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.

Art House reading

I really liked this article, and I felt like I could relate to the message a lot. I definitely agree that there is a different feeling, a different connection to a film and to those around you when you see a film in a microcinema or any unconventional setting than in a big theater. Cassandra and I went to Luna Fest last year at Browncoat, and we absolutely loved that there were just little uncomfortable wooden chairs set up next to the bar, and that the dvd player worked...most of the time. I was reminded of that when the article talked about how the unpredictability of this type of cinema viewing adds to the experience. Also that the most unconventional of locations can also add a thrill to the experience that a theater simply cannot accomplish. When I read that I thought of taking 6x1, and Andre having us all bring in blankets and sheets and taping them together with gaffer tape and projecting our video race projects under a precarious tent that we made. Having the projection sheet slightly crumpled and blowing in the projector fan made each project look a lot more hand made and raw.

Every summer my town hosts a summer film series where they play movies at the beach at Ontario Lake for free. Families, friends, senior citizens, and little kids all crowd in for the free entertainment. I would always get there late, and be stuck halfway behind a tree or on a weird rock. But it was fun, it was exciting to rush to get a seat in a different area each time, and hearing the waves lapping in the background added almost another layer to the soundtrack that obviously wouldn't otherwise be there.

I also really related to the relationship between people at screenings such as this. In traditional movie theaters, it is rude to talk during a movie, and it is not normal to stay around and talk to strangers about a movie afterwards. But in small settings full of people that love to talk about film, there is much more of a participatory feeling created among viewers and the film. There have been plenty of times that I have come out of a film totally pissed off, and have had no one to talk to about it that cares. I love going to microcinemas because everyone cares, and everyone would be pissed off together.

super 8 video

I found the incredibly boring video talking about the film stock that we are using for the music videos, so if any of you (Barrett) are still freaking out about it, feel free to take a look.

Music Video

Our group hasn't picked a definite song yet, so I don't have any definite ideas, but we do have an option that I think would be cool for super 8 film. Kristina found a song that involves human imperfections and women wanting to be different from the way they are expected to be. I think that song lends itself to a lot of creativity with shots of the body and movement, as well as contrast with different objects. I think that using super 8 will connect to this well seeing as super 8 doesn't look perfect, and is unique when compared to the traditional video that is mainly used now. I think it would be cool to use lighting to add to visual contrast to make lines harder and sharper rather than the soft lighting and focus that women are usually portrayed in.

We have some shooting dates set up, and are working on adding one more day hopefully.

yay for music videos!

soo I don't know what any of you guys did growing up, but I watched music videos. enjoy.

I don't really listen to coldplay, but I had a film teacher in High School that was OBSESSED, so I see these things, and this one is pretty cool


If any of you have ever heard any of Bjork's stuff... this wont surprise you. Shes out of her mind.


The White Stripes? of course.

self portrait idea

sooo here is what I'm thinking for my self portrait. I don't want to talk about my whole life in 3 minutes, because that is way too much and way too vague. I have had an awesome life so far, so would just be too much to say about 21 great years. So what I'm going to do is narrow it down to my experience with leaving for college. This was a lotttt more difficult for me than for pretty much anyone I know because I am a huge homebody, and for some reason I decided to not only leave NY state, but to actually venture south of the mason dixon line, to sunny NC. So I would like to portray my feelings about not only leaving behind my friends, family, and home, but also the experience and emotions of starting a four year long distance relationship, which was quite daunting at the time. I have gathered a bit of home movie footage that I may or may not use, but if I do it would only be in the very beginning. Other techniques I'd like to do to visualize this is a very basic animation, voice over narration, and found footage. I would like to represent my emotions through metaphors in nature (through found footage), because the environment is very important to me. The music will be a single guitar recorded specifically for this project. This will be a self portrait of an emotional experience and growth, rather than of my physical growth over the years. I am a little nervous because it is a really personal subject, and I have a really hard time talking about feelings and stuff... but I am going to try. My boyfriend was a little perplexed when I told him I was going to record him singing "you are my sunshine" for a school project, but he is being a good sport about it, not that he has much of a choice.

