Animation: Sticky
Adam Simon and I have teamed up again to bring you this short animated film about the trials and tribulations of a stick man (and his stick dog) in a 3d world. Initial storyboard below.
November 29, 2006
STFU!!
STFU is a short film by Adam Parrish, Adam Simon, Tom Jenkins, and me. It was a three week process from the concept and storyboarding to the shoot and edit. Among the crew, there was little experience producing video but we made the best of it. While there are (and were) problems (some obvious and some not), I think our little diddy has some replay value (if only to admire Tom’s brilliant character acting).
The concept was simple: document the plight of one dedicated ITP student in his struggle to find silence in an all too noisy world. Appropriately, we would open in the Japanese Room (a space which is supposed to be (relatively) quiet on the floor). Here, our graduate student would be diligently reading when rudely interrupted by annoying person tapping pen. Then he continues to move from one space to the next, never finding the silence he requires. Finally overcome, he is forced into an empty basement where he breaks-down screaming against the white cinderblock wall.
Once we began shooting, it became very clear how important the prep work actually is. We had completed a storyboard, shot-list and had done some location scouting but things still felt a bit haphazard struggling with the blow by blow while carting and setting up 100lbs of equipment around campus. Certainly, we would have benefited from an even more finely detailed plan of action.
We shot the film using two DV cameras. This was a huge advantage that in some ways mitigated for our lack of finely tuned planning. In the end, our six or seven hours of shooting yielded about 40 minutes of tape captured into Final Cut. Among the first problems we noticed was that some of the audio was buzzing due to a problem with our Beachtek XLR adapter (note to thoroughly test equipment before using all day). We also had some color issues between the two cameras but that proved to be easily corrected.
Although I had done some editing in an old (if archaic) version of Adobe Premiere, I found that enough was different in Final Cut Pro to make life difficult. Fortunately, Adam Simon had some FCP mojo which he graciously shared with us. Four people sitting around an editing session is a bit laughable, to be sure. The net result is often one or two people working and the others twiddling thumbs. I did, however, get a private moment with the project later that weekend to get acquainted with final cut and work on a scene.
When we watched our rough cut of the footage, the result was somewhat underwhelming. We had some nice shots but they didn’t always tie together the way that we had envisioned. The story wasn’t arching and building in a way which made you believe that our character was getting progressively more annoyed in each scene. It went from ho-hum to tearing out hair in the next moment. Having run out of time to shoot any more tape we had to get creative with some of the cuts. One of the more (dare I say) brilliant suggestions was that we make short cuts in the stairwell scene to reference the previous scenes. This helped reinforce our end-point and build the tempo.
Late that night, I tried scoring the finished cut to some music. Admittedly, this is a backward-ass way to do things but I was able to pull out a piece of string music (Two Star Orchestra) which worked amazing well. With only a few slight edits it fit just right into our timeline and definitely added some drama and continuity. In the end, I wasn’t sure that this improved the story but the team seemed okay with the addition and it stuck.
Enjoy!
October 25, 2006
Shameless GarageBand Music
A simple midi loop song created in Apple's GarageBand. Amazingly easy to use and OK results.
October 11, 2006
Painting the City...
Stop motion / time lapse experimentaton featuring my bad pen-man-ship and Yo Yo Ma's, well... Yo Yo Ma. Created with a Canon 20D SLR, Adobe Premiere & Photoshop.
(click to watch the Quicktime movie)
October 04, 2006
Photoshopery
September 27, 2006
101010
In his essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin has an uncanny ability to foreshadow the discourse concerning mass production in the digital age. Remove his work from the timestamp of his Marxist / Socialist underpinnings and set him up with a word processor and a digicam and we’ve got a relevant op-ed for the New York Times on the lost aura of art in the new millennium.
Indeed, we have reached the pinnacle of his expectation. With digital reproduction it is impossible to distinguish the replica from the original. Does it even make sense to use the term “original” while talking about digital mediums? What of our auras?
