Project Ratings

#1 Crowdsourcing
The crowdsourcing was the most interesting for me to learn about and the actual process of making it was the most collaborative and engaging out of all of the projects. I loved looking at other crowdsourcing examples and I especially enjoyed getting together with friends and drawing the frames and I think the outcome was pretty awesome.

#2 Video Letter
I liked this project simply because there were hardly any guidelines. I was able to have some of my friends contribute to it (through narration) and it was just sort of a fun project to close out the year. I had no idea how I wanted to accomplish the end result I just sort of started working on it with a vague idea and it was kind of fun to do it that way.

#3 Rhythmic Edit
This one was kind of tedious which is probably why I liked it so much, I enjoy tedious work oddly enough. It was a lot of small cuts and rearranging and trying to get as many different angles of one tiny action, but I was really pleased with the final outcome.

#4 Film Manipulation
I have never dealt with actual film before so I had a lot of fun just messing around and destroying it with a friend.

#5 360 Video
This was a fun project in that the whole class got to work on both projects even though technically there were two separate groups. It was not something I've ever worked with before so it was interesting to even attempt it. I also liked how each person did a different soundscape and it was interesting to see how different people interpreted the same footage.

#6 Stop Motion Animation
This was still a really fun project even though it's coming in at #6, it's probably just the most time-consuming one which is why it came so low on the list. In addition, looking at the final project I feel like there were a lot of things I would have done differently and this was the project where I was least pleased with the final outcome.

360 Experience

This was a really interesting experience I had a lot of fun with this project. I like that it wasn't as in-depth as most film projects it was kind of just a lot of practicing to get it to be one minute and choreographed. I had never seen a 360 camera before and haven't used those VR goggles at all yet so that was also an interesting part. The majority of my work came in the editing which was honestly just fun to mess around with because I didn't know how things would look such as titles so I had fun just moving things around. It was also majorly difficult to edit sound to multiple different scenes and I'd be curious to see how someone else does it.

Rough Theatre

This article brings up a lot of interesting points about how theatre needs "dirt" in order to properly function, adding the imperfect, human characteristic of art. Mostly this article made me think of, when I was younger, my dad would listen to a lot of Sonic Youth (even going through home videos there was a solid 10 minutes where my dad had just filmed shadows of trees with just the sound of feedback in the background). Feedback is generally a "mistake" that has been flipped and actually used to aid songs in certain circumstances (the "dirt").

My rough theater lately has been the app "1 second everyday". I've used it for a few years but basically you take videos everyday and choose 1 second and it cuts it together so you get a quick snapshot of your year. There's no glitz or glamor and it doesn't take all that much effort it just encourages me to take a video of anything each day that way there's kind of a cool end product that serves as a memory keepsake. It's quick and imperfect but serves its purpose and is an entertaining thing to revisit with friends.

Film Manipulation Experience

I had a lot of fun with this project, although it was kind of difficult messing with the film and not knowing what it was going to look like until it actually got projected. I can only imagine how meticulous of a planner you would have to be to get it to go along to music or anything like that. Loading the projector was very similar to how we put the film in the Bolex in our 302 Doc class and turned out to be a lot simpler than I originally imagined.

Probably my favorite portion was scratching in the animation. I made a little flower growing; however, when it projected it played backwards so it looked like it was just sort of sinking into the earth but it was still pretty sweet. The one thing I couldn't really predict how it was going to look was the bleach. I wish we had gotten a spray bottle because I'd be curious to know how that would look but we just kind of dropped some onto the strip to see what would happen and it looked a lot more interesting projected than it did just looking at the strip. The magazine transfer was a bit more tedious but I really liked the texture it gave the film once it was projected.

Animation Storyboards: Austin, Carly, Cheyenne, Ryan

R3 Reading Response

            Sound can often be overlooked in films. I myself do not really have much experience with it and have mostly gone by the idea that if you do not notice the sound, then it’s good sound. The article “The Father of Acoustic Ecology” was extremely interesting to me because it was something that I have noticed in my daily life but have not thought about as in-depth as this article did. My friend is taking a city planning class and a lot of the terms she brings up are over my head but she has mentioned the way sound plays a huge role in their discussions. Audiences’ only notice bad sound in films, otherwise it fades into the background. Similarly with city planning, being close to a huge highway or train track is extremely noticeable, while other sounds are less intrusive.

More often than not, the absence of sound is a lot more noticeable than movies with heavy sound effects. I recently saw “Moonlight” and it’s generally a very quiet movie and I could tell it was making the people in the theatre a little uncomfortable because they were trying to eat quieter and not move around as much. I personally prefer movies more on the quiet side because they feel more serene. On the complete opposite side, when I was younger I used to be obsessed with this gymnastics movie called “Stick It” and there was one scene in particular that had this loud music that was abruptly cut off when the coach unzipped his jacket and I thought it was the coolest use of sound even though I did not really understand films at the time.

R2 Reading Response

I really loved the Aaron Koblin TED talk (as in I sent it to everyone I know after viewing it). It reminded me a lot of a movie I watched back in high school. I went through an Ellen Page phase at some point and during that phase I was also taking a film class where we had to present on our favorite movie. It was called “The Tracey Fragments,” and I remember liking it because it was so out of order and jarring and a lot of it played like a music video. After doing a lot of research on the film, I realized that at the time of its release (years prior to my viewing of the film), the director actually put up all of the footage they shot for the entire film on their website, even scenes that didn’t make it into the final film. They encouraged fans of the movie to download the footage and basically have their way with it. I remember watching a bunch of different edits of the movie where people re-contextualized a lot of the footage and I thought it was the coolest idea at the time. 

Likewise, I found the Wikipedia TED talk to be fairly enlightening because, although I use it all the time, I have never really been clear on how the crowdsourcing part worked. However, I do think it’s an insanely brilliant idea because just about everyone you meet has limited knowledge of something and, if you piece it together, a pretty comprehensive bank of expertise is created.