Film stripping

The process of making this project was actually kind of fun. It was fairly easy and low maintenance to do. IT was broad and open ended and allowed a lot of room for artistic leeway. I find it a little refreshing to have just a good old fashioned art project to make, experiment with and just kind of have fun with. The objective was only to create the three elements and experiment with some different mediums of film. Now granted, as I think about with almost everything I do, I wonder how this could make me a better filmmaker. It was and interesting experience perhaps seeing the paint and animations over the premade film. It could be an interesting effect to somehow recreate digitally. I felt like I had seen something similar to this in a horror movie or some kind of horror movie spoof.

The animation was easily the most tedious and frustrating part since, whatever symbol I settled on, was stuck with it for the duration of that 100 frames. I started with a little sail boat because I figured it would be simple enough, but eventually I had to transition it out and go to a bird for simplicity’s sake. The sailboat was interesting for a while in trying to animate it to be rocking back and forth, but it eventually got repetitive and tedious by frame 25, so I moved a bird in to flap its wings by the 60^th frame or so.

The last thing that was really interesting was using the different materials to make see what the effect was. My partner and I found that using oil really helped to make the water element feel more liquid-y and bubbly. This project was pretty fun, and an interesting chance to use film as a medium

P.S. I hope the title made you giggle

R4 response: Thoughts on Rough theater

I all honesty, I'm not really positive about what I've drawn from this particular reading, mostly because I don't connect as well with theatre as much as I do with film. I suppose some of the information on rough/popular theatre doesn't consciously resonate with me because to me, the "trick" to Rough theatre, that is for example, to try to do a cacophonous gag when the audience is quieter, is just second nature to me in any public speaking situation. To me, it just seems like responding correctly to the energy of the audience should just make sense to do in any setting. Upon further thought, it does make sense for there to be a distinction between a dramatic type of theatre, improv theatre and rough theatre where. In the latter two, the performance is dependent solely on the script, and/or the other participants in the scene. So, if I understand Rough Theatre correctly, the performance is dependent on variables off-stage, in lieu of what is happening on stage. In traditional theatre, the performance is the same whether the audience is falling asleep or on the edge of their seats. In rough theatre, it seems that performance would shift to literally wake them up, and respond to the needs of the audience in the moment. I suppose much like how generally when people talk to each other, we often empathically mimic each other to "humanize" ourselves when listening. How this relates to film is what is challenging me. Unless its episodic content or live, there's really no efficient way to communicate with the audience and then respond to their energy. I suppose the best example we have at this time is YouTube episodic content. On YouTube, you get the content, the content creator can look at the YouTube comments and see what the response is, then make adjustments to the quality and performance of the show. I suppose an interesting experiment would be to make a show, that's literally written as the episodes come out, based on what the audience decides or figures out. That would be a very interesting way to attempt to emulate the main component from the rough theatre.

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.

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!