Assignment 1d

So assignment one is finally coming to a close. As much as I enjoyed this project, I am kind of looking forward to starting something new. So to finish the assignment, Kristen and I came up with a plan of sorts. It just happened to work out that she was going to be out of town the first weekend of the assignment, and I was going to be out of town for the second. So we were able to meet together during the weeks and talk through the project, what we wanted it to look like, what pictures we liked the most, and different techniques we wanted to use. Then on each weekend, we were each able to have a chance to work through pieces of it by ourselves. I think this will be a really good way to make sure we each get to include what we want, but also be able to collaborate together.

Since we have Nate and Barrett's soundscape that is very dreamlike and subjective, we want our images to reflect that mood and tone. So far, our images follow the rhythm and pace of the soundscape, and has a lot of superimpositions and dissolves as transitions to portray the dreamlike state. We will try to stay true to the mood of the soundscape, and enhance and add a new dimension to the tempo and vibe that is already in place.

Assignment 1b

I had a lot of fun making the soundscape. I feel like I learned how to convey what a specific emotion actually feels like, just through a bunch of random noises that were all generated by our class. Our sentence was "she continued yelling from the kitchen", and so as we were working through our soundscape, we really put ourselves into our sentence. What does it feel like to be in an argument? is it always loud, or are their moments of pauses? How does your body react? If this argument is in the kitchen, what other noises would I hear? How would my cooking be effected by anger? These were all questions that we really took seriously when making our soundscape. I honestly did not think I would be able to dive in so deeply to a question that was randomly assigned to us. We began to work our soundscape in a wave form, as we felt like arguments generally move in waves of emotion, from out of control anger, to moments of silence. When I listened to the final soundscape, I felt my body react to the waves of noise in the same way it would in an argument. My heart started beating faster during the loud and chaotically uncontrolled part, and I felt relief and nervousness during the quiet part in anticipation of another wave. Even though our soundscape sounds rather raw since we did not go farther and distort the sounds and put effects on them, I feel that it was appropriate to leave it this way because an argument is just that, raw and messy.

two nice pictures

Duplicating Reality
This image had copyright protection on it so I couldn't post it, but I really like it so here is the link to it
http://www.robertleon.com/photography/guate_semana_santa.htm

Impressionist Photo

Light Observations

Market St. & 18th St.
Sunlight is streaming through the tree lined street and making a spotted pattern of light and shadow on the road. This pattern is interrupted by the solid blocks of car shadows moving steadily through the street of Jaguar spots. The sun glints off the roofs of cars and straight into my eyes. As the sun hits the front and back windshields of the cars, there are vertical stripes of light and shadow changing rapidly as the cars zoom down the road. In the surrounding trees, light skips around as the breeze blows the leaves gently. The beautiful old houses are mostly in the shade by the protection of porches, while their roofs are bathed with sunlight. Light and shadows dance wildly out of control on the t-shirt of a motorcyclist driving by. A car's turn signal creates its own unnatural light as it flashes orange.

Wallace Park
Shadows from tree leaves bounce along the wooden bridge. The straight, unmoving thick shadows of the wooden bridge beams reflect solidly in the stream below. As fallen leaves float down the top of the stream, their shadow mirrors them on the stream floor. As the water flows gently down, the sunlight makes a rippled pattern that looks almost like shadows of fish scales with an outline of light, moving much quicker as it reflects than the movement of the water itself. The large bushes, shrubs, and grass cast shadows into the edges of the stream. The sun itself casts a painfully reflective bulb in the water. As little water bugs hop across the water, the sun catches on the rings of water they create as it dissipates outward. Dragonflies and birds flying over head create undefined moving shadows up and down the stream.

