Yaminie’s Underground blog

This post has been long due. I never got around doing it due to some issues that I was having with exporting the quictime movie.I did this flash animation for the flash assignment (obviously!) But also continued to work on it for my finals.

I have been very inspired by this one one album from Ananda Shankar “Missing You”. This album was done after the death of his father… The pieces (all instrumental) as deep and moving. Whenever I listen to the album it gives me a sense of being the “All knowing”.So i decided to give visuals to this feel…I’ve tried to create a world in this piece through flash animation…And then I take it back to what might have been the genesis of it all. The shape in the end of the piece is called a “kairee”. It reminds me of a womb. It’s a traditional Indian motif.I used that in end, where I make the world collapse into the womb of the kairee… 

Genesis - This is how it all must have begun 

Zannah and I decided to work together due to our mutual love for frogs…

We met in the evening and kept building our story for our frog…

But when I got down to sketching the storyboard I realised i couldn’t draw the same frog over and over again!!

Hence I gave up somewhere in the beginning (yes…what I’ve put in the storyboard is probably 1/10th of the story we discussed…)

I am looking forward to Flash…(I wouldn’t have to write 200 lines of code to make my ball bounce!!)

I loved the end result. Which is not to say it’s perfect. Infact far from it. We could think of ten thing we want to change about it even while we were converting it to quicktime…

For one, the sound does nothing for the video and that is one area where we really need to work. So, definitely want to work more on this one. Also, maybe we’ll create another edit with some suggestions from the class…

Go ahead…look at it. Our first movie

I am terribly behind in updating my blog as you can see…But that just goes to day how much fun I am having doing all other things! (I just complemented Jonathan today because he is incredibly meticulour with all this…his TNo pictures were up the same night on Flicr - and on facebook! - I am in awe)

Well, to come back to our shoot. It was the most fun time I’ve ever had… I feel great behind a camera. I love holding it…

Specifically, I thought our shoot was very organised.

The set was the basement ladies restrooms in the Tisch School, 721 broadway.

We thought Saturday morning would be less traffic. Unfortunately, there was a parents meet that day and we encountered a particularly heavy flow to the women’s restroom. We had to keep switching our camera’s off and asking JongMin - the protagonist to leave so that the women to pee in peace! But, really…people were quite helpful. even offered to use the men’s loo to avoid inconvenience.

We all were playing actors, directors, camera crew, light, sound crew all at once. It was a huge learning experience. We worked improvised on our storyboards a little bit…but largely stuck to the game plan…

I think I got some opportunity to handle the camera and lights. I need to work on setting up the initial settings in the camera, playing witht the focus. And yes sound…I wasn’t involved with sound at all this time around. Maybe more in week 9 assignement…

It’s at times like this that I feel that maybe i’m completely missing the point…

I intimidated by McLuhan and would not even consider passing a judgement. But I must admit that I found myself kind of shaken up by his definition of media and content.

All this while I did think of content as the message. And earlier when I came across this hyped text - ‘ medium is the message’ (before having read the book) I thought this statement meant that the medium limited  and shaped the content to a great extent — Just like Ong mentions how in the oral culture studies were more aggregative and tended to be fixed around  the human life world whereas with the advent of the written word, scholars had the freedom to move towards analytics and abstraction - so medium was driving the ‘content’.

But this is definitely not what McLuhan is saying. Message is not content according to him. The concept of speech being the content of the writing medium and the actual ‘content’ of speech being thought- which is actually non-verbal (and hence not limited to the written medium anymore!) completely foxed me. Message according to McLuhan is simply the change in scale that a medium brings about in human affairs…I found it difficult to internalize this concept.

After reading it the second time I felt he was pushing me to expand my idea of medium altogether. That was tough. To think of electric power as medium was really difficult. I found his definition to be too broad. I’ve always looked at medium as a ‘channel’ for communication. Just something that contains your thought. And very crudely, just like a vessel, it would probably shape the content it caries as well…But medium as anything that is an ‘extension of a man’ was the new definition. Light bulb, electric power….infact McLuhan wants me to be aware of medium without a content — now that’s going to take some amount of unlearning…

I think I need time to settle into these concepts to go any further…

It’s like this anti-body in my system. Gradually my system will accept it, perhaps…but rightly now it is revolting.

The set was the basement ladies restrooms in the Tisch School, 721 broadway.We thought Saturday morning would be less traffic. Unfortunately, there was a parents meet that day and we encountered a particularly heavy flow to the women’s restroom. We had to keep switching our camera’s off and asking JongMin - the protagonist to leave so that the women to pee in peace! But, really…people were quite helpful. even offered to use the men’s loo to avoid inconvenience.Shooting was a lot of fun. We all were playingactors, directors, camera crew, light, sound crew all at once. It was utter chaos. But a huge learning experience. We worked improvised on our storyboards a little bit…but largely stuck to the game plan…I think I got some opportunity to handle the camera and lights. I need to work on setting up the initial settings in the camera, playing witht the focus. And yes sound…I wasn’t involved with sound at all this time around. Maybe more in week 9 assignement…

So, this week we started out with video. I love working with video…

There was a story board reading for this week - week6. I must admit I never thought of storyboards as such am important aspect of film-making. And i realised it’s potential later when we finally got down to shooting our film.

Jong min, Sandra, Ja in, Armanda and I set out to make a small film!

The most difficult part was to come up with the story idea - the subject of the film. I remember we were at loss - couldn’t come up with any ideas. I think all of us were finding it difficult to explain our ideas which were so fluid in the first place and convince the team to go with it…

We finally settled on a toilet scene. It sounded like fun…Gave us possibilities to experiment with light and camera angles. Also, it was a tight enough script to play around with for a 2-3 minute film!

Jong min sketched out the story-board. He was great!

Here is our script/story board

With this assignment I found out how long 30sec could be. Thomas and I spent 7 hours shooting this with  istopmotion….

We had fun.Here’s the link…

This is one of the projects that I have had most fun with. The only stupid thing is that I did the assignment first and then did the reading…

There were definitely issues with comprehension! We had to do a lot of explaining before anyone got the story line.Here in this strip we played around with this plastic figures and paper napkins and other projects on the floor.  We decided to do something on the statement the Iranian president made about gays in Columbia… Well…

Walter Benjamin puts great emphasis on ‘Aura’. Which is in turn related to tradition - say magic or ritual.

And his main point of discontent with mechanical forms of reproduction is it’s “parasitical dependence on ritual”. Well, that to me is a complete positive statement.

He goes on to say how getting rid of ritual has now only been replaced by politics - however I feel Art always has been interlinked with society….so it is obvious that magic, then rituals(religious) and now politics will influence art. I understand and agree with what he says…only I dont think it’s a negative.

Ditto with his grouse against reproducibility, accessibility and the shattering of the aura. To me, Art is something that is dynamic. It must change it’s form and role with the times. Walter Benjamin’s work interests me to see the change in form…and as with Walter Ong’s work, it is helpful in understanding psychodynamics of the changing forms…I stress again…I dont see it as a negative. 

The absence of the reproduced material in time and space - it’s unique existence, is not so important according to me. I am happy to know the story. And view the reproduced work. Rather than not see it at all…