Motif Part One point Five: Pre-Post-Production.

I'm really getting out of order here. There are myriad reasons why.

I'm in class with only four clips I took to test out my view-finder guide, it was enough to set-up how I'm going to edit my piece. I guess you could call this an post-production heavy project, versus the art and literacy piece which one had to come into with a even a little deliberate planning. In essence, that was an exercise in shooting to shoot. This is becoming an exercise in shooting to edit.

No seriously, I got a lot of out today's exercise. Basically I pared down the images in repeating order to match the repeating phrase in the first part of the song. It is exactly 12 seconds long which, for editing purposes, makes it absolutely wonderful. Just add 12 seconds to the playhead, and not have to deal with trigesimal arithmetic to figure out how many frames to add. Plus, the phrase repeats itself about 7 times, and I only need to take 5 of those to get a minute. I couldn't have picked a better song to use, or so I thought. There's a lot of inner intricacies in those few 12 seconds that I've only partly picked apart, and make matching the images to the song a little difficult. In some instances, the sound lingers, which makes a better effect than if the image lingers. Ideally, the image and sound should have some distinguishing change simultaneously. It's all a matter of persistence. Unfortunately I deleted the original clips and am working now with just the pared down versions, and it's patently difficult to extend your clips using nothing.

Other than that, it's imperative I use a tripod to take footage. A stable image is basically paramount to the uniformity with which I'm expressing this motif. It's pretty much gotten out of hand, how far I'm taking this. No, I won't be using the tripod for every shot, just most of them. In the end, this motif should embody motifs, it should be a meta-motif, a motif about motifs. If I could use motif in a sentence any more times than that, I'm going to do nothing more than give myself a pat on the back. Motifs in just about anything literary or visual should be subtle in their pervasiveness, not redundant. Fortunately I don't have to put a lot of creative thought into the process, like something Oscar Wilde would approve of. I just need to shoot some damn circles. I find that the only thing harder than being subtle is not being subtle. And I'm trying my best at it.

Film Manifesto

What I’d really like to accomplish is to create a piece that tells something so profound, it is regarded as shocking or moving. It would need to be the truth. It would need to be original. I feel I have met the former criteria in most of what I’ve done in the past. It is difficult to distort the truth behind images, just how they are collected and presented. In all manners of expression, I pride myself on holding to the truth in that process. It is the latter criteria that I feel is especially daunting.

I have no style. That is, to say, I have a style, a loose pastiche of a lot of different directors’ styles. My style belongs partly to someone else. In a probabilistic sense, someone had to have used a lot of the cinematographic techniques I recycle time and time again, but it still draws heavily upon someone else’s experience. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I’ve gushed the most over my brother’s work. We grew up with a Canon GL1, iMovie, and too much free time. The first summer we had both, he tried to redo Fight Club and I tried to do a version of Big Brother with my friends. It was downhill from there; whenever he made something, I stole a lot of the little devices that made his work unique. I knew it then, and he knew it too. And he yelled at me, in that you-took-my-stuff-without-asking kind of way. When he left for school and I had no one to steal from.

Next to my brother, Run Lola Run defined my formative years. I’m still obsessed with non-linear narrative, time, and repetitive imagery. It’s these last two characteristics that pervade my work, including my recent pieces for this class. There’s something about manipulating time, in that you can’t manipulate time in reality, which fascinates me. It’s such a good device for getting through 20 minutes in just 1, to cite an exaggerated case when you would use it. My other biggest influence was Kubrick, particularly in my attempt to remake The Shining, with long shots and steep angles. I did, however, dedicate it to his memory due to his then-recent death. That was clearly not enough to absolve me for not being original. Granted, I was an impressionable eighth grader.

As an engineer, it is my fondest hope to advance the cause of technology through innovation. As an artist, I hope to do the same for our creative consciousness. This is a gradual process. I don’t expect it to happen within the course of developing one piece, but rather over the course of a long, creative campaign. Like science, the process is one of trial and error, and breaking away from established routines to find new ways to understand the world. The medium of film is the same, discovering what works, what doesn’t, and how it affects how an audience, or even the artist, comprehends the world. It means breaking away from old patterns and distancing myself from what I’ve seen before.

