Rate Projects

1. My favorite project we did by far was the rhythmic editing project. By heart I am a natural editor and love piecing together footage. I also love to edit music videos especially. I have lots of experience with filming and editing music videos in the past so this project felt like very familiar territory to me. I also love creating my own music so I decided to make a song specifically for this project to help tie together my ideas I had created while shooting.

2. The video letter was second favorite project. I believe this could have been my favorite project if I would have had more time to really refine it, but I became very bogged down with other school work. This assignment was fun because it allowed you to really hone in on yourself and think introspectively.

3. The crowdsourcing project was my third favorite project because the ends result was magnificent. While I was meticulously tracing and drawing I believed that this would be my least favorite project, but the pay off was so much better than I could have ever imagined. I would most definitely want to do something this again in the future.

4. The 16mm film manipulation project was the most difficult project for me because it wasn't quite in my wheelhouse, but similar to the crowdsourcing project, the end result was very rewarding.

5. The 360 degree video was my a very fun project and I had a lot of time actually going out and shooting. I was also very happy to learn the editing process behind it so that was very cool for me as well.

6. My least favorite project was the stop motion animation project. This project was very tedious and was not my strong suit.

16 mm film manipulation

The 16mm film manipulation project was a very interesting one for me because it was completely out of my element of skill set. I am used to either filming on digital film, or slaving hours behind the computer editing footage together. So to actually have to physically use my hands to make manipulation upon raw film stock was daunting. I knew it would be an amazing experience, but entered the project quite apprehensively. The hardest part about this project was not knowing what kind of marks you were applying to the film stock. Every time I would add a new scratch mark, or apply an extra drop of bleach I just prayed that it would turn out looking alright. In the end I had a ton of fun with this project, but it was the most unfamiliar and different film technique I had ever done.

360 Video Shoot

The 360 degree video shoot was a very different approach to film making than I had ever experienced. Blocking the scenes were much different due to the camera being able to capture information from every direction. Me and Smiles pretended to be in a relationship and fought-- while on the complete other side of the scene John was chasing people down as he prepared to kill them. This was a very fun process, but also took much more precision. You needed to be able to capture what you needed all in one take or else you would have to start all over again. As far as editing went it was very cool to be able to learn a new piece of information to apply to my skills within Adobe Premiere. Once you were able to view the footage in 360 degrees, it became like any other editing job. I would love to shoot another film in 360 degrees one day and overall think it was a fun experience.

Rough Theatre

Brook describes the the many forms of theatre as rough and having a "dirty" complexion of which allows for a unique experience in contrast to the high class modes of theatre. Sometimes the rough style of theatre can be seen as an unwanted medium and an outlet that people would commonly avoid. Nevertheless, theatre doesn't have to be perfectly designed because that is what makes it unique and different from other art forms. This is similar to how we approach our projects in 6x1 class because we approach each project with a certain spontaneity that can also be defined as dirty or rough. By avoiding the use of advanced technology and instead taking on old technical approaches were are able to prepare an improvisational piece of work. This sometimes can be the most effective and beautiful form of art because it lacks the conventional and organized structure, of which art should not be confined to.

R3 Blog response

After reading the Listen Up article I was able to take a moment and really absorb the sounds happening around me. Sound is a very selective thing and unlike visual cues, our neurons don't instantly process the message to our brain as direct information. Some sounds can be so obscure that we cannot remotely decipher what sound we are hearing. For instance, in another film class of mine we watched a video without sound and we were asked to decipher and interpret the visuals we saw. Without surprise, it was still very easy to complete this task. Next, we were asked to listen to a sound clip without any visual cues available. It was much harder to pick out distinctive sounds and the small details were practically unrecognizable.

The short film, Listen, touched on ideas about how everyone and everything on this planet creates the entire entity of our soundscape. Ranging from our own voice, to nature, and technological equipment, each of these things all add to the summation of our soundscape within this universe. As I said before being able to dissect and individualize each of the sounds that compose our soundscape is quite tricky. After watching the short film, I took a minute to focus intently on each sound in my own bedroom. The hissing of my computer speakers, the loud air gusting from my bathroom, the keys as I type on the computer. Each sound together adds to the composition of our soundscape, as well as a new piece of information our brains tend to let slip by.

R2 Blog Response

      Crowdsourcing can be defined as the process of getting work or funding from a "crowd" of people, usually done on the internet. One of the famous examples is Wikipedia, where instead of creating an encyclopedia on their own, they gave the actual crowd of commoners their own ability to create the information themselves. Different types of Crowdsourcing  includes: Crowdsource Design, Crowd funding, Microtasks, an open innovation.

      Aaron Koblin explains how crowdsourcing relates to projects he worked on including one called Flight Patterns. He shows a beautifully aesthetic display of flight pattern information which showed data from West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. By being able to visualize crowdsourcing Aaron Koblin says that we can reflect on our own lives and systems.

     Jimmy Wales goes into detail about the birth of Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia. He explains how the overall goal is about empowerment and making a free licensing model which allows anyone to copy and redistribute information globally. He goes into the detailed statistics on who uses Wikipedia and surprisingly only 1/3 of the total traffic is to the English Wikipedia. The website itself is generally a true global model where expansion has allowed them to become even more popular than the New York Times.

     

r1 response

  Through each of the posts explored through R1, one of the topics covered is known as cymatics. Evan Grant comes with the information with his powerful TED talk which gives a new perspective on the idea of sound. Cymatics is a process of visualizing sound, by basically vibrating a medium such as water.  The history of cymatics goes back to Earnest Clavney. He created an experiment using a metal plate  covering it with sound and bowing it to create the patterns that are known as the "Clavney Patterns".  Cymatics explores the ways of how we can explore the substance of things not seen. Devices such as the cymascope, have been used to observe cymatic patterns. Cymatics is also vitally important for healing and education.

  In another talk by, Daniel Tammet, he ties in the ideas circulating around perception and how Anton Chekhov was able to inspire him to write about this. He talks about how his world of words and numbers blur with color, emotion and personality. It's a condition known as Synesthesia which can be defined as  in which stimulation of one sensory of cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Little has been discovered and known about synesthesia and has been suggested that it begins to develop during childhood when children are most intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time.