December 11, 2005
Flash Animation
Oren and I made a short music video for the White Stripes' "Seven Nation Army." I'd played around a little bit with flash before, but this time I learned a lot more. Understanding how to correctly use movie clips and transitions is important to being able to know what you want to do. I don't find Flash very intuitive, but now that I've wrestled through basic animation concepts with it once, I will be able to pretty easily do it in the future.
The Flash Animation (The file is 3MB, so it will take probably 30-75 seconds or more to load. Be patient, it's working.)
Posted December 11, 2005 08:15 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 14 | Permalink
November 15, 2005
"I am not a mime"
We have finished a rough cut of the mime film, and it seemed to go over pretty well in class today. I'm going to hold off on putting any clips online until they're a little smoother. The audio levels right now aren't that great.
Posted November 15, 2005 05:22 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 10 | Permalink
November 08, 2005
Temporal Continuity in Editing
I enjoyed reading about directing a lot. It made the project we were working on this week feel a lot more like a professional project. Not that we really based very much of what we filmed on what we had read, but I at least felt more informed about what I was doing.
The reading made me want to do more experimentation with film, too. As we've been shooting this film, and as I've been reading about film directing the past few weeks, I've started to pay much more attention to how the editing of movies and TV shows is done. I'm kind of amazed to see how much of a rich visual language there is in television and movies that I was more or less unaware of until now. Of course, the flow should be seemless if done right (according to our readings).
Reading about (and thinking about) the issues involved with maintaining continuity and getting coverage has caused me to have a lot more respect than I did for directors. I realize now in a much more tangible way that there is a lot of planning that goes into getting a good shot. When we were filming we typically only used a single angle/range for every shot, although I would have liked to experiment with using multiple cameras or at least different takes with different angles to see how that can contribute to our film. It's becoming clear, though, that we are mounting a very ambitious project and multiple takes are a luxury for people not trying to get done work for 3 other classes.
The experience so far has made me really want to a) make my own feature-length film and b) star in one.
Here is a link to our pictures from the second day of shooting.
Day 2 of the Mime Shoot: I am not a mime.
Posted November 8, 2005 12:25 AM. Categories: Assignments , Reading Responses , Week 9 | Permalink
November 01, 2005
Mime Film
Our assignment (to be done over the next two weeks) is to shoot a 2-minute piece of video. Our group agonized over a lot of different options and we finally settled on a parody/mockumentary about a person doomed to live like looking (but not acting) like a mime. He's a normal person with a normal job and so on, he just happens to look like a mime. Our piece will document the misadventures of someone who looks like a mime but does normal thing (like talk to people, get coffee at Starbucks, go shopping, play basketball).
The assignment for this week was to storyboard our piece. Rather than actually drawing anything, we just took a bunch of digital pictures of me (yes, I will be the mime--it's my screen debut) acting out parts of each scene. We're going to start shooting this Thursday or Wednesday. I'm going to have to go buy my mime gear tomorrow.
I also wrote up a parody of a Levitra-type impotence ad, but we decided it was too difficult to put together in just two weeks. I'm going to post a link to the rough script here just in case anyone comes across this and wants to do it. I still think it would make a great featurette if anyone were to make it. The script for the Levitra ad.
Posted November 1, 2005 12:41 AM. Categories: Assignments , Week 8 | Permalink
October 25, 2005
Mashup: Gwen Stefani vs Kraftwerk
The assignment this week was to create a 2-minute sound file. We were taught how to use a variety of different recording devices and audio processing tools (like Audacity, ProTools, Marantz Recorders, &c), but Sai and I ended up doing everything in Garageband.
We mixed Kraftwerk's The Robots with Gwen Stefani's Hollaback Girl, using some samples from other songs including a bit from Cam'Ron's Hey Ma and The New Radicals' You Get What You Give.
There were two important parts of the process: First, we needed to be able to find parts of the songs that isolated either the vocals or the drum or beats lines in order to cleanly import them as loops into Garageband. Next time I do this I'm going to try to use some of Audacity's filters to pick out the drum-n-bass line out from *under* a vocals track, instead of looking for a song that had the d-n-b line all on its own.
The second tip was to make loops of the samples instead of just cutting them. Use of the Dashboard widget bpm widget was integral to this, because we had to figure out the bpm of the sample in order to make sure everything lined up correctly.
After the loop was set with the correct beat, you can choose "Add Loop to Library" from the Edit menu (I think) and then you can import that loop from the loop library. If you do it this way, Garageband keeps track of the bpm of everything so that it all sounds good together. It's kind of magical when you see that you can just drop the loops in with each other and watch (hear) them sync up.
