Monday, January 30, 2017

Response to R3 content: the power of sound

In movies, there is nothing quite like the sounds that situates us in the world or confirms what an object. Very few Hollywood movies are filmed entirely on location. An excellent example of how soundscapes can do this is in Iron Man, If you think back to the original Iron Man movie, the first few scenes where Tony Stark has been captured by the terrorist group, why do we believe he is in a different country captured by terrorists? We believe it because of the music that we hear in the background, the variety of languages spoken, the sounds of terrorist soldiers moving their weapons. When the Iron Man's suit powers up for the first time, why do we believe that its made of a hard metal, or moving based on a series of mechanical parts? We as audience members certainly cannot see all of the mechanical parts that move to run suit. We do hear the sound of hydraulics and gears moving in succession with the suit to indicate to us that it the suit moves using all of these mechanical parts. 

We know that the suit made of a specially made metal because every time any piece of the suit interacts w some other object with any amount force, we hear the trademark high-pitched metallic sound. Sometimes this is even to a fault when Stark sets the suit's metal face mask onto a wooden table yet it still makes the same noise like so: https://youtu.be/6S-lvDEvgpE?t=3m48s. When he escapes, Why do we believe he is in a press conference when we don't see the reporters in every scene? The clamoring of reporters and camera shutters (along with flashes of light from the cameras) help to situate us in that location.

Sound can often be too overlooked in student films and when we attempt to create these fantastical worlds, one of the most important ways we can situate an audience in our world is to give them a soundscape that reflects the world we want to convey to them.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Response to R1 content- Visualizing the invisible

Visualizing the invisible- Synesthesia and Cymatics

I had a friend who had Synesthesia. I was skeptical at best but I had the opportunity to speak with here about it and I believed it was a very interesting way to understand the world. The most interesting things to me was that it wasn't even as grand a thing to her as I'm making it with the verbiage "way to understand the world." seeing numbers and names in colors was simply what the world was for her. If I remember correctly she told me my name came off kind of blue to me but a shade she couldn't describe. Not that I was particularly special or anything but it is so natural to her that it's about as easy to describe to me as it is for anyone to describe what color is to a blind person, or to try to draw what something sounds like. However, that second one we seem to be attempting to do more and more with something called Cymatics.

When I saw the video on cymatics, it took me a while to understand what it was until they showed the board with the particles on them that move the particles in different frequencies. It turns out this was also a practice I was aware of but I had never learned the name of it. I first saw a demonstration of Cymatics in this video: CYMATICS: Science Vs. Music - Nigel Stanford. It's a fantastic music video and showed me an incredible way to visualize music in a different way. It was a great idea to begin that video with the phrase "all of the experiments are real," because there were many times I looked at it and I thought to myself, "there's  If you think about it, the nature of special effects, VFX, and even movie adaptations is to bring life to something that doesn't have a real form. To be able to integrate cymatics into the visual arts brings a whole other level of artistic possibilities possible, and I can't wait to see how it can be integrated into storytelling!