Project Evaluation #6 - Found Footage

The Found Footage / Collage editing projects were all outstanding. I had a lot of fun working on this and finding the clips I was going to use. At 1st I had no idea what I was going to do so I went to archive.org and got myself lost inside their vast library of clips. i eventually came across this movie trailor from the 1940's for a film that I don't think ever existed. I thought it was hysterical the way the announcer in the clip was describing the movie so i decided to use that as my audio formy fake movie trailer. I had my idea so I was ready to roll. I eventually found this World War II documentary which had a plethera of amazing footage I could use. I began to match the keywords in the dialogue with clips to match. Once I had them together I came to the end and felt it needed something more. I looped the sound clip of "Doom" about 20 times and matched the word doom with a different clip. i was going to call the project "Doom" or "War Trailer" but the last clips i used had the text on screen saying Sabotage and then Strike so the project became known as "Sabotage Strike". I really like the reception it received in class and was happy that everyone liked it. I thought it was easy to do and I might do this on my own for fun because it was so easy and enjoyable. Great project. I was really impressed by "Iraq Attack" by Adrian. Bin laden didn't blow up the projects it was you....Well done by everybody in class.

Project Evaluation #5 - Project 3- Class Project

I was amazed how the strips came together so well. It seemed to have forward movement and I liked the theme of sports that we used. It worked well and I had a fun time working on it in class. My part of the project was to add sound using dialogue. With the theme of sports I knew I could find some interesting dialogue from movies. I went to moviesoundcentral.com and downloaded clips from Major League, Raging Bull, and Jerry Maguire. Unfortunately there weren't many sports movie sounds on the website so I had to dig deeper. i eventually found some interesting dialogue clips from Naked Gun, Predator, Dumb and Dumber and so on. All in all I really liked the work everyone did on this project and I think the end result was amazing. I liked the alterations done with color when that clip was changed to an orange hue. The sounds were excellent and the editing was spot on. Great job everybody.

An Amazing Discovery in my Parent's Attic

I went to my parents house this past weekend and had an amazing discovery. In their attic I found a vintage 16mm camera from the 1930's, as well as an Austrian 8mm camera. Both cameras still work and are spring-wound. The story behind the 8mm camera was that it belonged to my grandfather's brother who lived in Hungary. He had the camera with him when he traveled from Europe to America. The ship he was on was called the Carpathia which stopped along its journey to rescue survivors from the Titanic. I was amazed to find these cameras along with old film reels from the 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's. Some of the 16mm footage was transferred to DVD by my dad's cousin and was in black and white as well as color. The film looked great still to this day and included footage of trips they went on like Washington DC in the 30's, South Florida in the late 30's, and unreal footage of pre-Castro Cuba in the 30's. The most impressive was B&W footage filmed by my grandfather when he took a trip to Hungary in 1947. He was a politician who was involved with an American association of Hungarian immigrants or something and he filmed orphanages, old buildings with bullet holes from WWII, as well as the streets of Budapest a couple of years after the war. It was an amzing discovery and I look forward to using these cameras on my own. I hope to use the found footage in some way as well in the near future, maybe for our 6th film.

Brakhage

I found this picture on-line and thought it was cool so...it looks like the film strips we made in class.

The Elements

After the screening of the Film Manipulation assignment I was amazed on what an amazing job everybody did. My partner on this project was John Marshall and we split the elements between us. I gave him the option of picking the 2 elements he wanted and he chose Fire and Water. He said he wanted to draw a design over the entire strip of the two film strips and then cover it with a magazine transfer. We met one morning to work on the film strips and used Sharpies to draw what we wanted on the film. He used tribal looking designs up and down the strip while I integrated designs with sequential drawings to simulate an object moving along with words spelled out across different frames. For Wind, I used a tree blowing back and forth and a tornado spinning furiously. For Earth, I drew the planet earth spinning around on its axis and grass in a field. After that meeting we completed the project on our own. I used magazine transfers to cover the remaining portion of the film strip that had not been manipulated. I then bought acrylic markers and drew over the magazine transfers and over some of the previously painted strip.
After screening the spliced together film as a whole representation of the elements I was pleased with what I saw on screen. Earth and Wind went first and the tree looked like it was moving in a gust of wind, the tornado looked like it was spinning, and the earth looked like it was in space. It was hard to draw the planet earth on a single frame for 15 consecutive frames, but when it was shown I believe the image was received as being earth. Fire and Water came next and it looked excellent as well. John and I both agreed that we wanted to see the drawings that were covered by the magazine transfers. After we saw it on screen we both figured that a better idea would have been to do the magazine transfer and then draw the design over it. Overall I was impressed by the creativity of the class. It was a great project that I might do on my own outside of class.