Posted October 25, 2005 12:55 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 7 | Permalink
October 11, 2005
Sequential Images: Diamond Knights Video
Sai (whom I worked with to do a composite image last week) and I created a video narrative, using sequential images taken with our digital cameras. The idea was inspired by Sia's music video for Breathe Me. You might recognize the song as the music that was played during the ending sequence of Six Feet Under's final episode.
We spent all day Thursday "filming." Basically, we put our cameras into continuous shooting mode and then biked around the city. I took 3rd person and external shots, and Sai had his camera velcro'd to his bike's handlebars for 1st-person biking footage. We set up a few special scenes, too, like the opening scene, which we filmed using a tripod in front of Sai's apartment as he brought out and assembled his bike and then rode out of the frame. There's a tiny glitch that you can see where Sai hesitates for a second as he is tightening his front wheel. This is because my camera's flash memory started to get full, which greatly slows down its ability to take pictures. I had to have him freeze and wait for my camera to catch up before we could continue shooting.
The other special scene was the crash sequence. We filmed this a number of different times to get the timing right, and there were a couple of sequences that didn't make it into the final production. The sequence with Sai going overhead is one that I'm pretty happy with.
The most difficult part about the whole process was probably the editing. We used iMovie to import sequences of images (from iPhoto) and then converted them into movie clips that we could arrange and cut as we liked. This was not such a problem (though iMovie has some idiosyncracies that we had to acclimate to), but it became really difficult to keep things moving at the right tempo when we started to attempt to use the musical cues for our scene changes. Ordering the clips and timing them right so that they work with the music changes was difficult. In the end, though, it is pretty clear that it was important that we did so. The piece is so much stronger when it plays right with the music.
Posted October 11, 2005 01:27 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 5 | Permalink
October 03, 2005
CSS Mashup Web App
I liked playing around with my CSS and making two very different versions of the same HTML page in week two's assignment.
I started to wonder what would happen if you applied the CSS from one site to a completely different website's HTML. So: the CSS Mashup program.
Posted October 3, 2005 03:23 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 4 | Permalink
Composite Image with Photoshop
Our assignment for this week was to create a composite image, from three or four different images, using Photoshop.
Sai and I created a composite image. This is the final image (click to see larger):
I think the image turned out quite well. We used the "Extract" filter to punch out several of the items (the dog, the prom couple, etc.). To get the images to look right in context, we turned up the Cyan coloring on most of them (in Image->Adjustments->Color Balance), and we had to change the ambient brightness on a couple so that they would fit with the lighting of the scene. We used the Burn tool to add shadows.
Sai blogged it, too.
The following are the images that were used to generate the composite.
Posted October 3, 2005 03:00 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 4 | Permalink
September 27, 2005
Three Digitally Manipulated Images
This first image is a mash-up of a pair and a woman's bottom. I believe the female model was my aunt on my father's side. I've been told this, but it might just be a kind of family legend. At any rate, she was once involved with the artist Alfred Gescheidt.
The second image is an entry in a Fark.com photoshop contest. The theme was unexplained phenomena.
The final picture is an image created by a recent inductee into the AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) hall of fame.
Posted September 27, 2005 01:10 AM. Categories: Assignments , Week 3 | Permalink
September 25, 2005
CSS
I enjoy the theory of CSS a lot: separating the content from its markup makes a lot of sense, and really plays to the strengths of computing and the web. I had a little bit of difficulty making sure everything worked and aligned the way I wanted/expected it to, but I was able to do it in the end.
One frustration I have run into while working on my CSS is that it is sometimes confusing to know which selector is controlling the property that I want to change. For instance, if I want the width of the navigation panel at the top of this page to be wider, should I change the div that encloses it or should I change the individual list elements, etc.? I find myself unsure of how many divs need to be enclosing a chunk of text/content on the screen, and, if there are multiple tags around the object I'm trying to modify, do they all need to be changed, or will just one do? Through trial and error (by commenting lines of CSS code), I've already found that a fair amount of the styles I have defined are superfluous.
For the assignment I decided I would try to explore how much the styles can be used to change the display of a page (a la the CSS zen garden). This gives a pretty good visual argument for the power (and importance) of stylesheets.
I created two identical websites, and by changing only the CSS I was able to make them look very different. The files are here and here. Here is the file with no stylesheet. (And oh yeah: the second link doesn't work in anything but Safari, it seems. Psych psych psych.)
Posted September 25, 2005 11:04 PM. Categories: Assignments , Week 2 | Permalink