Reflections

I did enjoy this course. The professors are knowledgeable and approachable. It gave me more of an insight into how movies are made, technically- which makes me appreciate technically refined films more, and allows me to enjoy older films without judging them for their technical flaws, such as a lack of a sound track.

My critique is that I did not learn quite enough, and a good portion of the digital and photography material was review for me. I think that when somebody declares themselves a film or media major at Hunter, they should be given a survey where they fill out what technical skills they already have. I have reason to suspect that a large number of them already did photography and/or basic HTML and image manipulation before they enrolled in college. Based on what the department learns about the skills of incoming Media/Film majors, they can then construct courses to focus on things that are more unusual to learn in high school, like professional film lighting, and things that older students who have more traditional film experience already may not already know, like Photoshop and HTML. Maybe not. At the very least, knowing what the students already know will make teaching a survey class like this easier.

I was engaged by this course, however, and was excited to start a portfolio that I see as a future professional web site.

Design I Like: infoMania Opening Sequence

Opening sequence starts at the :29 mark. Watch in HQ for full effect. Have the sound on.




infoMania is a weekly clips show on Current TV. Its presentation consists of commentators, often in front of a green screen, making comedy and satire out of an overwhelming glut of varied mediums, focusing on television, the internet, and magazines. Clips are rapidly edited together, to keep up with the fast pace of the jokes.
The opening sequence of a show should serve to preview both the content and the style of the program that follows it, and this short but powerful sequence does so effectively. It captures the overwhelming feeling of attempting to stay on top of contemporary pop culture. It does this through innovative composition and imitative typography.
The sequence is only 18 seconds long, but its composition spans a ridiculous scale. It begins zoomed into what looks like a web page on Wikipedia. It is not an actual screen shot, however, just an imitation- made perfectly believable by the use of the same font that Wikipedia uses. It then zooms out, again and again, showing more and more of a world that is completely filled with modern media devices, from cell phones and LED screens to Times Square billboards and blimp displays, with believable fonts. Each zoomed out shot reveals more devices as it goes. Each screen, that looked real, is then zoomed out of to reveal that it was really just an image on a screen, itself- an advanced, motion-picture version of the still image compositional technique called mise en abyme. The end shot is of the entire earth, made up of an incomplete image with the text, "Still Loading."
The furious pace of the continuous zooming out, timed with the rhythm of the music, creates a rushing feeling in the viewer, emphasizing the overwhelming nature of the amount of varied media we are surrounded by. This glut of information and misinformation can be disconcerting, but on this show, it is instead an endless source of humor.

What I See: Tetsuo, The Iron Man

"Tetsuo: The Iron Man" is a Japanese film made by director Shinya Tsukamoto in 1989. It is entirely in black and white. It tells a horrifying story about two men whose bodies are taken over by and transformed into machines. This could be seen as a comment on industrialization and capitalism's dehumanizing effects on the individual, since the characters are literally dehumanized. Its plot is not entirely clear, since there is barely any dialog, and since it is made with mostly expressive, rather than explanatory, cinematography.

The first five minutes of the film is a montage of wide shots of factories interspersed with images of a man entirely surrounded by wires, tubes, and machinery parts. All of the shots in this sequence are cropped to avoid seeing this man's eyes. All of the shots that show the man are close-up, focusing on just one body part after another. In each of these shots, the electronics are also in focus, putting equal importance on the man and his electronic surroundings.

Close-ups, ranging from a normal close up to extreme close-ups, are the primary type of shot used in the film. Much of the story is taken up by Tetsuo, the main character, dealing with his body's transformations. Whenever he is discovering a new part of his body that has transformed into machinery, it is done entirely in close-ups, including shots of just his horrified eyes and of his screaming mouth. Staying extremely close to the main character creates an uncomfortable intimacy, which allows the viewer to more viscerally feel the terrible transformation.

By the last third of the movie, Tetsuo has become completely covered in machine flotsam, and he resembles a walking electronics junk yard. It seems as though the camera itself is frightened by him. In a scene where he answers a phone in his apartment, the camera shows a medium shot of his freakish head and the phone, and the shot slowly pans to the left and the right of him, showing the uninteresting domestic background instead, as though uncomfortable with the idea of looking directly at the now monstrous Tetsuo.

Museum of the Moving Image Visit

The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, New York has a collection of artifacts and activities that illustrate the history of, and basic concepts behind, movie and television production and consuming.
I had been there before, when I was a child. As an adult with a sharper and more focused curiosity, I took away more from the visit. My mind was opened, a bit. I strongly dislike anything to do with professional sports, but I came away with a deep respect for the people who broadcast it. Live video editing, as shown with the museum's display of Bill Webb's live editing of a Yankees game, must take a powerful and calm mind to do well. The museum display showed multiple monitors from many cameras around the field, with the center one due for broadcast. The exhibit's voice over is Webb's commands to display first this feed, then another, and the visitor can see the result of this focused multitasking on the central display. It is a instant choreography that I was very impressed by.
The museum's collections showed how the production has become more portable and higher fidelity, made especially vivid by the hand-cranked late-19th century camera, which produced films with variable frame rates, depending on how fast the operator's arm moved. The bulk of vacuum tubes was made abundantly clear by the teal-colored early television camera that weighed 300 pounds, and was practically the size of a fridge. I compare this to my small digital video camera the size of a cell phone.
Consumption has changed with the public's taste. This is shown in the collection of fashionable television sets, including a feminine-blue one from the 1950's that resembles a housewife's oven. it has been very merchandise-heavy for several decades, as seen by the room full of movie-themed merchandise from the 1930's to 1990's.
The museum had enough content to write much more than this. Its collection, if seen a thousand years from now, would explain to future visitors that television and movies, made with a variety of changing technologies, formed the heart of culture for the West in the 20th and early 21st centuries.