Project 6 Evaluation

I anguished over this project for quite some time. This was due in the midst of 3 exams, a paper, and a 100 page report, so lets just say the creative juices were nearly spent when it came to this project. The blocks I chose either could spell "COW", "POW", or "PBJ". Since I approached this very literally, the blocks were going to be the title to the film and ultimately decide what the film was going to be about. I started the first day trying to come up with any possible story about a cow or anything having to do with a cow, such as eating a hamburger. These ideas quickly met the trash can. Then I decided to take another angle and go with the peanut butter and jelly possibility. I downloaded every peanut butter and jelly song on the internet and found the perfect one. The film was practically done for me, all I had to do was follow the instructions, since the song is basically a rough "how to" tutorial on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwitch. Then at approximately 1:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning filming began. I didn't have any grapes so I got in touch with their agent and had them flown in Wednesday afternoon to conclude filming. After the grapes made their smashing appearance (pun intended) I just had to match the images up with the song and voila! a highly disgusting PBJ was made for everyones viewing pleasure. The DVD was burnt and I hopped in the car to come to the party. Is it possible for you to post all of the video race films on the blog? That would be awesome.

Project 5 Evaluation

I really enjoyed this project probably more than any other project that we did. Mainly because it was so editing intensive and I really enjoy editing. Kristen was a good actor and a real sport for doing all that she did for the camera. I really enjoyed the editing process and the decision making boiling down o which 5 frames would get the point across best and show the most movement. It was a very tedious process, but once it was done I came away with something that I was proud of. I wanted to put some high tempo music on the soundtrack to match the rapid pace of the edit. I really think that the song worked well with what was shown on video. One of the most difficult things to edit was actually the song. The song takes a while to build and I wanted all of the stages to fit within the minute and a half video. To do this I had to cut out several seconds of each repetitive beats and match it up seamlessly. I also told Kristen that I had to leave the "Ugh, gross!" quote on the soundtrack when she spits out the toothpaste. It is barely noticable, but the soundtrack dips momentarily when she says it. I didn't know if I was cheating by not using the same cycle twice but I wanted to make more of a linear narrative piece than a more abstract piece. I wanted to focus on the doors since she enters and exits from her bedroom to the bathroom several times throughout the film. The symetry worked out great since her bedroom door is on the same wall as the bathroom door.

Rhythmic Editing

Which is about as rhythmic as having a siezure. We should seriously put some Epilepsy warnings up before we screen these. I was planning on just doing about half of it but once I got through the first minute I was on a roll and I figured I might as well knock it out. I used more of a narrative format and did not use the same cycle twice throughout. I had enough footage to go straight from point A to point B without repeating any of it. I hope I didn't break any rules by doing that. I had a lot of fun doing it since I love to edit stuff, I just don't usually have stuff to edit. Kristen was a great sport throughout this project and gave a nice performance. That gave me plenty of footage to work with. I wanted to lay down an audio track to helf spice up the video a little since it would have been quite boring on its own. I think it just adds another dimension to it. Since the length of the video was considerable shorter than the song I chose I had to do extensive sound editing to cut it down to the parts that I wanted, while still flowing and seeming like nothing changed. The song has repititious beats that build and progress throughout, so I just chopped off some of the length of each beat addition. I guess it is easier to see and hear than to explain. I am not sure what Kristen will be having me do, but after what she did for me, I am at her mercy. Fun times.

Low and Behold

I went to see the screening Saturday afternoon. I had high hopes for this one and it didn't dissapoint. It was about an insurance claims adjuster who went to New Orleans following Katrina to work for his uncle. He ends up befriending a man who we find out has lost everything including his wife and two daughters in the storm. It had documentary footage seamlessly intermingled with the fictional plotline. Most of the supporting cast were actually residents of New Orleans and had no background in acting. The lead actor/writer/producer actually worked as an insurance claims adjuster in south Florida, which is where he came up with the idea for the film and also the budget. It moved along at a nice pace and was well written. It was very humorous amidst the obviously somber backdrop of a hurricane ravaged city. As the film progressed I found myself sympathizing with the characters, which is a really hard feat to accomplish. Aparently the film got some good press at Sundance as well and they hope to sign a distribution deal soon. The quality is definitely there and I hope it takes off for them. It turned out to be a real tear-jerker.

