day 18 response

Overall I think this summer semester was one that was well worth my time. At least now I have some credit hours done with. I think the first few weeks with the film create/film destroy and the animation process was fun. But I also liked the chance to direct the one take film, although there were some things I wish I could've improved on while making it. Other than that this class was real pleasure to take, my classmates were a pleasure to work with, and Dr.Silva was a pleasure to have as an instructor and I recommend this class to anyone who wants to take it in the future.

day 17 response

Thursday night we had the "One Night Stand" party at the Silva house. I went ahead and tried to get there as early as I could but made it there in time all by myself. Our class helped mainly set up the decorations and deal with electronic devices while the editing class came with just food. Around 8:30 we started the showing of all the videos selected to premiere. The videos were from our class and also the editing class's as well. It a fun night viewing everyone's different videos done over the semester, and I was also thankful to have two of the videos I worked on show. I felt it was a good and fun way to end the summer class on a high note.

day 16 response

Tuesday was nothing really special. In fact all we did really was discuss the end of the summer party that was to be held at Dr. Silva's house on Thursday. We went over everything that we could think of that would be required for a party like this. When it came to assigning positions, James and I were assigned to be location managers. Around 8:00 that night, we both rode together to the Silva house and looked around for good positions to up everything. All seemed real simple and then we just wait Thursday to arrive.

day 15 response

When we were about to feature our one take videos to the class, I was not really excited about the one that my group did over the weekend. Making it was fun, but it wasn't as fun we when we actually saw it in class. Once again I dislike my work solely based on the decisions I made during production and editing. I thought to myself that this movie would seal my fate as a filmmaker, and as it turned out, as a director, I don't know if it's my decision making, or that I have a lot of ambition but no talent.

day 14 - filmbeatz and last project

We showed our film beatz projects today in class. After a long day yesterday of shooting and editing (which took practically the rest of the day to do by 11:00 by the way), we were all pretty much nervous about presenting our work. Unfortunately for me, I didn’t turn in my project properly, so I had to go back and export it the right way, with some help from Maura as usual. Since after I posted my video, it was initially the first one to go. I think everyone got a chuckle out of it, especially at the end where I had added the snorting sound effect for a little comic relief. All of the other videos looked very good as well, in fact some, if not most of them looked like music videos. After we presented our projects, it was time to move on our last assignment which is to create a 1 minute one take video. We looked at two examples from the films Annie Hall and The Graduate to a basic Idea of how we would construct our videos either similarly or originally. The ten of us in the class were broken into two groups of five with different genres to tackle. My group, for which I am the director apparently, is tasked with making a scifi zombie musical. This alone got me worried because, while I could probably do the zombie genre by itself, I the scifi and musical aspects of it could prove to be a little difficult. Nonetheless, our group got together during the last remaining minutes of the class and discussed what our plan would be for the rest of the week when we start shooting the movie.

day 13 - viewings and new project

Today was the day that we got present and view all of our animation projects. I kind of more excited to see how our animation turned out since we edited it yesterday, but also at the same time, I was a little too see how ours compared to the others. The group to go was Viet’s group, and their animation was pretty well done, almost professional like. The style looked very vivid and the motion of it looked very clean. I was surprised that they used the idea of a man smoking a cigarette all of a sudden turns into a cockroach. Maura’s group’s project was up next, and it a little bit more abstract than the other one in which it features a butterfly hatching and flying around the foreground. The part where the sound pitch suddenly goes up higher is what I think got everyone in the class a little scared because they weren’t expecting it. It then transitions into various clip out art pieces that form a woman who slowly ages as the pictures goes on, and then the same butterfly appears and then dissolves in the shape of a skull. Our group’s project was the last one to show, and it received a somewhat warm welcome response from the class.

The difficult part was determining which ones should play at the finale of class, Dr. Silva thought all three of them looked eligible enough to be featured, but it was a lot more complicated than that, as each film had its flaws. So we did the process by elimination strategy that we did for the audio projects. Each film had meet a certain requirement and criteria in order to pass inspection. In end, thankfully, all three films passed inspection and could be featured in the finale, which pleased me the most, personally.

