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.