Braindrops

A Modest Appraisal

2010-05-18T17:11:00.001-07:00

I will try hard to not use this last blog post as a way to blast the utterly disorganized, illogical, and scatterbrained way in which this course; designed by media professors feeling utterly overwhelmed by the admittedly overwhelming current changes in the nature of media production; failed to teach what it was designed to teach simply because that much can not be taught so quickly to a student body with such diverse prior experience and by a department with such inadequate funding for the required technology.

No, I will not broach that subject at all.

Instead I will explain what I learned.

I learned more about how the television and movie industries work, which strengthened my resolve to generally avoid them as a career. But I also learned how to use various technologies that will improve my creative and professional output.
I learned that I really do need to teach myself CSS sometime if I want to actually learn web design. I learned the basics of how to use Flash, which I will use in the future in my creative and professional projects. I learned the absolute basics of editing, but I mostly just learned that the media department doesn’t have enough money to install Final Cut on all of their computers, which is unfortunate, because if I had learned editing, a main reason I took this course, I could have searched for basic film-making internships and maybe change my mind about going into production if I felt competent in digital production skills.

The main thing I learned in this class is Flash. And that was worth the time and energy and frustration of everything else, since I do absolutely love how just by applying lots of time and energy into a piece of software, I can turn the funny little drawings I’ve been doing forever into funny moving drawings.

Having an introduction to digital media is a bit like having an introduction to analog media. And they never had courses like that, did they? A course that taught sculpture, painting, book cover design, architecture, typography, film-making, photography, and cooking in the same class, simply because all of the activities mentioned take place in the same space of the real world. The course seems to be designed from a perspective that things have a lot in common if they all take place on a computer screen, and they simply do not anymore.

Animation Blog

2010-05-11T13:54:00.000-07:00

This blog post is the hardest, because it is very difficult for me to pick just one animation that fires my imagination. I love animations and have seen hundreds or thousands by now. Instead of picking one that’s particularly beautiful or genius, I will pick one that inspires me when I, myself, work with Flash.

I chose Joel Veitch and Rob Manuel’s “Chill Out”, a music video for Youth of Britain’s song of the same name.

The sense of space is both limited and three dimensional, since it is obviously a collage of a few sources thrown on top of one another, it looks like just 2 or three layers. However, the content of the background has a very strong sense of space. It is driving footage shot from kitten-eye-level. The laying of the motorcycle on top of this almost makes it look like it’s in motion. It is a clever trick, but not realistic enough to fool anyone’s eye- just believable enough to entertain people by its obvious unreality.

The character is also extremely simple. The character is barely articulated. It is mechanistic. It looks sort of like an animated bobblehead. The kitten bobs its head to the beat in an almost uniform fashion for the entire video. It does not seem to have any complex emotions, but its movements do effectively communicate both speed and an enjoyment of the music. He also pauses when the footage and the music pauses and, pops a wheelie whenever the music does what electronic music fans call “dropping a break” (starting up a new layer of sound, to the proper rhythm.) These movements’ synchronization with the music give the impression that the kitten is enjoying the music, and the character effectively becomes an embodiment of the song.

Truthfully, I like this video because I like seeing a kitten enjoy loud electronic music, and now I like it even more because it is simple enough for me to aspire to create something of a similar quality. Now that I know the basics of Flash, given enough time, I could make this, and that fact makes me very happy (because I’ve been watching and loving silly flash animations for a decade now, and it’s a new, very internet-centered, geeky medium that I think has a lot of humorous and creative potential.)

Blog 3- Production Notes on "Stalker"

2010-04-11T20:41:00.001-07:00

I cannot speak for my partner, and frankly, this video assignment ended up being highly collaborative. I can’t quite parse out where my contributions ended and his began. I know that neither of us were slacking, and that we both brought much effort and (admittedly spontaneous) creativity to the project. I will try, though, to speak from my perspective.

My concept was based on a personal frustration with current gender-based romantic dynamics: often, women are still expected to wait for men to ask them out, rather than the other way around. I took this oddly archaic dynamic and stretched it beyond my personal experience of frustratedly noticing disinterest when pursuing someone, and the idea passed through self-mockery and into the realm of absurdity. I looked again: what if a woman REALLY doggedly pursued whom they wanted? It stretched further into the realm of the suspense genre, since I like the tension that exists in suspense films. The main character lost any autobiographicality, got slapped with the label “crazy,” and the film was begun.

