ART155-Video Foundation (GCC-Spring21)

 I don't have a solid idea for my project yet, I've basically just been trying to get a bunch of video clips, pictures, and stuff to try and get some inspiration. I'm going to definitely do a more abstract piece, like, with overlaying the clips and stuff. for now, my plan is to jumble up those clips that I have and kind of let them create their own little semi-narrative piece.

For my final film, I want to use the same concept as before, (mirror angled towards different objects), but use different imagery along with clips of the woods.  The woods will be stagnant images in the video, as well as blank screens to cut up the clips in the film.  I will be using zooming in as a tool to make the composition stronger in scenes.  The sound will be classical music like a single piano piece as well as recorded noises of the woods, but I am trying to figure out how those two will go together.  I want the film to be abstract and have the viewer make up the story of the film, and I want the film to feel eerie, quiet, and alone. 

My plan for the final project is to utilize a switch pitch ball, the one that is shown in my Exercise 1. I found the switch pitch ball to be a good thing to film for this transformation final project because the ball can transform from a bright green color to a bright orange color. Furthermore, these colors make the ball very easy to color key, so that has expanded lots of artistic options for me.  When the switch pitch ball is green, I plan on filming it being wrapped in orange construction paper. Then when the orange construction paper is unfolded, the ball will end up being orange. This will be a cool illusion I will make by cutting the footage multiple times when I am unfolding the switch pitch ball.  The second leg of the video will be filming the switch pitch ball at a river. With the switch pitch ball being such a bright color, and the river being such a dark color, it opens more options for color keying. Overall, I have some ideas, I already have a lot of this filmed, ...

       I definitely struggled to come up with an idea that paired well with the theme of 'Transformation' that would also fit into the time we have left. I finally came up with the idea of creating a video of me baking something and then overlaying my voice with a story or poem of some kind that I have written. Baking in a sense is a form of transformation, you start with simple individual ingredients that then are combined and transformed into the final product. I'm also going to try and include some elements of stop motion animation with the ingredients at the beginning of the video and also some moments of time lapsing in the middle portion. I'm still working out some of the details, but this is the base idea of what I will be doing. 

 Project Plan Title: THE NEEDLE What: a needle on a mission to find a fiber in order to make a creation. After trials and errors, it finally finds what it needs and just creates a master piece.  My goal is to make this as abstract as i can with still an outline to go by. How: I will be using a camera, a needle, dirt, fabric, plastic and more. I will also be some extreme close up shots and zooms. Why: I am currently working on a series of pieces of thread figures my art seminar class and want to find a way to intertwine both subject with this theme. I think it will be interesting. 

For me, the definition of transformation that immediately comes to mind is a change that evolves a person into someone completely new. Because my definition is deeply interconnected to a person and their body, I plan on using significant symbols of the human body to communicate transformation. The first is the heart, which to me symbolizes self in its naturalist form. The heart of a person is at the centermost part of the body. It is housed deep in the center of the body that it is a sense buried within. The second symbol hands, which is easily seen by everyone. Hands often act as a vehicle for people’s exterior feelings and responses. They follow a person’s thoughts and sometimes almost mindlessly replicate those thoughts. With this in mind, hands can be seen as the exterior heart. I plan to show a nondescript narrative solely through hands, with the final scene being hand burying a heart in the ground. The collection of shots that I plan on making are: hands moving in speech in a var...

           I liked the Tim Hecker video the most and was also the most inspired by it.  I liked his use of repeated cuts through the first 2/3rds of the video and then the film kind of "falling apart" in the last third, (color, a direct object and scene, and then it transforming into black and white and an "unfinished" feel.  I also liked that the pendulum that was swinging back and forth was out of focus so that the viewer does not know what they are looking at right away.  The use of the music in the film complemented the video so well that the song transformed along with the video over the course of the duration.  The feel of the video was earie so that the viewer could not guess what was going to happen.            I also liked the Oskar Fischinger film about the wax pieces being dropped through a machine, I thought the subject of the video was very organic-looking and that you can't really go wrong with...

     At first I was honestly a little weirded out by some of the art clips shown, but I really began to realize they are meant to be outside the box and against the norms of filmmaking which I found pretty interesting. I really like how many of these art clips shoot in unique angles, or sometimes “the perspective of a bug” as Pipilotti Rist said. It allows for the clip to achieve a visual that the human eye normally doesn’t see. Oftentimes these kinds of clips are achieved with illusions, such as in the Habitat video. The illusions are often mixed with colorful editing such as in the clip “Black Reflection” which creates really beautiful and interesting visuals. I also noticed many of the art clips shown really have no direct structure. This allows for people to interpret the art clips in their own way. These art clips are almost like the opposite of Exercise 2, where we were trying to create something that looks continuous and “normal”.       Interpre...