Vision screening

I went to see the Vision screening at Jengo's Playhouse last Wednesday. We got there about 5 minutes late and missed Kristen's film, which of course was shown first. I was impressed by many of the films that were shown. Of course I recognized the film manipulation that Oliver and his group did. I thought that the Mario film was absolutely hilarious. I would have liked to know how they made that one. Mantis was good as well and I was surprised that they had a pretty good cast for the film. Overall the films that were screened were high quality and its good to see the work that other students in other classes are doing since we aren't exposed to it very often. It would have been nice to see some more student work. Now I wish that I had submitted something.

Editing the One Shot

Kristen and I have put together a semi-completed soundscape for the oneshot. We were able to find a ton of sound effects to add in. The video turned out ok. It looked much better sped up but it will have to do. The soundtrack works fairly well with the video. I guess we won't have an opportunity to screen it and get some feedback like we did with the rayograms. That would have been helpful but Cucalorus is much more important. It will be quite embarassing enough to see it once so there won't be any need for you to play it twice next week.

Editing the Rayograms

Kristen and I put the final touches on the editing for the project 3 last night. We added a couple more sound effects and tried to follow some of the suggestions made in class. I think it sounds good and we adusted some of the video as well to try and match it up better. We slowed down some of the segments to make it sync up better with the audio that we used. Also we added some key frames in places where we had only adjusted the levels so that the sound would rise and fall more smoothly. Once we did that we could hear the dialogue better than before. We left most everything else the same since many of our classmates seemed to enjoy it fairly well. We lincorporated the baby laughing to make it seem more creepy than before, but our ambiance track seemed to take care of that aspect for us already. It may have been fun to extend it and make it a few minutes long but by that point it might become a little redundant.

Film loop

This was certainly a fun experiment. We started out being modest and only adding a few feet with each round and then toward the later rounds we became more ambitious and thus our name was born, the Ambitious Chinchillas. We had a vear disaster in one of the early rounds when our loop began to tear and when time was called it was being held together by about the width of a sprocket hole. Once it was repaired we added a very large length to our loop. The loops were working well when we were using the clips and belts but as soon as we had to take more drastic measures such as running the film through the metal thigns on the top of the dry erase boards things took a turn for the worse. The film began getting stuck in some places and was putting too much tension on the loop. While we had our full team this was not a problem but as more and more chinchillas fell victim to Evil Andre's chinchilla genocide we could not make up the slack (literally). And thus was the end of these Ambitious Chinchillas, the loop got too tight and broke, shattering our hopes and dreams.

One Shot

When we first went out there we couldn't figure out how to see out of the eyepiece and had to go back and have someone show us how to do it. Once we got that taken care of we just rehearsed it a few times. I felt like such a douche bag acting like a total idiot in front of the camera. Especially since tons of people will be seeing the video, or at least 16. During the rehearsals Kristen nailed me right in the face almost every time. But in the last rehearsal we decided to switch it up and have me stand in front of the camera and have her hit me in the side of the head. So when we shot it, instead of hitting me squarely in the head as had happened in all of the rehearsals, the ball just grazed my head. It looked like it turned out ok once we watched it but we were seeing it twice as fast as we actually will be. It probably won't look so good once we slow it down. I am glad you told us that we were actually shooting for 56 seconds rather than 28 or we would have really screwed up. Thanks, by the way, for taking those flattering pictures of me ass up on the ground. Now I'll never be able to live it down. Kristen already has it on her myspace so it will live on forever. We had a lot of fun shooting it. I am glad we got a good exposure, thats the most important thing. We got in the back of John's truck and rode around to dry the film. That was probably the most fun part, I know Kristen got a good laugh out of me rolling around in the back of a truck bed. Overall it was a good experience and I hope we can create a good enough soundscape to do it justice.