My technical goals were simple, since my technical skills are minimal. I wanted to learn more about handling a camera with stability and grace (We took turns, we shot about half and half of the scenes.) I wanted learn the basics of Final Cut. I just wanted an excuse to try shooting moving images again, since cinematographic techniques differ much from the still photographic techniques that I have already studied.

One technical aspect that is tied conceptually to the plot is the long hallways shot. It is supposed to give a feeling of increasing suspense and tension, which is tied to both the genre and the situation, and it does this through cinematography: the camera begins much further away from Ben than it ends. Lots of over-the-shoulder shots and first person shots are used for conceptual reasons, too: I wanted the audience to get uncomfortably inside the head of the unbalanced main character.

The only post-development fluke that changed the final product was the inability to shoot again. We wanted to redo a few of the shots, and that couldn’t happen. If I could change anything, I would take Melissa’s advice and change the audio on the long hallways shot. I would also reshoot it to make it slightly shorter and more dramatically different from beginning to end. Andrew’s sarcastic feedback that it “really captured the tedium of stalking” actually kind of hurt my feelings, because he so perfectly said exactly what was wrong with that shot. Other shots would be redone- I want different dialogue in the opening scene, for instance.

But this is what it is, now. I like it well enough, since the goal was to learn more about film-making, and I did. Also, it actually succeeds on one artistic point: the main character really does come across as crazy. That's more to the credit of the actress Gal than to the credit of either of the film-makers, though.

I can haz Intellectual Curiosity?

2010-04-11T19:58:00.001-07:00

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Blog 2 Redux: Nine Inch Nails' "A Perfect Drug"

2010-04-10T19:39:00.000-07:00

Mark Romanek- "The Perfect Drug"- 1997
Album: soundtrack for Lynch's "Lost Highway"

Mark Romanek’s music video for “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails contains a vague narrative, but atmosphere and emotion figure more prominently than plot in this gothic work. It is a montage of neo-romantic characters, landscapes and objects that are combined in an expressive way. The shots can be put into two different categories, split by the dominant color and feeling. One collection is mostly blue, and slow enough for the viewer to notice the surreal and at times pensive variety of actions and characters. These shots are mostly sorrowful.

The second collection is green, and the shots seem almost too fast for a viewer to consciously follow. This collection makes up a sequence that starts at 2:33, and it is why I chose this video to analyze. It represents an absinthe trip. It is only made possible by the uniformity of all the shots: they are all brief, and they are all shot in a special way or put through a filter to make them high-contrast and to replace any highlight values with bright green (instead of the normal white) and all the shadow values with black. These quick shots are made more chaotic by frequent flashes of video black in the middle of the brief cuts, which gives a strong strobe-light-like effect. In fact, it almost seems as though more screen time is taken up by black flashes than by images of characters in this sequence.

Drug trips can be portrayed in many ways, and it seems odd to present an absinthe trip in such a frenetic manner (absinthe is more of a depressant than a stimulant, since it’s mostly composed of alcohol.) These shots are edited in this way because this work is in the genre of a music video, and this genre demands the visuals to be strictly tied to the changing dynamics of the song. The complex, high-energy drum solo accompanying the visuals is undoubtedly the reason the edits are so fast. The staccato drums’ prominence in these measures requires that the accompanying edits follow their hyper rhythm until 2:59, the end of the sequence, and the introduction of a softer percussive sound that leads to more melody and vocals. Emotionally, the quickness of the shots, combined with the ferocity of the drums and the rage of the overlaying synthesized guitar sound, complement each other to communicate a feeling of angry, confused angst. I believe that this video is an effective work because it successfully delivers the emotions of sadness and anger that the song's instrumentals also convey.

Gen Y Must Totally Abandon Boomer Thinking

2010-03-07T21:42:00.000-08:00

From Douglas Haddow's latest article in Adbusters:

"Gen Y only has one choice if it wants to avoid becoming a lost generation: push the boomer way of life onto an ice floe and let it die. Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

There is a revolutionary current running through the subconscious of this generation that has yet to be realized or defined. We champion piracy, instinctively believing that information should be free and open, that intellectual property law is contra-progress and that capital is not a necessary intermediary for social organization. Postcapital collaboration is our daily bread, and we hold a distinctly global worldview, void of class, race or nation. But we grew up too comfortable, played too much Nintendo, watched too much Saved by the Bell, read too much Chuck Klosterman and not enough Frantz Fanon. We naïvely drank the consumerist-credit card Kool-Aid, and now that the Final Fantasy is upon us, we’re in danger of sliding into a delusional techno-utopianism.

