December 22, 2005
Mime Movie Finally Online
I've finally put the mime movie online. This is a medium-quality, large-size file. A higher-quality downloadable version is on its way, as well as a small, low-quality edit for those with slow internet connections. Check it out by clicking here:
I am not a mime. (new window)
Categories: Week 14 | Permalink
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.)
Categories: Assignments , Week 14 | Permalink
November 15, 2005
The Cloisters
Way, way up at nearly the northernmost point of Manhattan is the Cloisters Museum, a collection of medieval art in a setting designed to recreate the original context in which the art would have been displayed. It's pretty amazing, and hard to believe you're on the same island, in the same city that holds Times Square. As part of the bus ride assignment for Applications, we had to ride the M5 bus to 175th street, and since we were so close to the museum we decided to check it out.
Categories: New Experiences , Week 10 | Permalink
"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.
Categories: Assignments , Week 10 | Permalink
November 08, 2005
Fall Colors in the NE and the Empire State Building
And the New York City Marathon. This week was a banner week for me doing new things (much to the chagrin of that part of me that was trying to get work done).
On Saturday I went for a hike in Chappaqua with Alix and Susan, two friends of mine from Pomona. It was a great escape from the city. And, judging by the colors, perfect timing. This was my first bona fide experience of being blown away by the fall colors. I have heard a lot about how great the leaves in New England are, but I really hadn't had the experience of seeing them firsthand until now. I was deluded into thinking that Utah's leaves compete (actually, I still think Utah's leaves compete against these. But these were pretty awesome.)
And then on Sunday morning I went to David's apartment in Fort Greene to watch the runners whiz by.
As I was watching the marathon, I got a call from my best friend from college, Daniel, aka the Danimal. He was in town from LA and wanted to hang out. We met up that evening and he took me to the top of the Empire State Building. His grandfather had designed it, so he had a pass that let us skip the lines and go straight to the top.
Categories: New Experiences , Week 9 | Permalink
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.
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.
Categories: Assignments , Week 8 | Permalink
October 31, 2005
The $5 Haircut
It is said that you can find anything in New York. For the past two weeks I have been on a mission. As my locks got ever longer (some would say mangier), I searched the city in vain for the holy grail of cheap haircuts: the $5 haircut. Unswayed by cheerful Supercuts ads and $2 off coupons online, I kept my ear to the ground, diligently tracking down leads, to no avail. On Friday afternoon, however, a small, hand-lettered sign taped to the wall of my gym caught my eye. Maybe it was the judicious use of green and pink highlighter that I saw; maybe the misspellings and solecisms grabbed me; you can call it whatever you want. I call it fate.
The King Barber school, the ad said, located on 3rd avenue between 9th and 10th streets. "Ask for George. Haircuts $5."
I swaggered through the plate glass doorway, shook the hair from in front of my eyes, and surveyed the scene. Which of the estimable hair stylist herein would I deem worthy of trimming my mane? For a few moments, none stepped forward, and then a single brave soul whom I will dub "Jorge"—due to my not remembering or not having been told his name—looked me in the eye. "What you want?" He asked in a gravelly baritone.
"I'm here for the $5 haircut," I replied, leveling his gaze. With nary another word I was swept into a barber's chair and enrobed in a fetid black cape. Jorge and I negotiated the deals of the haircut (price: $5. length: shorter in the back), and he went to work with, his hair trimmer droning away.
Like many of the upper-class hair salons that charge 2, even 3 times the amount at Kings, the hair stylists there have an apparent moratorium on scissors. No matter. Jorge and his mentor "Sal" (name also apocryphal) deftly showcased the range of the common hair trimmer, using it superbly for both fine detail work and to shear great locks of hair at once.
If I were to make one niggling complaint (and it be a minor one), it would be this: Jorge, with his black comb, seemed to have a personal vendetta against my protruding ears. Time and again he sliced the comb through my hair only to whack it against my gibbous (and not slightly tender) flesh, so much so that I would be unable to contain a pavlovian grimace every time he wielded that shiny plastic weapon.
So how's the haircut? You can judge for yourself. Personally, I feel a little bit too much like a Willard-era Crispin Glover.
Categories: New Experiences , 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.
Categories: Assignments , Week 7 | Permalink
October 16, 2005
Digital Life
I gathered some friends from ITP and went to Digital Life, the consumer electronics and gaming convention, on Friday afternoon. The convention was a huge extravaganza, and reminded me of ComDex, which I used to go to with my Dad and Uncle while I was in college. DigitalLife promised to show us new products, exciting new games, and celebrities. I was there for the freebies, and as such, I was pretty disappointed.
The tickets to Digital Life were being given away rather promiscuously (promotion codes could be found all over google), and I'm guessing with the volume of thrill-seekers (as opposed to actual buyers) present, giveaways were not as high a priority as at Comdex. Still, there were a fair number of trinkets being handed out (I got an RCA dog keychain), but the lines were ridiculous. The big to-do when we arrived on Friday afternoon was the Tivo giveaway—apparently Tivo had held a "funeral for VHS" at noon, and anyone who came by to drop off a blank VHS cassette as part of the service could get a free Tivo if they also purchased a year's worth of service at the same time. There were people smugly toting their free Tivos all over the convention floor.
I couldn't help but be smitten by this cute little robot. He's only about 14 inches tall.
At the same booth, however, there was a really creepy animatronic monkey head with weird rubbery skin (and quite a bite). I got a picture of Matt with him, and a detail shot below.
There was also a large gaming influence, and to celebrate the release of a new Star Wars-themed game, Storm Troopers were roaming the floor.
Among the games, non-standard controls seemed to be a theme. There was a fighting game where the controls were little transmitters one wears on each wrist like bracelets. I saw someone flailing wildly but having dubious success in the game. There was also a slew of mats used as input, for running and jumping. There was another, a bowling game, with an actual bowling ball used as the input device. The kid trying to bowl had to take four wind-ups before he was able to successfully get the bowl rolling down the lane (gutterball). Clearly, the consumer electronics industry has a ways to go with the cutting-edge control pads/devices.
Categories: New Experiences , Week 6 | Permalink
Week 10