Dare to be unique, and see the world in your own way, this is the means to which I can say the truth.

Motif Part One: Pre-production.

I think I'm going to limit the number of posts per blog page to three. Having to load more than three posts with videos attached to them can add up in terms of bandwith after a while, especially if you're liable of being rate-limited. Having no internet is no fun after the first few minutes, let alone hours.

That said, I'm not sure where it started, but I was thinking I want to explore circular shapes for my motif. It was probably long before today that I thought it would be interesting to capture a number of varying images of basically the same thing, in essence, a motif. It would be great, I could film the moon, I could film the sun, I could even film someone blinking and have it change colors, á la 2001: A Space Odyssey. Unfortunately, the moon is not full, it's probably a bad idea to film the sun even during winter (and even if I'm fortunate to even see the sun in these cold months), and I really think I've done enough Kubrick homages in the past (although, I'll probably still do this one because I lack that much creativity... and it's too great an allusion to pass up). I still plan on doing this. Not only do I have a series of images, I have the perfect music to use, basically anything by the Appleseed Cast, who I saw this past Saturday. Their opening band, the insuferably obtuse sonic-indulgence-that-is Asobi Seksu, had a transparent drum kit, and upon seeing it I thought, 'that's it, I'm doing circular shapes.' There was something about realizing the quality of roundness, as if an opaque snare drum wouldn't give me that revelation.

Back to the Appleseed Cast: their instrumental stuff has this great circular quality to it with long, repeating riffs that have such a vast sound to them. I definately plan on laying down a track of theirs first and changing the image to match the bass or a rhythm beat. Oh, how my excitement right now is uncontainable! To make the circular shapes uniform, I cut out a piece of packaging tape, applied another piece of packaging tape to the first so their sticky sides were together, drew a large circle on it, and taped it to my view-screen. It works great, but it would probably help if I had a tripod or a steadier hand. Image stabilizers can do only so much...

That about does it for pre-production notes. As for principal photography, I really ought to preface the fact that I never go into shooting with more than a concept or a video prompt in my head. It's probably a good habit to start planning shots, but for this assignment particularly, I'm going to rely on taking video as need.

'Art is hard' and other trite observations of what 'art' really means

Again, love the open-ended assignments. Of course, there was some sort of rigidity, it was either "what is art?" or "what is literacy?" There are still a million and three ways to go about doing this. I wavered a bit on which of the million I three paths I should go down as I stood in the hallway a few doors down from where I sleep and pondered whether I should film my friends sitting there doing art or reading. If I had done literacy, I would have just filmed people reading or studying, spliced in a few images of the words they were reading and then slapped on some loud, ironic soundtrack. Loud and ironic clearly does not equate to literacy in the in physical manifestation of such, but it's nearly as exciting, evocative, and powerful in expressing ideas and communicating them in a manner that will remain unchanged for eternity. Or something like that.

Instead, I filmed people talking about art. Because I have no idea what art is. As an engineer (read: scientist and charlatan) I think that anything that requires technical skill is art. Science is an art. Writing computer code is an art. Those things are just extremely difficult and are brought about by effort, like painting, scuplting, photography, wicker basketry, etc. But what about nature? Is there not a lot of artistry in nature? The arrangement of leaves on a branch, or fields of wildflowers, or penguins in Antarctica? Obviously there is a lot of art in the world. For our purposes though, it's safe to assume that art refers to something technical (hence man-made) and an inherently aesthetic exercise (excluding all the fun explosions and supercomputing you find in science).

Or at least, that's how my subjects defined it. I left the question as simple as the project would suggest: "what is art?" Some were art majors. If they represented some discipline that is not a physical medium, I followed up with "how is [your discipline] art?" Some were reluctant, others more than willing. Some droned on, others skillfully exuded about their practice. Some offered to show me their art. All gave me some insight into something I pretended not to know about. I even filmed some of my friends watching the State of the Union address while one of them strummed on a guitar. In sake of verisimilitude, I simply asked them on the spot without time to prepare statements.