Assignment 1a

Before doing this part of the assignment, I have probably never paid attention to what it sounds like in a coffee shop. That seems so strange to me, because coffee shops are practically my adopted homes, because coffee is what keeps me ticking. But as soon as we walked into Starbucks, before we even asked permission to record the sounds, I was all of a sudden awakened to a plethora of incredibly interesting noises that I have taken for granted for years. All of a sudden the blending of ice, the squishing of syrup, the sound of coffee brewing, the loud hum of the steamer, were now not just annoying conversation interrupters, but individual fascinating noises that had a life of their own. I immediately started thinking of what each noise sounded like, how it could be applied as a sound effect in a film. The syrup sounded like stepping in squishy mud, or even like guts splattering. The harder I listened, more subtle sounds came to life that are not quite as obvious. The sound of shifting in a chair, the slurping of coffee, the noise of a straw moving in a plastic cup, and the tapping of feet were all a part of this cafe orchestra that has I have always had a deaf ear to, but has nonetheless been present every day in every Starbucks coffee shop.

Sound Observations

Chandler's Warf
I sit on a bench with a thud and close my eyes. I hear an airplane that must be flying very low, it is loud. A woman is on her cell phone talking loudly, but I can't tell where her accent is from. I hear tires in the parking lot next to me, crunching slowly on the gravel. The water in the little wade pool behind me is slapping rhythmically on the cement slabs. The wind is wooshing in my ears, and rustling the leaves on the trees. There are a lot of trees, so there is a lot of rustling. I can hear the feet of little birds on the concrete slabs in the wade pool behind me. They sound like they are hopping around on rocks, concrete, and twigs, probably looking for food. They are making soft chirping noises at each other. Two men are walking on the boardwalk talking. Their voices are very low, and their feet make a deadened thud on the wooden walkway. I hear those birds again, plopping their beaks or heads in the water. I hear a constant noise, and since the restaurant behind me is closed, I realize that I am near the bridge, and the rather low rumble is the cars constantly going over the bridge. A motorcycle engine is revved, and a man coughs. My notebook flaps in the breeze. Cars drive by the nearest street and I hear the radio in the car. Stupid rap music. A woman's cell phone rings on the board walk, and it sounds like a chandelier tinkling. A man jogs past me, I hear his heavy breathing coming in gasps, and his feet sound like they are dragging so much I wonder if I will hear him crash to the ground. I don't. Three women walk by, two slurping on some kind of drink through plastic straws. The third is licking her ice cream cone so loud its embarrassing. As they walk past me I hear three pairs of plastic flip flops flapping on the wood. I hear a car door open and close, then a car trunk close. An engine starts, it sounds like a newer car. A speed boat rumbles past me loudly. A family walks by with a stroller, the wheels make an uneven thumping rhythm on the boardwalk. The kid is running ahead, his feet making that little kid thumping noise that always seems like a louder noise than their body weight can create. He is laughing, and his dad is running after him calling.

Bella's Cafe
The air conditioning is loud and low, and blocks out a lot of other sounds. The ice machine adds its own even louder, even lower monotonous tone. There is music playing quietly in the background, it is generic alternative music. A woman is tapping her plastic pen on the granite counter very quickly. Two other women are whispering so quietly that all i can here are their "s"'s. The door opens, and the classic two note bell rings, first a high note then a low note. The blender is now grinding ice, and someone is walking across the floor tiles. A man is talking, and I hear footsteps that are so uneven I have to look up. Oh, he has a peg leg. A flier next to me rustles from the air vent. Some piece of machinery is squeaking. I don't know what it is, but it is high pitched and constant. The peg leg man sighs as he flops down on a vinyl couch. The noise sounds like plastic deflating, if thats even possible. A girl is tapping her foot on the floor. A newspaper is crinkling. A plastic water bottle is plopped down on the granite counter. The cash register opens with a pop, there are high pitched buttons clicking, the noise of fingers picking up change from the register, the register closing, and finally the clinking of the change as it moves from cashier to customer.

