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.