Posts

Assignment Ratings

6 = Earth Art Animation This was my least favorite assignment because I went into thinking that I had to build an earth sculpture masterpiece, when 1. I am no sculptor and 2. That was not the point of the assignment. It was also aggravating because I somehow lost a decent amount of footage which ruined our editing plans. 5 = Direct Film Manipulation This was a really fun and, for me at least, messy project. I enjoyed working with film for the first time and learning how to use the splicer. This assignment made me appreciate film way more, I could not imagine splicing an entire movie together. I'll probably never do something like this again, which is why it is rated 5! 4 = Bolex Long Take For my group, this project was a beautiful disaster. We had the worst luck, but we were able to make something unique out of it. The best part of the project was the live second sensory element. It was something that I had never experienced and that concept was really cool to work with.

Freestyle

Here's a crowdsourcing anecdote: I conveniently had a family event (my aunt's b-day) the weekend before our crowdsourcing segments were due. I had completed most of the notecards on my own, but I still had a few left and I was completely burnt out from it. So, I was thinking that it would be great to get my family to participate, knowing they were going to be drunk and goofy (they were serving margaritas and tacos, so things were assumed to get rowdy). When I felt the time was right, I pulled out my arts and crafts out of a Walmart plastic and all of the aggravating children were immediately on top of it. Me, being nice and figuring that this could be interesting, agreed to let them paint my notecards. Trying to explain this assignment to adults is hard. Explaining this assignment to children? Impossible. They don't know the difference between a warm and a cold color, they just wanted to paint. My mom participated, and even she got the color palette wrong. The youngest ki

Experience with the Bolex Long Take

My group experienced a lot of technical difficulties when it came to filming our long take. Our idea was to film another group while they filmed their long take. We planned on filming a group that was throwing bananas at the subject, which I was pretty excited for. We finished that and went to bathe the film in some chemicals. After what felt like hours, but was only a few minutes, in the pitch black darkness, we pulled the film out of the chemicals only to find that ours did not develop. At all. So it was back to the drawing boards for us, and we had to choose a different group to film. The technical difficulties did not stop there. We were trying to film as soon as the group we were filming started to film, but when Porshia pressed the button, nothing happened. We were able to get it to work as soon as the other group was done. So, our film turned out to be people throwing up peace signs and doing other random things. Overall, we tried our best and it didn’t turn out too bad. *UPDA

Rough Theatre

Peter Brook's piece about the Rough Theatre is an interesting and important perspective on what a theatre is. I think that his overall point is that you can make a performance out of anything, anywhere, with anybody. A rough theatre doesn't require the glitz and glam to be entertaining, it requires someone resourceful and creative enough to use what they already have to do something wonderful - or a lot of the times, wonderfully terrible. My rough theatre would have to be anywhere my best friend and I took our Flip Video Cameras. We would come up with really weird, middle-schoolerish skits, mainly in Walmart. Filming in Walmart allowed for an endless amount of props (for free), meaning endless possibilities. We used sunglasses, PillowPets, Iron Man masks, toy swords, and those really small tricycles. These skits were really, truly terrible but they made us laugh not only during the end result, but in the process. I am not sure why they didn't kick us out, but they should

Visualizing ourselves with crowd-sourced data

Seeing all of these different crowdsourcing projects really puts its limitless potential into perspective. I think that it is really awesome how no two crowdsourcing projects will ever be the same. It is interesting to see so many different artistic styles in one larger and very dynamic piece. I loved the Johnny Cash music video and I think it would really awesome to be a part of a project like that. With all of the negativity towards the media nowadays, it is nice to see it put it a better light. Social media can entail a negative experience if you let it, but it can also result in a new kind of creativity that we have never seen before. More voices can be heard and more stories can be told. I thought that the first projects Koblin mentions were unique in the way that he took simple daily activities and made them interesting. Seeing all the different flights and the color patterns they create puts air traffic into perspective. Air traffic isn't something I typically think about

Len Lye - Rhythms

The first thing I noticed about the Len Lye's film was that the film itself was being painted and scratched and he did a lot of other cool things to the film that I don't know how he did. I especially loved the movement and flow of it and how the visuals matched with the music so well. I of course noticed the colorful colors and shapes and the way they moved with the music which immediately made me think of being able to hear colors or see sounds.