I found Stan Brakhage’s work Dog Star Man to be fascinating. I noticed certain images stood out against the constant motion and texture from scratching of the film because of their similar shapes. The shape and direction of the lines making up the subjects of the image connect and overlap allowing the brain to make connections. To explain with an example, towards the hour and ten-minute mark, motion manipulated to look like folds melts and align with the groves of a mountain. The smoothness of the transition was directly a result of the connection of the shape of the folds. Throughout the section of Dog Star Man, this technique appears and allows images to stand out against the constant motion because like those pictures that can only be seen when you quickly move the paper it is drawn on, our eyes focus on what is distinguishable by their shape. I found that Ethan Barry’s Camera, No Camera acts similarly. The video is made up of unconnected images that are connected by the motion of t...

 My favorite video out of all of the ones watched was the Pipilotti Rist Interview. I think I enjoyed this video the most because when Rist talked about her art you could tell that she had a clear idea of what she was trying to accomplish with her work and how she wanted it to be experienced. I also found myself agreeing a lot with her views on artists and found her abstract concepts to be really fascinating. She seems to have always had this surrealistic view on life and to her, that's entirely normal. One of the things that she said that stuck out to me about artists was this "artists have different tasks but one for sure is to have a detached view on social constructions on political situations and try to bring in other alternatives so that we don't get stuck and frozen in given rules", and this is something that is true and can be seen so clearly when you look at her work and the way she brings to life her abstract concepts. The way Rist also views video and camer...

  My favorite of all of these pieces was by far Pipilitti’s work. I love how Pipilotti Rist uses her camera work to “reverse the hierarchy between the object and the subject” and how she sees similarities between machine errors, and the inner pictures of the human mind when we are overworked. She encourages her “fellow humans” to embrace our imperfections and not be ashamed of them. I think that the “Dynamic Frame” is a very interesting technique, one that, when used correctly, could create a lot more life and emotion to a film. However, I personally don’t think I would ever use it, just because creating super dramatic scenes isn’t really my style. I kind of like the simplicity of a constant shape of the frame. Peter Mack also had some very interesting work that caught my eye. I liked the distortions and abstractions of not only the sound, but also of these human-shaped figures. They also look like they were hand-drawn animations, which is a LOT of work and the attention to detail ...

 These scenes are very abstract, with no context and it worries me a little bit, but this the info I understood. Eisenstein's Methods of Montage Explained | Russian Soviet Montage Theory | VIDEO ESSAY The Transition of the dying men's breath towards the camera , and the transition of the clouds is very masterly done, plus with the audio still going of him breath, really paint a picture of him taking his last breath.(The Revenant Film).  TIM HECKER / BLACK REFRACTION  For this scene I really enjoyed the use of color from the very darkness of the whole scene but with a spots of colors,  and then transitioning to just just black screen but with white spot in back again to the spotty colors.  Pipilotti Rist: Sip my Ocean / Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney  This is by far my favorite video of abstraction so far,  I really enjoyed the different shots in the begin that introduced us to the location of the Museum.  Is it from us entering in wi...

 Noise is different than music because music is a form of communication. Even though no words are spoken, music elicits emotion, feeling, and brings people together. It is organized sound. Noise is unorganized and prevents communication from happening. However, noise is still a necessary part of life, as hearing is one of the main senses. Without noise, our perspectives on life would be completely different. Without noise, something would be missing. In music, noise and meaning has changed since the 1970s with the onset of punk music and then with metal in the 1980s and onward. Punk and metal utilize organized sound in a more abrasive, aggressive form, but still in a way that can elicit feeling like other music can. These days, there is so much more media and there is immediate access to music, internet, and more noise. It feels that the children and young adults of today have grown accustomed to noise, and could probably not live without it. If we eliminated noise, I wonder what w...

     This film “Reel/Unreel” by Francis Alys was interesting because while the main focus is on the children playing this game it’s also showing the conditions that they are in and what life looks like on an average day for a child living in Kabul Afghanistan. The film begins with wide shots looking over the city of Kabul to show the city as a whole before we transition to the children playing their game and we get a closer look into the inner workings of the city. As we follow the boys unrolling these reels of film across the roads and many paths of Kabul; we see what life looks like where they live. The camera shots were taken at angles that follow both where the children are going and the area that they are surrounded by, I think this is done as a way to simultaneously guide the viewer watching and show two different perspectives. The first perspective is the child playing with their toy and the other of the society around them. A good amount of the color in the film i...

