last post!

Well I have to say I learned a lot this semester. To be completely honest, I only signed up for it because I had friends taking it, I needed a class, and because I figured if Shannon was teaching, sure why the hell not. I did not take it because I was naturally interested in experimental filmmaking. I should have known better, because I felt the same way before taking 6x1, and that ended up being one of my favorite classes. I guess what I've learned from both though is that no matter how hard I try, watching famous or not famous experimental films is just not my thing. I rarely enjoy them, and I never feel like I understand them. However, I LOVE making them. I had so much fun with the music video, and I never really thought of music videos, even the weird ones, as experimental before. I learned that experimental can mean a lot more than Roger Bebe and Brakhage, that it can cover a lot of more mainstream entertainment as well, such as Aaron Valdez. This class really opened my eyes to different areas of experimental, and how it may fit into my own work as well.

I learned that as a filmmaker myself, I don't want to make pure documentaries. I really like that I have built up skills that enable me to be able to make documentaries that have experimental twists to them to add flavor and style. I still want to lean farther to the documentary side, but I don't want them to be plain and boring, and I now feel that I can avoid that pretty well. I think I learned more about the experimental community and the different levels of that community. I also learned a lot about the experimental community at UNCW. I was amazed that I could walk into a Silva class as a senior and not know at least half of the kids in it. It was great to be able to work with everyone and get to know people that I would never have met otherwise. I learned that experimental especially is all about helping others out whenever you can, because with as little money as most experimental filmmakers have, it is always good to rub someones back in hope of getting a back rub of your own in the future.

film festivals

hm how do I feel about submitting my own work to festivals. Well as far as this class goes, I'm not planning on sending any of the projects. I thought the first assignment was a great exercise, but I'm not proud enough of that to pay for festivals and spend the time to promote it. The self portrait... no. Kristina is planning on sending off the music video, and I don't know what Royce's plans are for the installation. The project that I am planning on sending off is my senior seminar sea turtle project, and oddly enough I'm really nervous about it even though I just got off a festival run for an intermediate project. After the festivals for Foot Not Bombs, Andy and I were starting to feel pretty confident in ourselves, but now I'm starting to get nervous about it, especially now that I've gotten all of my friends and family involved with the sea turtle project through kickstarter. I guess I'm worried that Food Not Bombs mainly got into festivals because it was an awesome controversial topic, rather than our actual filmmaking skills. So I am concerned that sea turtles as a topic is not exciting enough, or that it doesn't have an argument in it, and without that I am not sure that my skills are enough to get it into festivals. I'm just afraid that I'm getting everyone hyped up for it and it may completely flop. I guess that's life though.

Aside from that, I am totally excited to get back on the festival circuit. It was one of the best experiences I've ever had, and I just felt respected and treated like a professional at the festivals, not to mention all of the contacts that I made and the things I learned about other areas of filmmaking that I didn't know. And of course, it was amazing to see so many awesome films for free!

giant installation ball take one

post Cucalorus

sooooo Cucalorus is awesome. period. Unfortunately, by the time Food Not Bombs screened on Saturday morning I was at the onset of getting super duper sick, so I missed everything from Saturday morning onward. But I did get to do a lot before then, so it wasn't a total loss. I went to the kick off party for the first time, which was really fun to see some awesome music videos right before editing our own for class. On friday I saw Bunny and the Bull which was strange, but had a really cool visual style to it with a mixture of live action and animation. I also saw A Puppet Intervention which was a really nice documentary by a first time filmmaker, and then I saw The Red Chapel which was so awesome and twisted and morally wrong in so many different ways it was crazy. I don't even want to start thinking about all of the ways that the film was humanely wrong, so I'll just keep thinking about how awesome it was. Saturday morning Food Not Bombs screened with A New Kind of Listening, which was beautiful and had most of the senior citizen filled audience crying and blowing their noses by the final credits.

Andy and I also did the media literacy program on Wednesday, which I guess is also a part of Cucalorus. that was a ton of fun, but at the same time was a little weird that with all the family packed kids films they picked our illegal activist film to screen with them. It was slightly awkward to try to answer these 2nd graders' questions in the q&a by telling them that dumpster diving is good, but don't go do it yourself, which all of them wanted to do. The lady running it even had to make a disclaimer saying that "Cucalorus nor UNCW endorses this behavior, we just want you to learn about world hunger". It was fun though to watch them watch it and see their reactions, especially when Andy was in the film and you could hear them saying to their neighbor "oooh! its that man over there! he's right there!" I never understand why kids struggle so much with volume perception, but its funny all the same.

Cucalorus

I'm excited for Cucalorus! My first plan is to participate in the Media Literacy Program that Food Not Bombs is now a part of. I'm really excited for that, it sounds like an awesome program. That is Mon-Wed, and I will try to attend as many of those as I can. I would like to see Shelter in Place, A Film Unfinished, Bunny & the Bull, Enter the Void, Honeymooner, and the feature that Food Not Bombs is playing with, A New Kind of Listening also looks great. Hopefully I will get to some of the special events as well, like the midnight brunch and the Visual Soundwalls Party.

Installation

Sooooo to be completely honest... installations kind of scare me. I'm not really an experimental kid, and I certainly don't pretend to be. I'm glad I'm in Royce's group, because he is the most experimental kid... ever, in more ways than one. Our group met tonight to go over ideas, and I'm starting to feel a little better about this. Royce has a pretty cool idea about a guy that hires contractors to build him a new planet because he hates all of the other planets and wants to spend the rest of his life alone. Then he finds another person that hired the same group to build a new planet for her, but the contractors were just building one planet and were hoping that they'd never find each other. They fight.. and then they both jump into a volcano... I guess. I wish they didn't have to do that, but it shows our director's personality at least.

I then suggested that we not show found footage of construction workers on a boring sheet, but a more interesting surface. We then came up with the idea of projecting our footage onto a giant ball that has four different textures on it of earth, water, and two others of that sort to kind of represent a planet, that would rotate throughout the installation. This is the part I am excited about because a big arts and crafts project is much more comfortable to me that the whole projector/actor part. I am glad to have found an aspect of this that I can really contribute to and understand, and hopefully I'll learn a lot more about the other aspects of this as we go.

Music Video Shoot

I'm actually pretty happy with how our music video is going. We got off to a bit of a rocky start with our planned song not working out, and then not being able to find a song at all until the day before filming. When I showed up on the first day having never heard the song were making a video for, and only being told to bring different pairs of shoes, I'll admit I was a little concerned. But as it turned out, being crunched for time forced us to think simply and efficiently, and our song ended up being about a weary traveler, and so we decided to shoot people walking in a ton of different shoes, on different textures and surfaces, and from different angles. We even did a cool stop motion animation of shoes walking down a path with no body attached, and if that doesn't come out too unexposed, I think that will be awesome. Breaking it down to a simple concept has created millions of really neat editing options that everyone is really excited about. Being new to directing, Kristina had to deal with a few pitfalls that caused some irritation all around, but we all worked it out together and it actually turned out to be a pretty fun experience.