3D Shoot

The 3D was one of my favorite shoots of this class.  I had a good time making the props, set and costumes.  Trying to incorporate cardboard into the creation of the costumes and set pieces was fun and challenging at times.   The actual shoot was a lot of fun too, I thought my group worked pretty well together and we were able to finish the shoot fairly quickly.  Our genres were gangster film, samurai film, and spaghetti western.  These genres are pretty similar so it was fairly easy to incorporate all of them into our base image.  The sound design will hopefully bring out two completely different films.  During the shoot we just kept the number of shots to the recommended number of 4.  Hopefully this will help streamline our post production process since we won't have as many shots to convert to 3D.  I'm really looking forward to working with this more in post.

Rough Theater

For years it seems people have been trying to eliminate the "roughness" of art, whether by creating paint programs on the computer or eliminating the actual instruments used to create great symphonies we have been trying to move away from the true nature of that art form.  I personally think that it can work really well, as I am a big fan of both electronic music and animation, however it doesn't replace the more classical elements of those forms.  I think another one of the big transitions we have seen over the last decade or so is the shift from film to video to HD video.  This shift has taken away the graininess and textures associated with film and given us super sharp images which, in some cases, makes it look fake.  It doesn't seem to be a true film when its so hyper-real in the HD format.  We are trying to really move away from the roughness of art and in my opinion it lesses the realness and value of the art.

Long Take

Aight, so I had a lot of fun working on this film.  I really like the constraints of working with one take in one minute because it really forces the story to move along.  I have to say that I am really looking forward to working on postproduction and adding sound.  I feel that the audio will be able to add another layer of depth to the story that isn't present in just the image.  Processing the film by hand was also really interesting.  Our image turned out really well with rich blacks and nice contrast.  I was really surprised and pleased with how well it turned.  I really liked working with the other group as well.  It was fun to be an actor and to see their ideas in action.  I'm actually really surprised it only took 4 hours to do everything we did, considering the amount of thought that had to go into the stories and the blocking before the shoot.  I also thought it would be harder to time film to be under a minute.  I think that condensing the story into under a minute and with one take it really produces a lot of unique and interesting ideas.  Overall I had a really good time and a great day of shooting.  I think that film will really come together once we add the audio layers. I'm looking forward to finishing it up.

Film Manipulation

I really enjoyed working on this project.  I thought it was a lot of fun; however, it did get a little tedious after a little while (though that isn't to belittle the style at all).  I have such a respect for people who animate and do film manipulation because it takes such a long time to achieve the style and design of what you want to do.  I do wish we had more time to work on this project, I feel that with more time we could have had a much better project and have more creative work (time limitations of summer school noted).  I think my favorite part of this project was the magazine transfer.  The designs of the ink always turned out so beautiful and intricate, most of the time in ways much different than what I had anticipated.  This was also the first time I got actually got to deal with the film itself.  Overall this was a great experience and I had a lot of fun doing this.  I hope to have the opportunity to do it again!