ideas

So after thinking some more about potential ideas for the upcoming projects I have come to find that I don't really have as many as I thought. For some reason I just assumed ideas would come to me easily and that I wouldn't have any trouble coming up with a vision for my projects. Unfortunately I was counting my eggs before they hatched, and am currently drawing a huge blank in the ideas department. I am hoping that over the next few days I will see or hear something that sparks some creativity for an assignment. Since a watched pot never boils, ideas may come to me when I'm not trying so hard to find them. But anywho...here are some of the things I have come up with so far:

There are endless possibilities for where I could take the rhythmic editing assignment. Obivously I will be working with a scenario that my partner chooses, so that part isn't up to me. As for what I want to be doing when my partner films me is still up in the air. I have two jobs, and one is horribly un-entertaining while the other is really entertaining but it would be hard to capture the essence of it on video. So I started thinking of some of my hobbies...running- too monotonous, reading-super boring, shopping?- too lame. I am into photography so I was thinking I could play into that. PS- I would much rather be behind the camera than in front..so this should be interesting....

For the one shot assignment I am thinking my group wants to do something visually baisc (not boring, but basic), and then jazz it up with some cool sound effects and editing. I'm up for whatever. Since I am always more concerned with the visual aspects and aesthetics of projects, it might be cool to focus on some other ways to make a video great. Thank goodness four minds are better then one, because I'm sure once we all get together we will come up with something fabulous.

As for the animation footage. Yikes! I have no idea where to take that. Let's hope my mind starts pumping out good ideas in the next few days.

holy crap i'm overwhelmed

After yesterday's class I am feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of ongoing projects we have. I am the kind of person who likes to complete one thing before moving on to the next, so this should definitely be a challenge for me. I'm trying to keep all of the projects straight but this can be hard as well. I wish we had more class time or a longer semester so we could focus more time and energy on each project. I sure hope I don't get some sort of creative block during the next three weeks as that would surely slow down my rate of production. But enough whining from me...I'm sure it will all work out as it should.

The cool thing about the upcoming projects is that we are moving towards video. I'm sad to see our hands on experience with different film stock manipulations go because I really enjoyed playing around with new techniques. It helped to broaden my range of creativity. The first projects and workshops we did were so different from anything that I have learned in my other classes here and that's why I think they stuck out to me so much. But don't get me wrong, I am excited to be working with video next. Obviously there is a lot of room for creativity and experimenting within the means we will be working. I still have to more thought into my vision for each of the projects. So I'll have to get back to you with my plans in a day or so...

Final cut. Yikes. After the tutorial I feel I had a better sense of the basics of the program, but I hope that will be able to get me through the rest of the semester. I have little experience with Final Cut (I guess that's all thanks to taking film theory classes), so I am a bit scared that I will mess things up. I guess it will just take some time, and a lot of practice, before I feel completely comfortable using it. While some see a creative "block" so to speak on the 5-15-5-10 frame project, I am actually a little relieved to be working with such restrictions. It helps me take some of the guess work out of the editing process and will allow me to focus more on the basics of how to edit my work.

Needless to say, the next few weeks should be busy and interesting!

link

Not that people can't find this on their own....but here's the link to the The Yes Men's website if anyone cares to take a look.

http://www.theyesmen.org/

culture jamming and the yes men

I don't think I really understood the idea behind culture jamming until we watched The Yes Men video in class and then I decided to do some of my own research on the Web about it. The whole concept of identity correction among huge, worldwide organizations just blows my mind. I am always quick to think of the logistics of things, and how in the world it's possible for them to pull of stunts like this without getting arrested. Apparently someone had the same question as me, because on the Yes Men website there is a FAQ section and one of the questions was about if they thought what they were doing was illegal and if so, why haven't they been arrested? Here is a part of the answer that I found most interesting:

"On the other hand, what we do might not be illegal. Lawyers don't seem to know; the ones we've asked can't point to such-and-such a law that means we're in trouble. But then the law is pretty irrelevant, as far as corporations are concerned—if they want you silenced, they just throw a totally bogus lawsuit at you, that invariably gets thrown out, and in the meantime ties you up in red tape. That's called a SLAPP suit, and it's the main way corporations silence community activists whose causes aren't sexy enough for the mainstream media to follow."

Everything about the Yes Men seems to fascinate me because I just can't grasp how they are able to keep fooling people and doing crazy presentations and what not without getting in serious trouble. I don't know if it's part of the whole freedom of speech thing we have going here, but you would think someone would draw the line and limit them from pretty much doing whatever they wanted.

I love the attitudes of the Yes Men too. They aren't malicious or pushy in their ideals. When they don't get the reaction they want from a crowd they don't try and force it out of them. I guess they just want to get the information out their so they can better inform the people of the sometimes harsh realities of what some corporations and organizations are doing on a regular basis.

Because the video sparked my interest to look on their website I also found some shocking information about what happened in Bhopal in 1984. As they go on to say on the website, a vast majority of Americans had no idea what had happened with Union Carbide and the Dow...I being one of them. It's people like the Yes Men that are able to make others aware of whats really going on around them, and that's a great service they are providing to those who either take the time to research what they are doing or happen upon their activities by chance.