Editing the Animation

We ean into a ton of problems when editing project 2. Kristen and I tried to figure out how to brighten the image. We found the brightness but all it did was lighten the foreground, making the image worse than it was originally. We then tried adjusting the color saturation but it didn't help either. We eventually just left it alone. The audio also didn't work once we moved it into final cut but that had to do with the settings in final cut and we were able to fix that. We found some tracks that went well with the video. We thought we would be able to transfer songs off of our ipods onto the computer but I guess there is some limitation on the lab computers that disallows that. So we had to go to plan B and choose from a couple of CD's that Kristen brought. We slowed down some of the segments and copied a couple to make it longer. We sped up the first part where the cars were passing to make it seem like they were passing by more rapidly. We mostly left everything else as it was with the exception of cutting out some bad bits where our hands were still in frame or if the camera was bumed for a couple of frames and the image jumped. We had tried to shoot some coverage in class but the close-ups were way too dark to work with so they were just left out completely. I am not sure what exactly happened with the lighting. We had one light on either side including the Fresnel. I suppose we should have used some kind of reflective material on the floor under the glass to provide some backlighting. That was our main mistake in this project. It possibly could have had something to do with what stop we were shooting at. I honestly didn't notice what it was set at but it could have been too high to let the light in.

Bolex

The Bolex was a little more complicated than the super 8 cameras but not as complicated as the Arri S or the CP16. I like the self loading capabilities that it offers as it was much easier to load than 16mm cameras. I forgot to lock the pressure plate back in when I loaded it and I forgot to reopen the loop formers but I got the hang of it in the end. i am not sure what the practicalities of it are. If you can only shoot continuously for 28 seconds at 24 frames per second I can not imagine who would use it to make a narrative film. There is no capability for en extended take but I guess it could be used for stylistic purposes. I suppose you wouldn't be able to record synchronous sound with it since it doesn't have a crystal motor and the camera itself is very noisy when running.

Developing

The developing that we did last class was almost identical to the process that we used in high school. It brought back a lot of memories...mostly bad. I was looking forward to seeing our project but we ran out of time since we were so busy multitasking. I liked all of the other groups projects that we saw. It was neat to see some of the techniques that they used. I wish we would have tried some of them but I guess you can't think of everything. I saw some of the same techniques that we used so we know that it will look pretty good. Skip's group use the same ink that we did and is showed well on film, so that is one less thing that we have to worry about.

The caffenol was an interesting experiment. Its good to know that I can make a developer out of household products. I don't drink coffee so at least there is some use for it. It didn't work as well as the chemicals but at least there was an image on the film. Its too bad you had such a hard time finding that washing powder.

I am looking forward to the project tht we are doing on Thursday. I am not sure what kind of story that we will be able to come up with using beans, rice, and salt but I guess we can edit something together. I suppose we will be running the film through the projector and recording it on dv so that we can edit it later. Maybe it will be a snowstorm. Not much else going on in my little world.

Last Week

Last Thursday's animation went really well. I hope that everything turns out well with the film. We came into it with a general idea of what we wanted but really had no idea how we were going to do it. We didn't really play around too much with the different planes, we just stayed on the top. Once we got rolling everything went by really fast. I estimate that we probably shot about a minute of footage just making the story up as we went along. Gigi came up with a great idea for the car crash and we mutilated a couple of cars along the way. A lot of our time was spent fighting with the playdough trying to get it to stand up straight. We finally just taped the thumbtack in the little hole since we kept losing it on the floor. Our floam started melting under the lights and gave us a fun time as well. Once we edit it together it should be pretty cool. We went to another set up for a close up but I'm not sure how it will turn out. I think we might have tried to get too close...we'll see. Now we just have to come up with a soundtrack to go along with it.

In other news, Kristen and I finally finished the elements project. We saved the fun stuff until last...not really. We bleached a pattern into a few seconds of one of our spools and we finished up another with some inking. Tomorrow we are going to try to splice all of this together and get it on the spool. I just really hope that Our magazine transfer strips don't come off in the projector. A couple of them are getting loose from all of the winding and unwinding. Last time we projected something the projector ate it so hopefully we will ave better luck this time. We have to see our masterpiece at least once. I also hope that our animations look pretty cool. We did four different ones so we have options if one of them sucks.