 These clips were interesting, because they all showcased something different. The Monty Python clip utilized still shots, specifically the same one used several times. In the context of this scene, the repeated use of the still shot adds to the comedy because it doesn't look like Sir Lancelot is moving any further until he finally arrives at the entrance. They use a very similar approach in Poltergeist, where the repeated still shot adds to the suspense and anxiety the mother feels, fearing she will not reach her child. Many of the shots in the Radiohead video are continuous shots, following the protagonist of the video as he goes on some sort of journey through the video. The shots from My Dinner With Andre come off as a pit peculiar, specifically because of the editing. In many of the shots, the characters are clearly building up to deliver dialogue, but never do. It comes off like watching a scene with the music removed. The David Lynch shots focus on the person speaking, parti...

Reel/Unreel opens on a wide shot from a distance to introduce a child playing with a wheel. The film has a continuous use of tracking shots as if the camera is chasing the wheel just like the kids in the film are. This is similar to a game played by Colonial children. The camera shot changes briefly to a still shot with change of object (film reel) and then changes back to tracking shots. The tracking shots in the film made sense for what the film was going for in its filming style. Instead of just watching the kid and the wheel move by the screen, it felt more like we were following them as he rolled the wheel through the town.

 These clips were super helpful to me. I loved how just the slightest changes to the direction/position of the camera made a completely different mood.  The "Endless running" clip was both funny and suspenseful due to the intentional lack of both continuity and dialogue. The sudden transition from dancing music to action music also adds some silliness to it. The "Daydreaming" clip was very inspiring for me, probably one of the coolest music videos I've seen. It's both satisfyingly simple and clean and also super complex and perplexing. It boggles my mind to think about how many shots they had to retake in order to get those seamless transitions, it's absolutely amazing. The illusion of continuity in this clip makes it so fun, as the man walks through one door and seems to teleport into a completely different place (or maybe it's just a very very strange building from another dimension, I guess we'll never know for sure.) The music is also very go...

 The film "Reel/Unreel" is definitely a very interesting one. It has a lot of surprising periods of suspense and an increasing feeling of breathlessness, exhaustion, and excitement as the film progresses. It starts off with a series of wide shots that slowly zoom into a largely populated area, and uses dull, muted tones of the dirt the buildings, and even the sky to emphasize a similar mood for the film. There is also some good quality car beeps and people chattering that put the viewer right into the setting of the film. As we continue to zoom in on the city, we also zoom in on the sounds of children playing and running around on the dirt roads. Their clothing is also a nice contrast with the surrounding dirt-colored environment, so even more emphasis is put towards them.  For most of the rest of the film, we cycle through many different kinds of tracking shots, following the many children playing with wheels, in particular the two boys reeling and unreeling a film reel (wel...

  Reel/Unreel is a very interesting film that I'm glad that I saw.  In the beginning I couldn't figure out what it meant, or what it was trying to depict but  the title had me going to Google and asking what reel means in unreeling which is very interesting because I've never really thought about it. The scene kind of start of very silent introducing us to environment so we get a bird's-eye view of Afghanistan because that's where he filmed it and then we get kids playing with like a wheel thing and it's in the same motion as The Reel. I loved the lack of words,  in the beginning because they let us as viewers narrate what we think is happening and I especially love when the kid was playing with his wheel and then it went down the hill into like a cemetery kind of place and he just looked at it.  I also noticed in the beginning they were playing with the reel, they stopped and looked up at the helicopter with this frightening kind of look on their faces and...

The continuity in Reel/UnReel comes from the never-ending stream of the reel of film. The film never runs out, as a result, it acts as a continuous physical line directing the viewer till the end of the video. Because of the constancy of the line of the film, a narrative is created, with the unspeaking subject moving throughout the city acting as the plotline. The never-ending constancy of the rolling of the film creates a rhythm to the sequencing of the shots. Even when the camera is drawn away from directly shooting the film, the viewer has a feeling that the film is still moving throughout the city.  The color of the reel of the film stands out against the dusty muted colors of the cities, even the boys who are moving the film blend in. The boys blend in the most, in particular, during the scenes in the market. During that scene, there is so much motion and similarity of color in the background that the boys blend. While the reel of film, with its bright red and blue, stands o...