This is our decisive moment. Either we wallow in debt as passive observers of history and pray that technology will eventually solve all our problems or we actively seize power and deal with the consequences. While Gen Y outnumbers the boomers, we won’t hold the balance of power for another ten years, at which point the climate may be all but lost. So democracy is not an option.

We should take our cue from the likes of the Brazilian Pixadores, a disenfranchised group of graffiti artists from the favelas of Rio who storm and vandalize art galleries and universities to proclaim their existence against the society that excludes them. But rather than storm art galleries we should pursue a policy of strife: storm and occupy whatever political and economic space we can."

Editing: The White Stripes- Hardest Button to Button

2010-03-02T11:37:00.000-08:00

Video directed by Michel Gondry.

This music video from the middle of the White Stripes' career relies entirely on editing. There are no long shots. Each take lasts between a few frames to just less than a second. Gondry uses hundreds of very short shots to animate the band, in a sloppier, more jittery version of stop motion animation.

In the beginning of the video, the drummer Meg moves, exactly with the drumbeat, in a bizarre way. She is not walking. Instead, her entire drum set scoots through the landscape, and multiplies as she goes, leaving a trail of empty drum sets behind her. The singer, Jack, walks in what appears to be a normal fashion. In this sequence, especially when they walk down the stairs, the edits for Meg are obvious, while the edits for Jack are seamless- I am not even sure if his walking was shot in the same multiple-takes way as Meg's was.

Adorable Spider Babies Atop Their Mother

2010-03-01T22:04:00.000-08:00

I wonder what percentage of the population would react to the baby (wolf?) spiders shown here with, "Aaw!" noises. Count me among them.

Why I Love the Sites I Love

2010-02-05T11:07:00.001-08:00

I visit Facebook often, because it is a massive social-networking site whose content is created by my friends and acquaintances. This user-created site is more relevant and entertaining to me than the cold but polished content created by large companies on other web sites, since the creators of the content I see are personal friends. This is the ultimate appeal of social networking sites. I also use it for its intended purposes, most of the large social gatherings I attend I was invited to with Facebook. It has become a personal event calendar for me. Instead of being bored and reading things written by strangers, I can use time on the web to plan real-life get-togethers later. This pattern is reflected in the other sites I visit often, detailed below.
The other sites I visit the most often are intellicast.com, yelp.com,and google maps. I look at the weather so I know what to wear when I go outside, intellicasts' instantaneousness and the data it gathers from the National Weather Service is very useful. I like looking up reviews of food and coffee before I spend money on it on Yelp.com, and its user-generated aspect is useful to me. This is because lots of votes go together to make the overall rating of a place, as opposed to just one food writer who I may strongly disagree with in a traditional food review publication. I use Google Maps to find out how to quickly get to where I find on Yelp. I then use my web time to facetime advantage by inviting a friend out for tasty, cheap food or drink.
My other favorite sites are humorous ones and entertainment sites. I love humorous photo blogs, because they load quickly and laughing relieves the stress of my daily life better than anything else. I also love the funny but intelligent web comics xkcd.com and Catandgirl.com.
For doing homework or writing fiction, I like having a neverending stream of instrumental music to drown out ambient noise. For that reason I listen to the online radio station bassdrive.com and use the internet-based radio application last.fm, constantly. These are both very niche-oriented services, bassdrive only plays a specific type of electronic music called Drum and Bass and last.fm plays any microgenre you want to request, on demand.
Lastly, the main blog I visit is boingboing.net, so I can stay updated on a uniquely fascinating vein of science, art, and politics news. The internet allows an extremely niche source such as this to exist, it started as a zine but flourished as a blog, after thousands of people equally interested in technology, humor, art, human rights and the science fiction present found they all had extremely similar taste. I also view streaming video sometimes, but not often, since my connection generally is not strong enough.

Reflections

2009-12-08T09:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-30T22:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-10T13:32:00.001-08:00

"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

2009-10-13T15:47:00.001-07:00

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.