I am looking forward to next week as well when we develop the film. I developed film in a still photography course back in high school so I am looking forward to seeing if the process is similar to that. If I remember correctly the chemicals don't smell very pleasant, but then again they are chemicals. I suppose that is the week where we will turn the classroom into a darkroom. Sorry I hadn't blogged in a while, last week was Nuts with a capital "N".

Continued work on the Project

Kristen and I worked for the past few days on the project and have made some pretty good progress. We finally got our animations done and traced them onto the film. We used inks and sharpies to get some color on there. I just hope that the colors that we used are visible once it is projected. I am really excited to see how the magazine transfers turn out on screen. The creativity level has gone up as we have progressed through the project. We aren't getting stuck on what to do next as much anymore. The scratching has turned out to be my favorite method, probably due to the least amount of clean up required. And it also looks cool on film. We are completely done with two of the rolls and are about 2/3 of the way through the last two. It's a good thing we still have a while to finish this project because most of this week will be devoted to the animation project.

Work on the Project

I never have been and probably never will be a good illustrator. My drawing skills topped out in the first grade. So that does not bode well for this animation assignment. I am drawing a simple flower and lets just say I'm glad it will only be on screen for two seconds. It may just end up looking like a blob of crap, but that can be art too. I wish that the frames were a little larger to draw the image, but it is what it is.

Kristen and I gave bleaching the black leader a shot and made a complete mess. We probably bleached about two feet of it so that we can apply ink and our animation to the roll. I think we will scratch most of the black leader to avoid the mess of bleaching.

The never ending search for ink finally ended at Staples. AC Moore only had black ink, Michaels had a nice six color pack but wanted thirty dollars, and Target and Wal-Mart are worthless. So I ended up getting some waterbased stamp pad refill ink. I hope it works as well as the ink we used in class, but if not I'll fight for the ink in Bear with everyone else.

Second Class

The second week of class went really well. The magazine transfers went a lot better than I thought it would. I was a little skeptical that the ink would stay on the tape once the paper was rubbed away but it worked out really well. I cut the strips a little too wide to fit so they needed to be trimmed. I guess it is better to make mistakes when practicing rather than screwing up a project. I'll just have to cut them thinner and probably soak them longer than I did in class.

The inking was interesting. I tried the oil both ways; putting the oil down and inking over it and inking and putting oil over it. When I inked first and then put the oil on it just seemed to smear the ink anound and did not give the bubbly effect of inking over the oil. I think I prefer laying down the oil and painting the ink on top of that. That will work well with the clear leader but I guess I would have to bleach the emulsion off of the black leader in order for the ink to show up.

A Moving Picture Giving and Taking Book

The beginning of the article was a good review of what we have learned in previous film classes and in this class. He got into a lot of technical aspects that were a little confising, but overall I think I got most of it. He got into a lot of still photography terms and tricks that took me back to my high school classes. I found it kind of funny that he doesn't like to use light meters. It was interesting to learn of all of the techniques you can use on different types of film. I didn't realize that there would be that much of a difference between tungsten and daylight film.

First Day of Class

I never really realized how much I hated writing until I stared at this empty blogspace for twenty minutes. The scratch film junkies' film was pretty cool other than the fact that the soundtrack sounded like they recorded a fourth grade music class. I had seen a couple of Stan Brackhage's films before but they were the ones where he glued leaves and grass and dead bugs and crap to the film. I thought that was all he did so seeing the painting and scratching on the film was pretty cool. I blinked and missed a good portion of the film that was about three tenths of a second long, but the Dante one was really interesting with his portrayal of hell. I wish we could have seen how that one progressed.

The scratching on the film was fun. I wasn't too sure how much we would be able to see once it was projected. I was unsure of how hard to scratch. It would have been great to see more of it once we finished but the projector was hungry and ate our loop. At least it gave us a good idea of what we can do on film and what we can do in our first project. It was a good learning experience and a good way to experiment.