The last thing we did today was discuss our new project assignment which is about creating a film with “beatz”, like montage editing. We were divided into groups of two this time, with me teaming up with Paul and we discussed what our battle plan would be for this project. Hoping that everything goes as well as planned and that we just have fun with it.

day 12 - project continued

Thursday was just the continuation of our animation process. I, of course, was the first person in the classroom per usual, so I just waited for Knox to arrive first and then we waited for Natalie to arrive later. Once all three of us were together, we immediately went to work on continuing the animation process that we left the day before. I acted as camera operator the whole period, and took the remaining shots of Knox’s 200 frames. After I had shot all of Knox’s frames, it was time for Natalie to animate her 200 frames, by this time Knox had to leave early for work. We also had to change out cameras since we had to change the lens and focus of the first camera. So it was just me and Natalie all by ourselves to finish the project. As we went along, we decided to just make stuff up in order to fill in the gaps between sequences and to make up for all 200 frames to be shot. Also worth mentioning is the fact that as I was shooting the pictures, the battery on our new camera was on one bar, and blinking red. At this point, we were both nervous that the camera would soon die on us and delete everything that we all worked on, so we just tried as best we could to go ahead and animate as much as we possibly could before the camera shut off. Thankfully in the end we finished just in time for us to complete the project, turn off the camera, clean up our work station, and then make plans to meet up on Sunday in the edit lab to edit the project with a soundscape.

day 11 - project

My group started working on our animation project today. At the start of it, we had originally planned to animate it with charcoal and sand, but seeing that Maura’s group also wanted to animate their project with charcoal, our group decided to just animate the entire film with sand. It sounded like a daunting task, but since our film required the use of color, sand was our best option. We also planned who would animate each of the three stages of the storyboard. I went ahead and started animate the first stage, which showed the formation of the character, Pilgrim, and his acknowledgment of his own existence. Natalie served as the “director”, while Knox acted as the camera operator or in this case button pusher. We wanted to use black sand like before, but due to limited resources, we went with blue sand instead. It was quite a job just to animate a single frame at a time, and trying to animate the character perfectly for that matter. Unfortunately, Natalie had to leave early, so it was just Knox and I left to finish up as much as we could. After we took 200 pictures for my stage of the storyboard, Knox went on and began to animate the second stage, while I took the pictures this time. We had gotten around 207 pictures before taking a lunch break at Chick-Fil-A around 3:00. When we came back, we started again and moved along quite nicely, ending up with about 273 pictures before calling it a day for today. Tomorrow we can hopefully finish up with the project and then add sound effects later on.

day 10 - animation practice

The animation exercises that we did today were fun and exciting. We were practicing working on three different types of stop motion animation, charcoal, sand, and paint. My group with Natalie and Knox started first with charcoal animation. I was the first volunteer to animate something onto the frame. My first idea was to start animating Captain America’s shield a little bit at a time. After that I erased the inside portions of the shield to create the symbol for Black Widow, then I erased that and just drew a swirling pattern. After Natalie and Knox did their share of charcoal animating, we moved on to the sand animation. I admit that this process was probably my favorite method sense it offered a bit more freedom in terms of originality. We used 6 different colored sands, red, blue, green, yellow, orange and purple to create an original random piece of art. By moving the sand with our fingers and palate knife, we just created the entire piece full unique patterns and forms. Next we moved on to the painting animation. This was the shortest process we worked due to time constraints. Again we just painted random patterns onto the paper, and in fact to me, one pattern looked so recognizable that I painted in a hidden peace sign within the other surrounding patterns. After all of us in the class have had a chance to work each station, we uploaded our videos onto the desktop and viewed our work along to the music of three artists. Starting tomorrow, my group will start on our project using the charcoal and sand techniques that we practiced with today, seeing that they both seem to fit the story telling style that we preferred at the beginning of class.

day 9 response

Not much can be said about Monday since I couldn’t meet with Natalie and Knox because I was working at my job for the Duplin Winery in Rose Hill. Due to it being Memorial Day, I had to come into work anyway because Memorial Day is usually a big sale day. I did however text Natalie and Knox back and forth in group message texts asking about the project ideas of what we were going to be doing. All I needed to know really was if everything was squared away since I wasn’t there to begin with. So with today’s class, I got the chance to see Natalie’s storyboard and see with my own eyes what it was exactly we would do the rest of the week.

day 8 - audio video evaluation

Today was the day that we listened to each other’s audio videos. Going into this thing, as I did the day before, I had huge doubts that the video that Kendall and I worked was going any good than all the others combined. When it came time to listen, my predictions were correct as soon as I heard the other videos play. The rest of them sounded very good like they had well planned and executed. The critiquing part of the session was the one that I was dreading the most. Like I said in my bio, I am very self-conscience about what show to the rest of the class and this video was no exception. The only good parts of the video were the parts with the rocks and salt shaker coinciding with each other to represent the sound effect of salty. Other than that, the video had no middle or end, no very feeling or impact, not entertaining, and hardly kept the tone of the theme. Therefore I can proudly say that after comparing this video with others, I dislike my work.

day 8 - Leaf/Kentridge

Leaf: The whole thought of “under the camera” filmmaking is a process which I haven’t even heard of up to this point in the major. It sounds like a fun way to make a film, but I think more importantly than that is that “under the camera” filmmaking is moreso of an art form. Whereas film is in and of itself art, this new process gives a whole new meaning to the term “art film”. Ms. Leaf proves that it’s one thing to make a movie with pictures on a cell, it’s quite another to make a movie and try to tell a story with nothing more than just very few materials to work with. That takes a lot of creative thinking and ingenuity.

