed reduction and acceleration, reverberation, and reverse motion. There isn't a single moment in the track where you aren't listening to at least three or four different sounds at the same time. We paid particular attention to a lot of the vocal work and ambient effects when creating the track. There is one sound that we stretched out for the entire length: the German conversation. It's that constantly vibrating low hum that you'll hear the whole time. One thing we did well, I think, is that we maintained a consistant atmosphere. For a first attempt at Sound Design and Editing it's not bad.

Sound Journals

Journal 1

The sounds in and around my apartment were quite varied. Just sitting in the living room I could not only hear the sounds of the ceiling fan, the loud hum of the air conditioner, and the refrigerator. There were also a lot of sounds coming from outside. I sat and took notes for an hour one night and this is what I heard coming from outside:

A large group of drunk college kids singing, arguing, shouting, etc. Cars screeching to stop. Knocks on doors. Loud engines. Swerving. Crashing. Running. Concerned murmurs. Sirens. Doors slamming. Footsteps up and down stairs. Shouting and banging on other side of the wall. Screaming. Glass breaking. Laughing. Cheering. Echoes. Loud music.

Journal 2

Many sounds in the library just kind of blur together as it is a very quiet place. There's a lot of humming sounds like the air conditioner, computers, the display at the coffee shop, the soft voices of people working, and a few places silence. There's a sense of emptiness in any of the private study rooms. It's very quiet unless you're sitting next to a vent or window. It's kind of odd when people don't think you can hear them as well. I was working with a partner from another class when I heard and became all too aware of the fact that there was a group of people staring at us giggling and whispering. When you go downstairs you can hear all kinds of soft murmurring, assorted beeps (cells phones, check out desk, etc.), computers, printers, footsteps, people sitting down, standing up, and opening doors, etc.

Journal 3

There are kinds of interesting opportunities for sound recording and observations in Trask. One of the best places to do so is in the pool. I went while the swimming and diving teams were practicing. There's a lot of splashing, of course, as the swimmers and divers do their drills. One thing about the pool area is that there is a lot of echoing, almost as much as the racquet ball room. Every time the coaches yell or the diving board bounces you can hear it all about five times over. I refer to the library as a soft blur. Trask is the exact opposite. Whether you're watching the basketball or swim teams practice or walking through the locker room you will hear a resounding loud echoe in every room. Except the offices, which sound more like the library.

My History as a Film Fan

I have been interested in films since I was eight years old. I suppose that's an early age but when you grow up in a small North Carolina town like Huntersville, where there's nothing to do except make trouble with your friends, go to school, or stay at home all day, you have to try and find something to relieve the boredom. Sure, I preferred playing with my friends to just about anything else, but even that got old from time to time. I also spent a lot of time visiting my grandma who loved to watch the American Movie Classics channel. I didn't understand at the time why she liked to watch all of the old movies that seemed so boring and distant with their black and white images. I remember falling asleep while watching movies like To Kill a Mockingbird, Casablanca, and Grapes of Wrath. Then one day we watched the original King Kong which I thought was the coolest thing I'd ever seen up to that time. I knew I wanted to make movies after I watched that film. It began my appreciation of classics so I began watching more and more of them. Everyone around me, including my parents, couldn't believe that I would be interested in films of this sort. That only one who really praised my willingness to try experiencing classics was my grandma. My brother eventually came around, too, but I'm not so sure that mom and dad, and some of my friends understand my point-of-view on the subject. Eventually, I started reviewing films in my own journals when I was 12, and have been doing so ever since. It's kind of hard to keep up these days with school and all but I try to do at least three or four every week. As a teenager movies became more than just a hobby for me as I began collecting video's with allowance money. I eventually built up a collection of more than 200 VHS, and then DVDs came out. So I got a job when I was 16 and worked all summer to save some cash so I could buy one of these $500 pieces of equipment. It worked out like I hoped it would and I started collecting DVDs. In the nine years since, I have accumulated exactly 611 films. When I became a projectionist at my local theater in 2000 I started collecting 35mm trailers. Now I don't mean trailers from newer films. I'm not the kind of guy who will settle for anything. The oldest trailer I have is a 1965 Academy Awards trailer for To Kill a Mockingbird (yes that "snoozefest" from my childhood). Others include: A Clockwork Orange, Midnight Cowboy, Apocalypse Now, The Wild Bunch, The Indians Jones Trilogy, Alien, and many others. Splicing the trailers together and screening them for friends and family alike was a lot of fun and happened quite often. I also started a collection of original posters as well. The most valuable one is an insert of A Clockwork Orange. I eventually had to stop collecting trailers when I quit the theater. When you have to watch an average of five movies per week and four of those aren't worth a shit and make you miserable then it's time to leave. I'll leave at that for now as I'm sure you'll be finding out more about me as the semester progresses.