As I'm sure you gathered from this entry, I have found a fascination for The Yes Men and what they are trying to do. I'm pretty sure that I will keep researching other culture jamming activists who are out there trying to make the people aware of what's going on around them. It still shocks me that people could get away with stuff like this, but I guess in today's day and age, anything's possible!

2.27 class

Since we got to see some of our work projected on the screen I was able to make some mental notes about what to do and what not to do in future projects. Let's start with the animtion footage. I was so, so excited to see how my group's would turn out because I thought we had a lot of great ideas and fun props to work with. However, once I saw the project, I realized that a lot of what we tried to do didn't show up well on screen. The lighting was very weak, causing the image to be grainy and dark. We did not have a lot of contrast in the objects we used so a lot of the images ran together once projected. Also, we lacked consistency in camera placement as the camera moved back and forth instead of staying static. This kind of hurt the fluid-like movement effect we were looking for. But not all was lost. There were a few parts that looked great! My favorite parts being the jellybean sequence where we moved them back and forth across the camera, and also the helicopter flying across the frame and then landing. I thought the movement looked continuous and not as choppy or dark as the some other parts did. Hopefully we will be able to salvage a good amount of the footage for our project. We included some shots of narrative inserts that we can include to make a story out of. Also, with slowing things down and lightening them up I'm sure we will be able to make something cool out of it all. I'm looking forward to see what we all come up with.

Now, onto the 100 frame animation project. I don't want to see negative in saying this, but I was diasppointed in the turnout of this project as well. I made the mistake of drawing my images wayyyyyyyy to big, and therefore a lot of the deatil of them was cut off when projected. I also think that when we contact printed my sprocket holes weren't lined up perfectly so the images were showing up half and half. So put both of those together, and you can see why the animation wasn't recognizable at all. It was kind of disappointing because I spent so much time with the fine detail to not have it show up : ( Oh well....now I know what to do better next time! I would pick simpler shapes and draw them a lot smaller, and then I think I would be ok!

The good thing about these projects is that I'm learning what works and what doesn't. I only wish I was getting better results!

the molotov man

This is by far the most interesting article I have read this semester. I am fascinated by Latin American culture and the structured chaos that they live in daily. Because I am also a Spanish major, I have taken many classes in Spanish-American Civilization where we have discussed the Sandanistas Revolution in Nicaragua. So this article was of great interest to me.

I like the structure of the article itself and that we got to see both sides of the story. Both ladies brought up great points about the art of context and who ultimately had "the rights" to an image. Here are some of the points that stuck out most to me:

• This has nothing to do with the Molotov Man directly, but I thought it was interesting that Joy saves the most promising images on her desktop for awhile before choosing which ones to work with. Seeing as how the images are very emotional and thought provoking I can imagine it would be hard to separate a personal attachment from the aesthetics of it all.
• What happened with the resurgence of the Molotov Man's image after Joy had worked with it was pretty amazing. It seems that anyone and everyone was jumping on the bandwagon and catering the image to their marketing needs. What started out as a simple documentation of a pivitol moment in history turned out to be a highly recognized image more known then the story behind it.
• The stand out quote for me for this article was "Who owns the rights to this man's struggle?" That one line summarizes a gray area that many artists find themselves in everyday. Obviously there is no easy answer to the question. And quite frankly, I'm not sure what end of the spectrum I find myself on. After reading both Joy and Susan's thoughts on the "ownership" of an image, I'm still uncertain what to think.
• The information Susan gave about the context and background of the Molotov Man really helped to put things in perspective. In a way it's kind of sad that Pablo's intentions and context really were being washed away with all of the replications and usage of his image. I don't necessarily agree that it was a betrayal of him, as Susan put it. We are blessed to live in a land where we have freedom of speech and expression, so it's hard to draw a line to stop people from going "too far."

After reading this article I am definately interested in researching the topic and phenomena of the Molotov Man some more.

my afternoon in the darkroom

Today's class was pretty relaxed and very experimental so I definitely enjoyed myself. My group worked with some cool objects that made for nice rayograms. My favorite object that we had was the slinky. We tried a few different ways to impose it's image onto the strip. I think it worked best when we stuck the film strip inside the slinky because it gave it some depth and allowed for some shadows. I also liked the beaded necklace and the tiny people we used for the animation project too. I wish we had some more reflective objects that would have cast some cool light on the film strip. If I was to do this project again I would make sure to include something like that. Although the objects seem small, I know when they are projected they will go by so fast. Thank god for Final Cut and being able to slow the film down.

I liked our results better when we flickered on the light instead of using the cell phone. We got more crisp, solid images that way. When we used the cell phone method we got some blurring of the objects and weird shadows because of the movement of the light.

I am going to stick with my previous comment about not being a fan of the contact printing. It just doesn't seem as fun to me as the rayograms. We had a great result with clean images, but there was nothing special about our print because it was merely a copy of something that was already created. But, since we will be intercutting those images into some of the things we created I think the end result will be pretty neat. We have a lot of good prints to work with.

I really liked the No Logo thing we watched at the end of the class today. The lady in the video made some really valid points about marketing and our culture that I never really thought about before. There is a lot more thought put into advertisements and marketing plans then just what will look good. The idea of businesses and corporations selling more then their product is so true, and to the average consumer it's over looked. My favorite part was the towards the end when she started talking about Celebration, Florida. I was not familiar with that community but now I'm pretty fascinated by it. I look forward to seeing what the rest of the video will bring.