Rating the Assignments.

Here's my ratings for the the assignments with justification below the list.

6. Video Letter
5. Stop Motion Animation
4. Rhythmic Edit
3. Crowd Sourcing
2. 360 Video
1. Film Manipulation


I really enjoyed working with actual film, I haven't before this semester began. The process of working with it was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the creative freedom we had with the animation on the film strip and the many different effects we applied to the films. A close second was the 360 video, just because it is such a new technology and is incredibly fascinating to try out. I really enjoyed working with this format just because it was so relevant to the time. The crowd sourcing was a lot of fun, but it was a little tedious with the drawings, we all put significant effort into it, so the final result was awesome, but the process was tedious. The rhythmic edit was fun, but got quickly repetitive and a little frustrating to edit, I struggled with this assignment. The Stop motion animation turned out interesting, but I didn't like how we had to combine all 4 techniques into the same film, I would have liked to really explore one of these methods to fully immerse myself into that topic. The last would be the video letter, I really struggled with defining a new way of working with film, I have tried a large amount of ways working with film, but I didn't see how I could do something new for this project, so pushing myself to be creative was frustrating.

Rough Theater

I like to think of my photography as my Rough Theater, most of the time when I take photos seriously, on trips, I don't take photos for anyone other than myself. They can be crappy blurry photos that have absolutely zero artistic value, yet they mean something to me. I don't care how others think about them because they aren't for them. Yet at the same time, I'm able to capture photos that have both artistic value and personal meaning to them. Some can be artistic, some can be dark photos of reality, some can be photos of stars and infinity, and some can be simple objects isolated from the world.

Rough theater doesn't care on the widespread appeal of the product at hand, they take whatever it can get and makes something out of it. I try to do that with the photos I take, I make the most out of the situation I'm in. Sometimes, I'll have to snap a couple of quick photos out of a bus going through a bumpy patch on the mountain roads of Belize, other times I'll quickly snag a photo holding my breath diving down 35 feet. I take what I can get and make the most out of it, that is my rough theater. I do what I can and not try to make it overtly artistic making the viewer think long and hard, I focus on myself and if other people can find deeper meaning from it good on them but that wasn't the intention.

16mm manipulation response

Working with actual film was a fantastic new experience, I have always wanted to work with actual film. Other than being very excited about working with film, the actual film manipulation was an awesome time. Not knowing how the final result will turn out was a definitely new experience for me. Whenever I have shot something in the past, I will scrutinize it looking for any flaw and try fix it right then and there with another take. Take that mentality and compare it to the film manipulation where you can't make any changes or an undo button, just a little scary.

I really did not like the magazine transfers, I see what the point of it was and the effect that it achieves, but I enjoyed actually manipulating film stock. Drawing and altering the frame was a lot of fun, while incredibly meticulous, very satisfying. Same for the scratching away some of the frame. I wanted to scratch away a large majority of some of the frames and only leave the actor's heads. I stopped about two frames in because it was about 10 minutes of work for 2/24th of a second. I did scratch out their faces for about 1 second, but it felt like the work I did was a lot more. That was the general feeling I got working with film stock, it was a long process for not that much payoff. While the final result did look very visually appealing, actually doing the manipulations was a little tough.

When JT and I combined the film at the end of the project, we had absolutely no clue what it would look like. We were both very pleasantly surprised at the end result.

R3

Acoustic Ecology is a topic that I've never thought about before. The idea that natural sounds in the environment are vanishing is not that large of a leap in idea, just one I have not made before. To preserve these sounds is definitely a noble cause, recording and establishing a record of these ever vanishing sounds will only help to promote and bring attention to the fact that they are vanishing. Establishing a large collection of these sounds will help to continue their noises even if the species becomes smaller in population, or worst case scenario, extinction.

Looking at this idea from my science background, it definitely has validity to it. The ocean is probably one of the most rapidly changing environments as a result of human activity, so recording as much of it and the sounds associated within make sense. They also can provide factual backing to influence arguments for conservation of other environments.