Kentridge: Like Ms. Leaf, Kentridge also takes great pride in doing what he does for a living, and that is make charcoal animations on film. As a film student, I can relate a lot to what Kentridge has gone through in his life with all of the various positions in order to pursue and find his career, and I admire him for that. His charcoal animations seem very similar artistically to pencil drawn animation, but with greater or bolder depth. The short clip that we watched in class today about his “Pain and Sympathy” was a bit disturbing in a sense that we see a man lying in a hospital bed and see reflections of his most recent memories before his accident. What was really disturbing were the parts of a person being beaten on the side of the road and the moment of impact when the man hits a crossing pedestrian. I think was a good look into what really goes on in the world charcoal animation.

day 7 response

Today was pretty simple. All we did basically was to edit the sound effects we recorded yesterday. I worked with Kendall, and together we picked out ten sound effects to go along with the “Salty” title that we were given. I came up with the idea to start the video with the sound of the beach and the sound of Maura singing to give it a somewhat haunting melody. We proceeded on with the sound of a table saw, and then the salt shaker, rocks, and tree bark. At the end, we decided to put the sound of the chiming of the clock tower. I t took us a majority of the time trying to figure out what sounds to use, what order to put them in, and finally to edit them to the point their sounded nearly identical in terms of volume pitch. All that’s left now is for us to see how it turns on show day tomorrow.

day 6 response

Today was recording day for our “imageless cinema” project. I teamed up with Viet and Paul and was given the duty of recording everything that we came upon. I also had a hand in making suggestions whenever they were needed for the recordings. We went around the campus, not the entire campus, looking for random objects and places where we could record our sound effects. We ended up with a lot of metal sounds, but also water, wood, rocks, plastic, people voices, and even the chiming of the clock tower. I think today went very well, considering that we got done in just over an hour and a half through the use of good teamwork.

day 5 response

So today we pretty much continued with our eight strips of film that we did last Thursday, and just cut and spliced them together with each other to make a complete 9 minute long abstract film. The last thing that happened was Dr. Silva talking to us about the sound recording assignment, and that we would be put in to groups to record all kinds of different random sounds around the campus. More specifically, we had to record what went along with the title of our group’s sound description. For example, I got “Salty” so my first thought would be to use a regular household salt shaker, and possibly the sound of sand and the waves of the beach to give off the impression of salt water, but then again that would have a bit too much to accomplish, so I just went the salt shaker alone.

In the article about acoustic ecology, the passage that talks about listening with our ears, the first paragraph says that if one should stop for a minute or two, and just listen to the sounds around them, they hear not only the sounds of their everyday surroundings, but the sounds of the world in general. I think this is but a taste of what the real definition of listening is all about. Also, it’s kind of sad to hear that we as humans, and as a modern technological society, that we have to rely on our high tech to exercise our defense sources while at the same time endanger the livelihoods of animals, in particular whales who could very well die from our supersonic sound wave testings.

The Chion reading about different modes of listening kind of speaks the same as the acoustic article. Listening is taken for granted, especially in these times. When someone says, “Listen”, people usually think about listening to what people are saying to them or listening to music, but sometimes people should listen with their ears in general and just close their eyes and just try to imagine what it is they’re listening to and then they can definitely know for sure that sound is a very important, and artistic thing in life and should be not be granted by anyone.