Objects

Trying to prepare for the multi-plane animation and getting together some objects to use. I wish I still had a lot of my action figures from when I was younger. Everything I have is pretty bulky, just trying to figure out how all the objects will come together. I've been looking for a second option on the background but I'm having a hard time finding that as well. I'm looking forward to this project and I think it will be a lot of fun. So far everything has been pretty cool in this class. I like the hands on aspect of everything and really feel like I'm learning something each week.

Superbowl Sunday

I have to be honest...this blog will be all the 6X1 work that I will be doing today. I have worked a little on the film strips and I am about 3/4 of the way through with the painting on film assignment. I have been collecting a couple of cool items to use in the animation project we are doing on Tuesday. I've been interested in doing multi-plane animation ever since learning about it in Dr. Kreul's History of Animation class. This project seems like it's going to be fun. I'm still working on the project where we have to draw the shape progressing into something else. Today, I have to film an hour's worth of footage for a documentary we are editing for Intro to Editing. Just trying to keep pace with all of the work.

Idea's for Wind?

As I continue working on this project I find that I am having a great deal of trouble figuring out what else to include on the film that can represent WIND. All of the other elements FIRE, WATER, and EARTH seem to be easier in representing colors. With WIND, I have been going with a lot of grey, blue, and then I have a problem. No other colors really represent WIND because it doesn't have a color. WIND can only be seen through the breeze that blows leaves and tree limbs. Hair can be blown by wind. Basically objects can be affected by wind but wind cannot be seen in the air. I was watching "The Fifth Element" on TBS the other night and watched to see the stone that represented WIND and it was 3 squiggly lines. Awesome, that helped a lot. Squiggly lines I already have drawn on the film. I might leave the rest of the film to be covered by magazine clippings. All in all, I am having a lot of fun experimenting with the 16mm film.

Painting on Film

It is Sunday and with the day being free of football I plan on painting something on those film strips. In my group, I'm doing EARTH and WIND. Earth doesn't seem that bad so far because you can draw almost anything to express the theme of Earth. The colors I am using will express the colors of Earth which generally include a lot of browns and greens. It is rather difficult drawing or painting on such a small 16mm film strip but I am trying my best. It also doesn't help that I am a TERRIBLE artist. My art skills resemble those of a 5 year old. I don't know why I'm such a bad artist, I guess some of us are just born with better skills than others. I'm going to try to incorporate some of the other methods we learned in class including the magazine-tape transfer and some scratching of the film with sandpaper, razer blades, and keys. The WIND part of this project seems to be the most challenging. I'm using a lot of light blues and greys to get the symbolism of wind. I plan on trying to draw a tornado to show the ultimate destruction of the wind funnel. I'm just hoping to make it look less ridiculous than I imagine it being in my head. I find that the Sharpies are easier to control then the paint. We have been using fine tip sharpies so far in this project and it seems like those will be the most heavily used tools. As I continue with this project of painting on film I will let you know which parts seemed to work out better than others. I am interested to see how this will be seen on screen. I am a little confused about the soundtrack part of the assignment, but if it bought us some extra time to experiment with the different methods then I like it.

Launch

This is a test blog to see if this is working correctly. I am trying to figure out how to draw "WIND" on my film strip. Maybe trees blowing leaves or hair flowing in the breeze.