     This was a very unique film. Although it was 20 minutes long with basically no dialogue, Francis Alys kept it interesting as he made a large variety of shots of the action of the wheel and film tape moving. Furthermore, it was set in Afghanistan which is an area where many people are not shown, so having these variety of shots really expressed the landscape and culture of Afghanistan to the viewer. Wide shots helped show the landscape, but closer shots really showed more intimate details of life there. For example, close shots of random civilians doing random everyday actions were shown as the wheel moved through the city. It gives the viewer an idea of the variety of clothes they wear, what they are trying to accomplish, and how they socialize. Furthermore, shots both wide and close captured different audio of the city, such as background dialogue, cars beeping and moving, footsteps, the sound of the wheel moving, the film tape dragging, and more. Some of the audio ...

 Hi Everyone!     During the wathcing of these film clips I had a lot of fun learning more about the importance of camera angles and how they can truly alter a scene to create different feelings and tones. It was interesting to rewatch the endless watching running scene from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" with a more cineamagraphic lense; typically when we think of comedy its depicted through the dialogue of the actors or there actions, so with that being said it can be easy to forget that the editing of a video can create comedic moments as well and the endless running scene was a perfect depiction if that. One of the clips that I found most helpful to me was the breakdown of the Coen brothers reverse shot technique, I think that when I start filming I'll try use that because it definitely creates nice individual moments between two characters within a scene. I also enjoyed Jim Jarmusch's Coffee and Cigarettes (mostly because I already love Jim Jarmusch) because h...

 In the clips, I found two major topics to be interesting. Firstly, the impact of an environment on carrying a story and creating characterization. In The Royal Tenenbaums clip, the narrator explains the impact of the positioning of the camera in regards to the objects making up the environment. During the analyzed scene, the unspoken shifts between Eli and Margot’s relationship and feelings towards each other are shown through the position of a pole in the background. As a result, the pole acts as another character expressing an unspoken dialogue. The significance of an environment, I noticed appears also in the clip from 8 ½. In this clip, there were moments of silence or very little sound, during which the camera panned across the scene. The lack of sound causes the viewer to focus on the images and visual context to try to understand the plot. The same could be said about the clip’s use of asynchronous sound, which keeps you connected to the plot but adds to the environmental c...

Now that I have a background in Premiere and using a video camera, paying close attention to clips like these are very interesting to me. Paying attention to things like continuity editing in the Radiohead video will help me for scenes like the character entering a door in Exercise 2. The Radiohead guy entering different doors or turning each staircase showed me how important the timing of the cuts between separate shots need to be for a fluid continuity to be portrayed in film. Contrasting to this, the Monty Python clip of the knight running across the field goes against fluid continuity for a humorous effect, so it really shows how the "rules" of film can be manipulated for artistic effects which I found really interesting. Analyzing the Coffee and Cigarettes video also gave me some good ideas for Exercise 2 such as "B-roll" as Joe mentioned in class. For example I found the birds eye shot of the characters moving their coffee cups to be a cool angle. This shot br...

  Hi guys, I have to say these films are wow the brilliant behind the scenes and the shots are so different but all amazing. I personally love movies, specially action movies but I never thought about the different shot sequences going on. From the dolly shots and zooms and closeup, they all are similar in a way but so different at the same time. My First favorite film is Storming the Castle , it was amazing because after doing our 1st exercise I notice the different shots. And that extreme jump cut between the Knight running up to the other Knights was intentional. It brought so much comedy to the film and I wasn't sure if I was suppose to laughter or not because that scene made me burst out laughing. My second favorite film was Daydreaming by Radiohead, this music video made me appreciate the use of a nonverbal sequences. I also love the overexposure in the beginning of the music video. I love how in the middle of the video he seems to finally look at us the viewer and goes back ...

  All of the shots include at least one child rolling a film reel all over this village.  Most shots are taken where the child(ren) pushes the canister to the right of the camera’s edge, creating most of the film’s pan shots.   One constant in this film is that the canister that the children are playing with continuously rolls across different parts of this area of Afghanistan spewing out film across the ground.  Some film strips are seen to be walked over and “dirtied” on the ground almost like they are being discarded.  The sounds in the background, (people talking, hooves, footsteps, etc.), make this a more intimate setting where it appears that a group of children are just entertaining themselves with a mundane object.  The metal noises of the film reel catch the attention of the viewers; the jarring feel echoes across the cobblestone and cement streets causing a loud constant throughout the film.  The two strongest sounds being the rolling of...

I just sent out an email to you all yesterday about deadline changes and instructions for the week. I can't believe how tough the weather has been on our schedule! Please email with any questions or issues keeping up with everything or getting your gear situated. I'm happy to help via email, Blogger, or extra-help Zoom meetings. Looking forward seeing your Camera Actions videos uploaded to the class shared Google Drive (due Friday), and catching up with you all on Tuesday!

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