I look around me in search of something original that I own. Sadly (though not surprisingly), I can only be sure that a couple paintings and maybe a clay pot are, in fact, unique. Am I bothered? Not really. Am I detached somehow from the analogness of life? I don’t think so. But, how would I know for sure? I’ve never really known any different.
Certainly, digital mediums have changed and disrupted the course of art and communication but have we completely lost touch with what is special about the making of art and about the viewing of it? Of course, there are problems (illegal distribution, intellectual property, digital manipulation (see photos) blah blah) but I’m not so sure that the Ludities have the game cornered just yet. Accessibility is a word that all socialists should love. Digital has done more to make art, literature… knowledge accessible than any other innovation in human history. Now that can only improve our auras.
Credit to Hany Farid at Dartmouth for a nice collection of manipulated imagery:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/
September 20, 2006
Beautifying the Blog
Truth be told – I have never had any experience with Cascading Style Sheets so a hot new (read: original) look for my blog has not yet come to fruition. I did come upon this handy plug-in for Moveable Type called StyleCatcher which has allowed me to plagiarize off the abilities of others. In the process, I did learn a lot about Moveable Type and more generally what the hell is going on with CSS. So that is good. For now, just marvel in the simplicity of it all…
September 12, 2006
Truth Tellers?
Since this will be my first blog entry, it seems only appropriate to blog about blogging. While writing this (offline), my first observation is that this program (Word) doesn’t even seem to know what a “blog” is (I’m getting red squiggles). Yet this is a medium that has become so enormously powerful…
So the journalists are all up tight about bloggers and how they’re encroaching on their credibility as the sole distributors of truth. To be sure, this is a complex issue which I can not hope to tackle in one entry. Simply put, I believe that we are only better served when more people have a voice. This, obviously, creates a huge problem for many of the deeply entrenched institutions of society. Maybe even for society itself. Soldiers (for example) aren’t supposed to have a “voice,” after all, they’re supposed to shut the F up and follow orders. How can we effectively assert our power in the world if an inconvenient truth enters the collective? What if it were something which might lead some people to comment (in similar entries) that maybe things have gone very wrong? As it turns out (indeed, as we see every day), these institutions with a truth to protect have turned the full force of their instrument to tackling this problem. Main-stream journalism, corporations, governments - have all gone on the offense. How does a military which had been accustomed to opening every letter, eavesdropping on every call, and corralling every media interview respond when soldiers have access to a two megabit broadband connection in the rec. room? Well, at first there’s confusion and chaos: as we see now. It’s doubtless that the Pentagon brass blame such mediums (email, blogs, etc.) as a primary source for all this foul sentiment. We hear over and over that the good news just isn’t getting out. Maybe they’re even deluded enough to believe that bad news pouring out of Iraq is the actual cause of their struggles. For now, they respond by printing more “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers - which sounds like a nice thing but really means shut the F up and follow orders. So what comes after confusion and chaos?: New rules and legislation. The mortar which holds all of these independent thinkers into something called a society.
My concern is that in their efforts to subjugate this relentless chatter, these intuitions will begin to divide up and “refine” corner stones of this “freedom” we are all said to be enjoying. What if new laws begin to carve away at stuff like that first amendment? Shrouded in something like a bill called “the patriot act,” they would begin to define the modes of communication that are actually held to be free. Or who was or was not press. Sure, people have always feared that the sky was falling in this respect (and I realize that this entry is beginning to sound alarmist and angry)… I do worry that it is much easier to plunk some rules down when no one is really looking or really knows what the hell is going on. My mother just learned about Wikipedia today after all. This new wave of mass-mediums does seem to be that kind of an environment – where no one really knows what’s going on. Take the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example. A sneaky piece of law that was passed before anyone (most people) knew what DRM was. This basically tried to retrofit existing intellectual property laws (for physical items) into the digital domain. It seems to me that what we needed was a complete reworking of what property is.
And then we have these massive multi-player online games with their virtual properties and goods and GDPs equaling small nations… What is a true piece of property? What is a true truth? Who will tell us? Or do we simply have to trust in the democracy of it all and become better, more informed, consumers of things (real or not) and knowledge (true or not). I’m afraid that we all have a lot of learning to do.