In total, I shot about 25 minutes of footage, and paring it down to less than 3 minutes proved progressively less difficult. After reviewing the shots, I chose the image of my friend Justin writing on what appears to be the lens of the camera as an introduction. This was a technique I used in an earlier project, wherein the camera is placed behind glass and focused in front of the subject on the surface of the glass. This is a good way of simulating the perspective of a whiteboard. Because it visually emphasizes the words being written and the physical process of writing, it exudes a sense of exposition. After this, I chose a shorter transition before a longer interview. It begins with a medium establishing shot of my friend drawing on her arm and then a tighter close-up for detail. My friend then speaks: "Art is expressing creativity" with a slight pause, followed by a rough cut to her laughing at her sentiment, perhaps at the sense of embarrassment from appearing on video. Otherwise, it functions to lessen the seriousness of the whole piece. In contrast, I placed afterwards Emeka's and Zak's more thoughtful response to the question that otherwise has the same message. Only does my friend Kristin offer a different explanation, that "everything in the world is art" in the sense of material and manufactured consumer goods. For parts of the interview, I voiced her over a few images to add some visual examples. From here, I return to Emeka's interview which emphasizes art as a discipline and means of self improvement, and leaves off with the same rhetorical question the piece attempts to answer.

In juxtaposition to this, I put Russ's overreaching answer, that "art's whatever you want it to be," and follow it with Zak's explanation of how he likes to eat tortilla chips. I was almost not going to leave me saying at the end of the clip, "this is art... clearly," but it only bolsters the self-referencing argument that its inclusion tries to make. On one level, exactly how Zak eats a tortilla chip is "art" and the piece that the audience observes is also art. I appropriately finish the piece with Justin's unironic delivery of the concluding lines and finish it with him playing a few well-toned chords. Just as I ended the piece with music, I finished post-production by adding music to the beginning images, Cursive's Art is Hard, which ironically is all about letting go of who you are to get commercial success.

Again, I'm satisfied greatly with the result, especially its coherence. I still don't know what art is, but could ascertain an answer on various levels after repeated viewings. Unfortuantely, the method of presentation didn't allow me to include all the footage I took, and the inherent message differs from that of the aggregate. For one thing, one of my subjects spoke at length about how art reflects the cultural value we assign it. Others gave functional answers, about how art is a method and a medium. A lot of the the interviewees' messages were also mangled in the editing process, as I made liberal use of documentographic "ellipses," or just plain didn't include part of their messages that didn't fit with the overall meaning. Notably, Russ gave a quip along the lines of "an intellect takes a simple idea and makes it difficult. An artist takes a difficult idea and makes it simple" and expressed how art simply communicates those ideas. If anything, I could use that quote to end this journal entry. I leave it up the reader to read that line again and try to mentally digest it.

...and this is how it turned out. Turn up the volume, the levels are kinda low.

Journaling the adjective and self-discovery process through meaninful images and sounds

My first impression was “I have to concoct three adjectives?” My second impression was how well I got over the shock of doing something blatantly… creative, for once in my college career. Before I dove into the world of creative neologisms, I borrowed my girlfriend’s digital camera and collected the necessary images that define myself: the bike ridden everywhere, the bizarre rasterized artwork, the hung-up shoes that represent youth and vigor from a bygone era, Allen hall, and a tidbit of computer code showing the toil of such a difficult engineering discipline. That said, I quit my adjective quest for a few hours to think about issues that were important to me. Dodging the difficult task of taking photos of the melting ice caps or having to go out to Savoy to capture the (sub)urban sprawl, I searched the Hall for the typical liberal issues that I would normally hold a sign for if not for the endless hours of other burdens to be overcome, like optimism, anti-Chief-ism, and un-plowed-bike-paths-ism.

