Wednesday, March 28, 2007

I thought this was a cool video by H. Choi

Assignment # 2

I wanted to give my response to the process of producing Assignment # 2 and my thoughts about the final cut of the film.
We only had a few ideas about what we were going to for the multi-plane animation when we walked into the room. Most of the groups creative ideas came on the fly. The process of shooting a multi-plane animation is a tedious one. Every small movement takes time and detail to film correctly in order to tell a story. A lot of care was placed into having several things moving in the shot. We were not only moving the main characters but also the sea monster, the sun, the clouds, and the ocean below the cliff. I believe in the filming process we did one thing differently than other groups. At certain times while shooting we shot more than the recommended 3 clicks of the camera. There were certain times during the course of the film that some group members decided needed six or seven clicks of the camera. In hindsight this was a fabulous idea as it allowed more material to work with in the editing stage of the process. Getting back to the actual filming of the movie, it was a long shoot. At the end of the alotted class time I had to leave to go to another class, but the rest of the group was able to stay behind and get the photography finished.
After seeing the developed footage of what we shot I was very happy with how things came out. I had some reservations about what the outcome would look like, but what we had done looked pretty amazing. Now it was time to take the footage through the editing process.
The two John's in our group did a fabulous job of not only editing this together but also adding the sound. I know that they spent a few hours in the editing lab trying to get the outcome we ended up with. They told me they added in another few clips from what another group had shot so I was interested to see how the final cut would look.
After seeing the final cut the group did a great job, and the two Johns did a great job in the lab, especially with the sounds. They not only had the ambient sounds of the water, but the creature noises and gun sounds were great. The music that played over the action solidified the movie for me, they picked a great song for the film. All in all I think that we told a good story and learned a lot in the process. This was a total success

Saturday, March 24, 2007

Saturday, March 17, 2007

Getting Nervous

I don't know if I'm the only one that is overwhelmed by the amount of projects that will be do. My partner Elaine and I have a couple of ideas about what to do for the rhythmic editing excercise, but I'm still trying to coordinate finishing up a couple more assignments with my group members and getting the class project done. I'm a little nervous about doing the rough cut editing as I am not that familiar with Final Cut. The class members I am doing it with have told me that they'll help me out, but it is still a little nerve racking. John and I are going into the lab to edit our Super 8 Multi-Plain animation. I liked what I saw of our work when the entire classes was edited together and we have disscused how we are going to weave in some other groups footage to make ours even better. I think that it has the possibility of looking real good. I guess I'll feel a lot better once some of these projects are completed instead of just nearing completion. I kind of like to take care of stuff early, but in these cases I need the help of my group members.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

100 Frame Animation

This is going to be a quick post as I just wanted to say a couple of things about the 100 frame animation. I just completed it and it was a little harder than I expected. My art skills are awful so that didn't help. I drew on the template and then traced the template onto the film using the sharpie. After I completed that I realized that the figures were a little light and retraced on the back of the film strip. I think I did everything correctly, we'll see I guess.

Thursday, February 15, 2007

Developing Film

Just wanted to comment on Tuesdays class and my first expierence with flashing film and then developing it. I thought what we did was very interesting. I was surprised with how the first film strip came out considering that the light from a cell phone was very quickly scanned across the strip. I could not believe that was enough light to be able to come out the way it did. I really liked the way the striop that had other film strips on top of it turned out, it produced a cool image. Also watching the film get developed by hand was very cool. It was amazing to see the process of seeing the film go from noting to a negative. I also want to comment on the Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water projects turned out. I was very impressed with the work of the other groups. They had some very cool effects in their strips, I especially enjoyed the animation that some teams chose to do on their strips. As far as my group goes, I think we did a solid job. What was projected was no where close to what I had in my mind when I was working on it. The important thing however is that now I know how to improve for next time and it actually ended up turning out pretty good.