One of the downsides to technology evolving, new sounds arise and become more prevalent. Look at synthetic music, compared to two hundred years ago, trying to explain these sounds would be an impossible task. It only makes sense that in the future, there will be even more new sounds dominating a city environment at first, then spreading outwards. Additionally with the rate of technological advancements, new technologies are found daily producing a new effect, which in turn can bring new sounds. If one of these technologies is produced en masse, new sounds can start to dominate the landscape.

R2

Crowd-sourcing is a genius idea for tapping into many different people for accomplishing a big task through small increments. In it's essence, crowd sourcing is an incredibly simple idea, but when applied correctly and to a large amount of people, it can be an efficient engine producing amazingly large creations.

I think Wikipedia is the most impressive crowd-sourcing feat, having a constantly revised and updated encyclopedia readily available to many people is an invaluable tool. I don't use Wikipedia for actual scientific research in my oceanography major, but if I need to quickly read up on a topic and have a general understanding, I'll go there. While people sometimes say "just google it" most of the time google points to Wikipedia and that just shows how impressively large Wikipedia has reached. Also another cool fact about Wikipedia, you can download a text based version that can fit on a typical flash drive. So essentially, you can have the majority of human knowledge readily available at your finger tips thanks to millions of people coming together and collaborating and refining this encyclopedia. That's just impressive.

Crowd sourcing to create visuals is also a cool method of crowd-sourcing. It definitely removes all control over the visual aspect of what something will look like, but it can provide a unique touch to the video that cannot be replicated. The movies that were crowd sourced come to mind, such as the star wars remakes, and the Robocop remake where the film is given a completely new tone and feeling, but it still is the same exact movie as the original. Again just the little inputs from everyone helping to create a centralized product makes for a definite interesting visual and end result.

Crowd-sourcing is a genius idea that when applied right can be incredibly effective in distributing a large task over a large amount of people, which in turn makes the task each individual has to do, relatively small. It's a genius way to use the internet and a genius way to tap into millions, if not billions, of people online.

Synesthesia & Cymatics

Synesthesia is a very interesting and fascinating topic, the visualization of letters as colors, or numbers as colors seems fascinating, however that perspective only exists because I don't experience it. I feel like most people to some degree have an association with colors and numbers just from inherently growing up, at least that's how my mind works. I know that I don't have synesthesia, however I do associate numbers with colors mentally, my visual perception isn't affected at all. Research into synesthesia is fascinating just because of how it demonstrates that senses are intertwined and not free from influence from other senses.

It's applications into art and media are also very apparent, a couple of prominent musicians (like Kanye) say they have synesthesia and it helps to visualize beats and rhythms. I have seen an interview where Kanye looked at a painting and as a result saw a beat emanating from it. Finding natural rhythms and interpreting them into rhythms that other people can hear is elegant in a way. Hearing and reading about synesthesia is just plain simply cool. The whole concept is engaging and I can just easily get lost thinking about it.

Cymatics is also extremely interesting to think about. It makes sense coming from a mathematical approach, sound waves act as a wave and as result creates interesting visual patterns. The patterns that Cymatics creates are absolutely amazing, the complexity that occurs as a result of these sounds look amazing. I also like how they relate it to Oceanography and studying dolphin's sonar, anytime that the two worlds that I'm interested in (film and oceanography) collide, it makes me more engaged with the topic at hand. In the TED talk, the visualizations from the songs add another layer of complexity to an already amazingly complex system.

Overall, cymatics and synesthesia are an awesome topic to talk about and read about. It's a hidden beauty to the majority of people, those that experience synesthesia don't always know that they are, and cymatics is also a very new study. The topic is fascinating and I would love to explore it more and learn as much as I can about it.

1st Response Transcribe

I really like this style of film, I've seen types of these before in 302. It's a creative format of film, where its without a camera, just painting on the film stock while keeping in time with the music. The idea for the film is simple but it comes out in an elegant manner, it's captivating and visually interesting. At times its almost too chaotic on screen with too much changing between frames, but the music choice helps to move along the film and justify the changes in the frame. it's a very interesting film that leads me to think this class will have us producing something in a similar manner. One question I have is how do you match up the rhythm to the music on film-stock, it seems like a very tedious process.