So now the adjectives. The first one was easy. I wanted to capture a feeling of contrast, something at ends with itself and at the middle very peaceful. Something Zen. I thought of “immotion” – maintaining a constant position through constant motion. Like trackstanding on a fixed-gear bicycle, the filming part was simply that. I then realized “immotion” is less a noun than an adjective, so I added “-al” to the end. “Immotional.” Like emotional, but not. More Zen. My next was not so easy. I though of a definition first, the quality of a inelegant, inexpensive, and aesthetically unappealing solution. This lead me to my friend Ben's room whereupon I chanced his crappily-affixed whiteboard on the underside of the bunk above where he sleeps. Henceforth was Begineering born and it's descriptive counterpart 'bengineered.' The third was a complete dodge to the assignment, I just took a photo of a painting I helped to create by throwing paint off a parking garage onto the canvas below. Garage-tossed was hastily crafted as a means of describing art that is the result of probabilistic forces, like gravity, or just by throwing paint off a parking garage.

I made a successful attempt at getting sound to complement one of the above images; I simply pointed my camera at my keyboard as I typed in a manner suiting to Steven Colbert as so many of my friends have pointed out. I'm always concerned with capturing sound poorly due to the fact that my camera has awful sound-recording capabilities. At the price, you would think it attenuates sound better, but it still takes excellent photography. It's best to overcome this failure by pointing the thing close to what you're shooting and hope for the best. This will explain a lot of close-up framing of people, especially when they're speaking.

Lugging both my camera and my computer in my messenger bag to class was an adventure, man was not intended to carry sling multiple bags on his back and bike down Gregory in the cold. I avoided this pitfall in later classes by loading the video into my computer first or my hard-drive second, which fits snugly next to my computer in one bag. Plugging my camera into my laptop in class brought back some memories, I hadn't edited anything this summer when I produced a short piece for my hall's orientation program. I love iMovie for its simplicity and hadn't lost on the little nuances that gets things done really quickly. I need, however, to graduate to Final Cut and take advantage of it's rich feature set, despite the learning curve involved.

I kept the assembly of my images in a logical order and added the obligatory titles. I let the adjectives define themselves (or rather, I defined them) for sake of brevity and the fact that trying to add long dictionary definitions would prove cumbersome. I try to let things speak for themselves and draw on the evocative power of the image. Of course, a well-chosen sound always bolsters an image and can create a strong rhetorical effect. In whatever I make, I try to add some pervasively ironic component, and in this piece I put the iconic measures of the Marching Illini's Three-in-one behind the image of the anti-chief, anti-racism logo. If I had to defend this inclusion, I would probably just cite the fact that the anti-chief movement doesn't have a soundtrack like the pro-chief movement does. So why not co-opt theirs, call it funny, and thus detract from their credibility as a regressive movement? It's exactly that that the juxtaposition of the image and sound intend to do.

Taken as a whole, the adjective process got my feet wet again thinking about images and their inherent and collective meanings. I enjoyed particularly trying to encapsulate who I am into a handful of images and deriving from it some sort of personal insight. Honestly though, I think I'm getting ahead of myself. There is still much to explore and learn.

Take a sneak peek. Higher quality movie coming if not already "higher quality". Meaning something you could bear watching on an ipod:

"Writing with Video" and the implications of self-exprssion and artistic exploration

I like long titles and by extension I love academia because it creates them. There is nothing quite like a witty, succinct title ruined by a long, descriptive post-script like above. The frustrating part is that they are so completely necessary and reflect a certain amount of security on the part of a time-pressed reader. Do I have time to read about the Diurnal Mating Habits of Uruguayan Rainforest Termites or rather Real-Time Distribution of Small-Scale Data Structuring Algorithms in Assembly Languages*? I don’t. But their titles are well written so I assume they do not lack academic rigor. In short, I’m forced to secretly hate them.