Friday, February 9, 2007

What I Thought About Tuesday's Class

After working with my group on the project Tuesday I have to say that I am pretty excited about what we may have created. There were some initial start up problems, but I'd have to chaulk that up to inexpierience. At first we had trouble with our tri-pod which was in-turn leading to problems with lighting. We originally couldn't get the tripod up high enough so we were catching a lot of shadows from our plates of glass. Once we were able to raise the tripod, the lighting was much easier. We began filming and instead of using only two clicks of the camera per shot we used three and sometimes six. We did this in order to hopefully have a little more footage to work with during the editing stages of the film, I thought we did a good job with continuity on the shoot. We did small movements and kept several things in motion during the shoot. We also came up with several different ideas while we were shooting that I think will make the film a lot better than we had originally scripted out. I had to leave early to go to my next class, but I talked to one of my group members and he said that the rest of the shoot went really well and I look forward to getting into the editing room and seeing what it looks like all put together.

Monday, February 5, 2007

Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water Project

I wanted to talk a little about how my Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water project went. Overall I think it turned ut all right. Of course I haven't seen it go through the projector yet so that is all subject to change. I want to start by talking about my Wind or Air strip first. What I was kind of going for is a shot where as the film gets pulled down through the projector it would give the viewer the feel of falling from space, through the Earth's atmosphere, and then kind of floating in the sky and clouds. To do this I blacked out about a third of the film strip and then scratched small holes into it that I hope will resemble stars. I then set aside a piece of the film that I used a couple shades of blue on to signify entering the atmoshere, and then I used a couple of different shades of blue to represent the visable sky. I then scratched some different shapes into this blue to set up my clouds. I tried to think what would make for some decent looking clouds. In the end I settled on using white-out. I have no idea how this will project on screen, but looking at it on the film strip, it looked pretty interesting. For my fire strip I blacked out the entire strip and then scratched out a fire growing from a small spark into a complete blaze. Eventually i tried to give an effect of the strip burning up and then smoldering out. Looking back I wish I would have done this strip a bit differently. I wish that I would have only blacked out part of the strip and then used yellow, orange and red colors only on the rest. I think that would have possibly signifyed a raging fire a bit better. All in all though I think it will turn out ok, but as I've said, I guess i need to wait to see what it looks like on the big screen.

Saturday, February 3, 2007

Brakhage Article Blog

In this blog I am going to briefly discuss the Brakhage article. The article was about the process of making a creative film from begining to end. He began by discussing the parts jobs of film. He then told a story about how motion picture film started. He also went on to talk about the importance and timing of every single frame of film. Brakhage then talked the projector, it's parts, and how they operate. He talked about how to thread a projector, and the interaction between the claw, shutter, and sprocket wheels. He also touched on the flip tempo (fps). He then talked about the viewer or editor. Brakhage then furnished a copy of a letter from a friend who talked about the splicing of film. Among the things mentioned in the letter were different techniques, scraping emulsion, splicing creativley, how and when to use it, and etc. He also spent some time talking about the use of light on the film. Brakhage then talks about hand exposing film in an experiment that he did.
In my opinion the article was pretty informative. Some of the information consisted of things that I had previously learned in other film classes. I also realized how passionate he is about his work. After seeing a couple of his films I can't honestly say I understand them very well, but I know that a great deal of time and effort was put in to producing them.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

It's My First Blog, So Cut Me Some Slack

I've never done a blog before, so I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to be writing about. I guess I'll start by talking about the first couple of classes. I'm not quite sure what to think of my work so far. I get the feeling that everyone else is doing something really innovative and creative and I'm just coloring on some film. This is my first expierience with "experimental film". I've seen other people's work, but to actually sit down and try to create my own is a little frustrating. I guess in this particular type of filmmaking there really isn't a right or wrong way of doing something, but it sure feels to me like I'm doing something wrong. I think it's really amazing what you can do with some film and no camera. When we were scratching and coloring the film that had already been shot on, it was a little difficult because I had no idea what it would look like going through a projector. All you could see was the frame by frame results and those looked ok to me, but what the hell do I know? I thought what we were doing with the magazine, newspapers, and tape was cool, but i need a lot more practice on it. I'd like to use a little of it in the Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water project but I'm not sure I'm confident enough in doing it yet to put it on a project. I'll come back tommorrow to give an update on the project.