Ranking the projects

Number one would be the found footage assignment. I had never done anything like that before and it was pretty gnarly. I definitely spent the most time on that one out of all the projects I did for this class. I just felt very pasionate about my idea and started to obsess over it. Most projects were done in a few days, this one was over two maybe more weeks. The majority of the work was on sound design and adjustments to the video as the sound evolved. I went through alot of different songs trying to create a composite that I liked before I got to the Thom Yorke song and the Portishead song. Then it started falling together. I used the Thom Yorke song because it has this creeping beat and and alot of weird vocals, alot of breathing and rasping and weird sounds. Then the portishead song just clicked with the overall rythm of the piece. After I found that one I started flipping things in reverse and mashing up the bits of narration from old cigarette commercials. It was alot of fun. I'm definitely not finished with it though. I'd like the sound to come in a few beats earlier and there are some adjustments that definitely need to be made. And I'm sure I would find more and more as I started re editing. My second favorite was the 48 hour video race. It was a pain in the ass but it was a very fulfilling experience to work that long and hard on something with so little stopping time and see it turn out. It's not fanastic. I wish I had had a tripod and the sound was a last minute throw in because I wanted to sleep but overall I think it turned out pretty well and the experiment shots I had of the peanuts dropping and blurring and shaking the camera to blur the whole image looked cool. I'm also proud of myself that no shot lasted longer than three frames. Third favorite was the rythmic edit, again because of sound design. There wasn't much collaboration on the topic that would be shot or how to shoot it but once I started editing and found that Infradig song, the drum beat started to drive the whole thing and it started falling together in a really cool way. Fourth favorite was the film scratching/painting one. I had alot of fun trying different things to the film. I don't remember how well it turned out but it was a fun experience. Fifth favorite was multiplane animation and sixth was the long take. Both seemed liek really cool ideas but my group didn't do too much with them and I wasn't very satisfied with it. Not to blame them, I didn't come up with any better ideas, I just didn't enjoy them that much.

6x1 part 2

For my own personal 6x1 followup I would want to explore media and ideas that I wanted to explore in this class but didn't get to for one reason or another. There would definitely be an animation using cut outs, a la South Park. I tried to do some of this on the multi plane animation with magazine cut outs. I also did something similar in the 48 hour video race with the pictures of Robert Downey Jr as he fights the candy bars. I think that that might be a very limiting parameter but I would be interested to see what different people came up with for ideas. I'm afraid they might all end up looking the same in so far as how the cut outs are used. The next one I would try to do would be a claymation or stop motion animation using models. I think I am attracted to this idea because there is far too much of a reliance on cg models in modern filmmaking and watching the old sci fi movies like the original star wars (before the special editions) and seing all the models of the ships and planets and death star and such has a much different effect than that of seeing cg models of the same things. I think I want to explore and would want others to explore what can be done with physical models as opposed to cg and see where they would go with it. Third would be a VJing performance. I can't actually teach this because I don't know how to do it but I would love to learn and if I learned I would pass it on to the children. Fourth would be a found footage project where only one clip per project could be in color. That just seems like cool parameters. And by in color, I mean the source material. So that most everything would have to be from before 196whatever or something that was stylistically black and white. For the last two I would want to do something with film, I'm just not sure what. I don't know enough about film and its versatility to really come up with any ideas for it just yet.

Mysterium Workshop Response

I never really realized how 3d worked when filming, so I'm glad I had this experience. Of course it's completely impractical for independent filmmaking (in traditional narrative films anyway) because it requires two of the same camera and they have to be the same width apart all the time. Also its hard to take the end product seriously. It's cool in a rough theater kind of way but as far as something that's aesthetically salient or cohesive with other elements of a film, I'm not sure there's much potential for it. It was fun to learn nonetheless I'm juts having trouble imagining using it in any future projects that were not simply based of the thrill of seeing something pop out of the screen. I like, after having seen the final product, that my face was so prominently featured. I'm on a huge ego trip right now. I think it's safe to say that my beard and Josh's groin were the stars of our project. I would love to try moving the cameras in the next 3d experiment I endeavor in. It could very easily screw up and I guess there would be no way of knowing until trying to match the two videos on top of each other and it never quite working. Which, if it never ended up working, would a monu-fucking-mental waste of time so its risky. Also next time I try 3d of any sort I want some more wacky props. I was just thinking about some kind of experimental short in which there was a 3d vignette, but that would be kind of ridiculous to have to have people throw on their glasses and then take them off. But maybe if the movie was enough of an experience then interaction could be really fun. In the same vein (or it seems so to me... maybe its completely off topic) I'd really like to learn as many different media as possible for animation and off the beaten path filmmaking. I'd also really like learn VJing. I'm very interested in music and I like the multimedia approach to musical performance. For some reason narrative filmmaking is just always too much of a hassle and the end product is always too shitty and the audiences are always too apathetic for me to keep being interested in it. I'm much more interested in these other media for filmmaking now.