Mystery Men

To be perfectly honest i did not really enjoy Mystery Men. I thought it was entertaining and funny some times but kind of annoying a lot of the time. THese guys spend all this time and money for what? to make some college kids mad and make a point to themselves. I got it, the general public is kinda dumb. I've know common sense is not that common for awhile. anyway, how it relates to the 48 hour video race i am not sure. i'm guessing it is a race against the clock and having to come up with different ideas to make something come across that makes sense. thats about all i could think because i know sometimes they came into problems and had to think on the fly and were up late doin their project. they had to improvise and come up with weird ideas which we will in turn have to do when given our mystery prop and little time to make a movie without a film camera. they also made points without a camera. maybe that had something to do with it but probably not the more i type this. i'll stick with the fact that they had to improvise and were on tight time schedules as we will be.

Molotov man and Ecstacy

molotov man was an extremely interesting article. I agree with both sides, if there are even two sides to what people ar saying about Molotov Man. I can see Joys side of here being able to reproduce an image in such a way, especially from a documentary picture, and turn it into her own art. It is tough to draw a line in the sane with this issue because Susan does bring up good points with saying that while artists do and can have that power it may not always be right because if someone is fighting for a cause and an artist somehow takes away froma depiction of that cause,I do not believe Joy did that, then why do it. for arts sake? what about the greater good and who is the judge of it? it is a tough debate and a very interesting article. i also loved joy's paintings.

The Ecstasy of Influence was a great(long) article. I always think about if people are influenced by others are they plagiarising because we as students need to cite everything. I understand why but when did people stop being original because for me it seems that ideas are always recycled in every form of art. there does not seem to be real originality. people tend to get influenced by things in the past, what they see or hear or taste, etc. and make it their own. artists have been doing this since the beginning of artists. Michaelangelo's David is not an original piece of art. it is a man. Men is nothing new but the way he did it was the art. Great article because I think about that all the time especially when people say "oh Avatar was not original" so what. it's how it was done and shown that mad it fun and special and unique.

Experience on the Saturday shoot

Saturday shoot was actually a lot of fun and i enjoyed it very much. I was so glad we got great weather because, while i would have rather been at the beach, i was also doing something i love outdoors in the sun. i had missed the meeting on monday with the group due to my flight not getting in because of bad weather so really i found out about the project that day. it was fun have to really prep for one take because i'm sure down the road we may not be able to waste film and really need to over prepare shots so that we get the take on the first or second take. it may be due to financial reasons or it may be due to time but giving us only one take was a an interesting way of shooting especially in todays age of digital filmmaking when you can just erase and do it again or just have more drive or disk space to film on. it kind of puts you back when they could only shoot on expensive film and every shot counted and you had to keep rolling no matter what. all in all i loved the saturday shoot. i know some people were not happy about coming in on a saturday but i am ready to be working on films in the near future out of school and they will require many hours no matter what day of the week it is. all the matters is that it gets done. hopefully under or on budget and within the time frame

Ideas for 48 hour video race

This is the project i am most worried about. Well maybe 'worried is not the right word. I am nervous about this project because I do not know how to use a lot of the equipment yet. I have not done the prerequisite for a lot of the film classes, film tools and techniques, or intro to editing so while i am a film major and have made some films, i am still a newbie. It will be interesting to see what i can come up with on the fly but i was thinking about using my point and shoot camera and take still photos, upload them into the computer and have a kind of stop motion type film. other than that i have not really been thinking about too much. i really am kind of set on doing something like that. it will give me a pretty close representation to a film without using a film camera. i still have some thinking to do and hope many ideas will come to me on the day.

Scratch Film Junkies second response.

It was very different watching a movie by the Scratch Film Junkies the second time after working on a cameraless film and realizing how much time and effort it takes to do the littlest animation as well as the tinniest bit of coloring or dying. I was able to enjoy the film much more this go around because I related to the effort a lot. I was alos able to recongnize parts of the film and the techniques used which helped with the viewing and game me a sense of relateability(not sure if that is a real word) During the film if I saw some bleaching or toning or scratching I related to the techniques recalling my own frustration and elation using the different techniques. During the first time I saw the Scratch Film Junkies I enjoyed parts of it but soemtimes I kind of tuned out because I had no clue as to what I was watching. In this film there was a great use of colors and neat animation. THe animation for me was the most frustrating part of the project so when I saw animation in this film i watched it quite different than the first time. Basically when it comes down to the second film and watchign it I can appreciate everything a lot more because I had to do most of the stuff I had seen in the film. THis made the second film much more enjoyable. I give THe Scratch Film Junkies a lot of credit in addition to any filmmaker or filmmakers that make these ind of films because although I enjoyed the experience of making mine it would probably take a lot for me to make another one. It is just not my kind of film but now I can have much more respect for them and not look at the films as pure chaos.

I would like to say first and foremost that was the most annoying reading I have had to do because I do not print it out. Instead I had to flip my laptop sideways and reap the entire article like that. Kinda funny actually. However reading the article was pretty interesting. Especially talking about sound registering faster than sight. I never really thought about that but thinking about it it very true. Eyes have a lot more to do that ears. Eyes have to look at distance of an object, size, movement , what it is, etc. etc. and process it all. Ears and sound just have to focus on that. I guess that is why I would much rather lose my hearing than lose my sight. I know I could deal with that much better. It would such not to be able to hear music, but not seeing would put me at a much much greater disadvantage. Another thing about the article that made me think was the use of sound in cinema and if you took away the sound what would you have. It is kinda different watching a video without any sound at all. It loses so much. When watching Stan Brackhge films it is different because there is no sound to it at all. No dialogue, no music, nothing. I personally do not like it. I enjoy music during films, especially short experimental ones. It gives something extra to the film. Sometimes sound helps to just get through it. When I do not have sound on a film I can easily drift off out of the world the film should bring me into. Music and sound give emotion and propell thought and feelings. How often it happens to me that I hear a song that reminds me of a time that something good or bad happened to me. Or someone says a line from a film and I immediately laugh or am brought back to what I was doing when that film came out or who I was with. Sound is so important and I believe incredible detail and immense thought should be put into putting the sound into film even if the sound or music in obscure. Even then it may stand out in a good way.

Wells Response

I will start off first and foremost that what I just read (i literally JUST read it about thirty seconds ago) went over my head. I understood what Wells was saying most of the time about the animation but maybe it did not sink in enough. So i will blog about what I did take in and what I know about animation. I know it did not start with Disney and Warner Bros., which was all i watched growing up as most probably did, but with others like KOKO the Clown which I watched in another class. I like those films I had seen although some of them were incredibly racist and I could not believe my eyes at what I saw with them. Some of the ways they portrayed black people was pretty bad in those cartoons. Anyway, getting off base here, I thought the early animation with the artists hand in the picture was really cool and I remember seeing 'Duck Amuck' when I was young. I also remember seeing really early animation with a dinosaur and a guy 'interacting' with an animated dinosaur. Those videos were really cool. I was in awe, and it came back to me reading Wells article, at the painstaking time and effort it took for early animation to produce single films. It really is mind blowing especially in todays age of speedy everything. I do wonder how much animation will be changing because it already is with computers. Does anyone even make cell animation besides purists who do it for the art? How long will they even do it? When will that fall by the waist side, or will it ever? I do not think it will totally go away but animators now are computer techs. They still need to know how to draw which I do not at all but I believe that having to draw will not be such a necessity in the future with how technology and thinkgs like pixar and 3-D are progressing. It's interesting to learn the history like in Wells article if only to see how far ahead we have come.