day 4 response

I know that this blog is meant for yesterday, but I’m just going to try and recap yesterday’s events and start from the beginning. Thursday, like every other day this week, was just a continuation of what we were doing in class on Wednesday with the magazine transfers; but it was also an introduction to what we were going to do afterwards for the remainder of the day. When I first got class, the first thing I did was try and figure out how to fix my first attempt at the magazine transfer. Since I wasn’t all that impressed with it in the first place, I sought help from fellow students who had done theirs and did them well. I got from Maura who, nicely, gave me some helpful advice and tips on how to fix the problem and to do it again for future assignments. All turned out well as it should, I produced a, what Dr. Silva called “very pretty” strip of film. Our next project was to make strip of film that represented the four elements: earth, water, fire, and air. Each couple would pick amongst themselves who would do which element meaning one person would do two elements and the other would do two elements. I chose to find things that represented fire and air, while my partner, James would do water and earth. I looked for pictures from magazines that represented fire and air as best I could like the sky, fire-breathing dragons, the sun, and just the color red in general. I then took a strip of stock film and punch star-shaped holes along the whole thing just to give it fancy look when shown through the projector and because I a star could represent air. Next I took a clear strip and just colored it yellow and orange Sharpies, and red glitter glue to make the film look like flames. I unknowingly and unwittingly dragged clear, grey, and light blue colored glitter glue onto the other clear strip, when I was supposed to create a 100 frame animation. So I trashed that strip and now am planning on finishing the animation at home over the weekend.

P.S. Thanks for the help Maura. I really appreciated it.

day 3 response

Today’s class session was a little exciting and also a little hectic at the same time. Our task was to make magazine or newspaper transfers onto film. This meant that we were to take clippings from random pages of several different magazines of our choice, make collages onto packaging tape, and transfer them all onto the strips we were given at the beginning of class. One thing we all had to consider was to make that the images stayed within the boundaries of the strips and cross the sprockets or else they would get caught in the projector. My initial idea for a collage was a little different than everyone else’s. I spotted a fantasy comic book and took about two pages from it and clipped only the dialogue boxes and two picture pieces. My intent was to combine and organize all of the dialogue boxes to form a (somewhat) complete and compelling story and use the two pictures to give action to the story. Here’s where everything got a bit difficult afterwards.

The first thing was trying to put the entire collection of clipping onto the tape as neatly as possible without making it look sloppy. It was a quite a task trying to even cut the excess tape off while at the same try to make that nothing else stuck to it because that tape stuck to anything it touched. Futhermore, since I was the very last person in the room after everyone had left for the day, I was forced to proceed with no guidance and put the entire collage onto the film and just hope that it will turn out fine by tomorrow.

day 2 response

Today was a good day in class for 6x1. We learned the basics of how to make film by playing with four different strips of film, and then having to design them any way we wanted. Since 24 frames of film equal one second of screen time, our objective was to count 24 individual frames from the strips we were given so that they could later be cut and spliced together with each other’s strips.  This was a real interesting technique for me to learn, since this was the first time that I have done this before in the FST program.

Before this class, I have had experience seeing what actual film looks like, but I never had the opportunity to actually see it up close and work with as a project. I worked with James as a partner and together we collaborated on several film strips at a time. The first one we worked on, we were just randomly doodling on it with green and magenta ink, two Sharpies, a star-headed hole punch, and gold and silver glitter glue. The next strip was one that I personally worked on myself. The strip had frames of a man and a doctor, and my idea was to “literally” scratch the doctor’s head off, therefore calling him “Dr. Headless” or “Head(less) Doctor”. It took a while for me to, very carefully, remove the head and also add red nail polish to the shoulders to give off the look of blood. The very last thing that James and I did was to cut and splice the film, which James taught me how to do, and do properly. This was a valuable trait to learn that might help diversify myself during the rest of the course this summer.

first day response

My name is Ian Kelley and I am a Film Studies major at UNCW. Some of my favorite filmmakers include Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, and George Lucas, just to name a few. Like them, I aspire to become a director of mainly narrative films in the future, but also wouldn't mind directing documentaries or experimental films. I like a lot of different types of genres in film like action, horror, comedy, sci-fi and drama. I'm typically very shy about the films that I make because I consider myself a perfectionist and want to do everything right, and sometimes worry about the response the film may get when shown to my professors.

I really enjoyed reading Maya Deren's passage about amateur and professional filmmaking. It really speaks to me in that all the time I have watched movies before I was even in the FST program, there was a difference between amateur or independent films and professional films. From what I could understand about the article is that amateur filmmaking seems a lot more fun than filmmaking within the studio system. Amateur filmmaking is supposed to be freedom both artistically and professionally. It seems that artistically and professionally, amateur filmmaking gives filmmakers a chance to film the movie the way they want to film it, as opposed  to major studios who would expect filmmakers to shoot a film the way the studios would want it. Overall, the main goal of amateur filmmaking is to tell whatever kind of story you want to tell and have fun with it as you go along.

It was a little hard to understand Brakhage's article at first, but from what I could gather is that it is mainly guidelines that teach you different techniques on how to make experimental films. This seems fair sense it takes a lot of techniques to make avant garde films considering that avant garde is another term for art film. This means that experimental films should be created like art and treated like art.