Walter Murch Response

I thought this quote/short article thing was really interesting, especially when I reread it directly after reading the Bela Balazs article for this week. When reading it in class, I completely agreed that it was strange that the first sense we have in life does not stick with us once the other senses come. In many other aspects of our early life, our first impressions do stick. Our young years are said to be the best years to teach children everything from good manners, to multiple languages, to family relations. Even when we get older and become independent, our first experiences and habits tend to stick with us. I would think that spending 4 and a half months in a sack of nastiness that I probably wouldn't want to see anyhow, and having my only relief from what I can only imagine being a crappy period in my life, be the ability to hear everything around me including love from my parents and brothers, that I would not forget that first impression so quickly. Even though I much prefer to have the ability to see, obviously, I felt like the natural path for people to take would be to use sight as an accompaniment to sound, rather than vice versa.

Once I read the Balazs article, I started to understand parts of the question that Murch left unanswered. While Balazs does back up my thought that sight should accompany sound by pointing out that "science tell us in fact that the ear can distinguish more delicate nuances than our eye", he also explains the pitfalls of hearing that does not occur with sight. He explains that while our ears are more perceptive to subtle differences, sounds cannot be isolated from its acoustic environment as, in the context of the article, a close up shot in a film can be isolated from its visual environment.

In relation to the cinema, I absolutely love the sound track of a film. When making a project of my own, the sound effects, voice over and music can change the mood and tone of the film entirely. When I am in a theater I like the sound to be really loud because it is truly what draws me into the visuals of a film. However, it is true that when I leave the theater, I rarely talk about the sound, but about the movie, and therefore the visuals. But my decision on whether the movie was great or terrible is greatly influenced by the sound, even if it is in a more subtle way.

Reading Responses

Intro to "Avant-Garde Film"
I thought this article was pretty interesting, mainly because I really don't know much about the history of experimental filmmaking aside from what I learned in 6x1. I thought it was a really good point that even when people make films that are as far from conventional as humanly possible, dominant cinema is still implied because commercial film is what is drilled into our heads since birth. I never thought of it that way, that how I react to "avant-garde" is entirely related to my relationship with dominant cinema, but I guess it is true. I thought that was interesting because I always try to keep an open mind, but I suppose this isn't entirely my fault. I also thought it was interesting that MacDonald connected "pioneer" avant garde filmmakers of the 1960s to the pioneers of original movie making. It makes me wonder that if those first movie makers went the route of "avant-garde" from the very beginning, if what we now consider "conventional" would be the road less taken.

The Film as an Original Art Form
mm I'm not sure I buy into this one. It seemed to be way more judgmental than I would agree with. He seemed to be saying that just because narrative film borrows from other mediums that it is therefore inferior to documentary and experimental filmmaking, which is in his opinion more "pure". That seems strange to me because before film, artists still borrowed ideas from other mediums, and I don't see how it was okay for other types of art but not for film. Painters paint stories that they read from ancient literature or the bible, and sometimes writers write stories based on paintings or sculptures that they see. Some painters make extremely realistic images, and others are more "experimental" work. I feel like film has many parallels to other art forms, and it doesn't make sense that all of those similarities that film has with the "original" art forms are the same qualities that Richter is using to accuse film of being unoriginal.

Artist Manifesto

As a person, I believe in living to learn, explore, and enjoy the resources that I have. As an artist, I feel that it is important to bring those values into my work. I love to capture real life rather than the imaginary, which come in various forms, whether it is capturing a real person or event in the form or documentary, or attempting to capture my own real feelings and interests in the form of experimental filmmaking.
As a person I would rather spend my money on experiences and memories rather than plastic toys that will be forgotten the next year. Memories are never forgotten when they are captured on film, whether it is a single moment, or a year's worth of memories in motion.
I love to buy from garage sales, because buying a bike that was loved and has a long history is far more meaningful than a shiny new bike from a factory. In my experimental art, I love to take used objects and forgotten toys and give them a new life of abstraction and meaning through film. While I am far from perfect, I strive to live for the moment, learn everything I can, and reuse what I have to create new and honest work and experiences.