What I really love is stuff like Week-end by Godard, something so completely non-sequitur, encapsulating about 50 years of modern philosophy so as to be genius yet so pretentious and inaccessible that only a few people would get it. I honestly didn’t get it. Reading Wikipedia just now didn’t help me get it. Trying to make some rational, empirical conjecture about what the hell the movie is about from the title alone is so clichéd that I must call it an ‘exercise in futility’. And I dig that. I like obscurity and obliqueness because it represents a good effort of mental diligence to simply watch and piece together. It demands interpretation. And rather than some long string of nonsensical words strung together, film titles like Week-end, or just about any film title, are as carefully chosen as the brush-strokes on a Renoir** (An exception to this is a good favorite of mine, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, which qualifies as ambiguous both existentially and referentially).

As far as other foreign pretensions go, I confess that I have yet to see a Fellini or a Truffaut (I have seen some Herzog and Kurosawa, but who hasn’t?). I have seen a lot of popular German films, ranging from Run Lola Run and Goodbye Lenin to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. They are fascinating simply because they reflect a culture and a filmmaking style I’m not already submerged in. That is not to say I’m completely desensitized to the opiate that is Hollywood. My all-time favorite is The Godfather Part One for its brilliant acting and sheer epic proportion as the quintessential American tale of family, crime, politics and everything in between. I appreciate Wes Anderson’s cycle of films from Rushmore to The Life Aquatic for their particularly strange and well-shot studies of effete, intellectual, and mal-adjusted characters. They’re simply too weird and different not to pass up on a few repeated viewings. Upon a recent viewing of Annie Hall, I now appreciate the subtext that breaking the dramaturgical fourth wall brings forth. Also Woody Allen clearly falls into the mal-adjusted character column.

What I don’t like about films is something along the lines of Crash. Yes, it had a good message and yes it was heart-rending (if you aren’t already in tears when the Iranian father shoots the locksmith’s daughter, you have no heart). It was just very heavy-handed in its attempt to tell me I’m racist (which I claim not to be). Also as an aside, it did not depict Asians in a very positive light. At all. Crash’s brand of social criticism was just a little too much. Other that that, it wasn’t terrible.

I’d like to say that I have the vision of Anderson or Coppola or even Spielberg, but I haven’t developed fully my eye for moving pictures, much less opened it. If I were encouraged to follow my dreams, perhaps I’d have gone to film school. I had everything I needed growing up, a nice camera, a nice editing set-up, the technical know-how, etc. Instead, I was primed for “serious” academia and ended up in engineering school. How cool would it to be a film director? Then again, how big of a connection does it take to make a living in the business? Large-scale production and true artistic vision mix like oil and water. Instead, I ran with the opportunity to take this class and feel right about it. I would like to express myself in a creative fashion and work hard getting credit for it. I feel that I can exceed, especially in the first few movements of the class, the technical learning curve to spend time developing some semblance of artistry or at least come to some realization of how I view the world.

Among all my classes, this is the least straightforward. The title alone suggests that I will write something. To put a mathematical perspective on it, there are somewhere in the order of one million words in the English language after which one can logically put another of something like one hundred thousand words, and some fraction of that initial million thereafter and repeating until a sentence is formed. And from a collection of these sentences, a paragraph. And from a paragraph, something similar to this reflection. At the beginning of this sentence I had written 724 words. Even for a prompted response like this, the number of ways I could have completed it would be a 1 followed by 724 zeros. The possibilities are endless, compared to the math I’m assigned, which normally has one answer. I won’t even get into the “video” part. Together, you have “Writing with Video.” Behind such a simple title lay a gazillion and five different paths I could take, a title which I anticipate enjoying.

*Something I'm likely to end up writing.
**Or 'Insert your favorite Impressionist here.'

My very first ever blog entry. Please hold the phones.

Holy crap, I can finally call myself a "blogger."

This is a test to see if it will post properly.

This is my ART 250 journal/blog. I'm excited to be in this class as my first entry will show.

So, In the words of William Shakespeare*, "Let's get bus-ay!"

* this is a lie. It was William Faulkner.