Project two was a growth experience both through the experimental film collaboration as well as the hands on building of the camera Dolly. While project 1 was human behavior, everything ended up being related to time management and its organization techniques for most group members. Here, in simply working on projects with other people, that other people depended on, those time management techniques were all required of me automatically.
My experience with the shoot made me realize If its an important shoot with a lot of people required to pull it off, you need to start planning it three weeks ahead of time. This way everyone can agree on a schedule and if anything comes up there's time to reschedule, as well as it seems to be a good length of time before a scheduled event occurs that makes people more responsible to show. I had written three short pieces to be shot as a way to avoid the problem of having an actor missing and having to come up with a solution for that on the spot. One was for 5 people, one was for 4, and one was for 3. Two actors showed up. So, unfortunately, while I had wanted a crisp feel of each shot moving but smoothly and rythmically with the comic scenario, I instead had to go handheld and without a proper microphone due to the time constraint.
We spent half our shoot time thinking up an idea and half our shoot time shooting. The cool thing about having to work under that pressure was that my actors and I came up with some incredible ideas we've agreed to shoot at a later date which were inappropriately long for what this needed.
I had the three of us agree on a humor style, and while it did not end up our first choice we knew we could pull off a Pete and Brian type "knock knock" youtube sketch in 2 hours and so we did.
I had a lot of fun working with everyone and really collaborating on something again. It was interesting to see what connections and ideas spawned out of the "5 Links."
My one other lesson learned the hard way was that upon turning our film dvd into the openlens film festival I was told it was too long for them to accept because it was 18 minutes and the longest they accepted was 15 minutes.
Attention to detail and preparation is something I thought I was much better at then I have proven to be lately. This project was a good reminder to stay buttoned up in terms of deadlines and guidelines even simply out of respect for others. Had we checked we could have cut it down and had a screening. (Ironically this post is way late).
I'll be shooting my first short with the dolly over the break. I'll be sure to post it as a demonstration.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
DIY FILM DOLLY
These are pictures of pictures because I can't find my camera cord but you can still see the whole project. The steps are laid out photo to photo on this flickr set Here.
Its a great piece of equipment. I can't want to start making the crane next week! :-D
Its a great piece of equipment. I can't want to start making the crane next week! :-D
Project 1 Write Up
Project one for me happened by following a set of curious synchronicities of interest. Over the summer I fixed what had become a terrible sleep cycle. I had trouble in the spring (after several illnesses) getting up in the morning. To the point of getting to bed at 7pm one night so that if I slept 12 hours I would still wake up to my alarm clock ready for class at 8am. Instead I slept through my alarm clocks until 3:30 in the afternoon.
I began to fear going to sleep fretting that I may never wake up at the time that I wanted. Over the summer I was running a bit in the mornings and walking everywhere in Portland. This exercise kept me from wanting to smoke cigarettes. It also made me want to eat better, do more, and all of a sudden I was getting sleep, breathing fine, and not needing 3 or 4 cups of coffee to get me through the day. Oh Yeah, I smoked, had a pretty bad diet, and drank tons of coffee every day.
These habits had developed over the last three years slowly and I never thought too much about equating these habits with my sleep and sickness problems. Pretty stupid. I was glad to have solved my own health problems without thinking too much about it and had a great summer.
The first week of school rolls around and I decided to join the human behavior group. I regretted not joining the hands-on building group but remedied this later in the term. I chose to think practically rather than romantically about human behavior because in the past I had been so romantic about it all. (writing stories, making movies etc). I sat down to think about what would be practical in addressing human behavior and it occurred to me that taking a look at the brain and how it worked might give me some insight. I hunted around on Ted.com for videos on neuroscience and what a goldmine that site is!!! After watching many I ran out and bought Oliver Sach’s book “Musicophelia.” I had also taken a liking to Jill Bolte Taylor’s examination of a stroke and what it revealed about the brain’s spiritual sense of connection and separation correlating to hemispheres. Soon what started as a small amount of research on the way the brain works turned into an obsession. A whole new angle or lens for me to observe the world and human behavior with! My junior year the obsession had come in the techniques of Buddhist and zen meditation and the mystic poetry The Upanishads. I became very obsessed with the idea of connecting the understanding of this organ that controls us with a better understanding of existence. Its fair to say I became romantic about my notions of discovery.
The love of my project research had me branching out to new articles which branched me to new articles and videos and books and magazines and of course I needed to stay awake and focused for all of this so maybe I should just have a cigarette and drink coffee and stay up late. I’ll just get up early and drink more coffee it’ll be fine.
That’s how I got sick. I had a bad cold which turned into swine flu as well. It was not the strongest sickness by any means but you better believe it threw off my whole sleep cycle again. I despaired. Whats the use. I can’t do anything right. Blah Blah Blah helpless blah blah.
The point of all this is that What occurred to me while I was sick was oh gee, I fixed all these habits over the summer how could I have fallen back into them. I kept researching. I bought a book called In fitness and In Health. It explained the direct correlations between compounds in our foods and a healthy happy brain. It explained the connection with energy and happiness to exercise and that one can’t work without the other. It explained how in order to be happy and have good relationships with friends and family you had to be in the moment but to do that you had to be healthy. It was this book that had me get out of my head again and back into my body.
Musicophelia had led me to a fascination with out “glitches” and I began to wonder about how machine-like we really are. This led me to a new obsession with science fiction and as midterms rolled around I could only listen to Del Tha Funkee Homosapian, Kid Cudi, and the master David Bowie. I also watched star wars and The Fifth element all the time. I began to despair again over the existential worth of existence as the love of mystery in my world view turned into a belief that we have peaked out the foodchain, and dusted the skies to a point that all life on this planet will die unless we learn to repurpose everything.
I do still wonder about that.
But a great thing happened to me while I was sick and struggling. I came home late one night from the studio and threw in my VHS of wayne’s world (which I hadn’t seen in like 6 years) and laughed my ass off ! !! I realized that no matter what, whether we all need to change our lives to save this planet, whether disasters come wave after wave and we have to think about survival more and more, we still need to laugh. And that as wrapped up in an apocalyptic worldview as I had been by reading up on different things (and science fiction which reallllly makes you paranoid) I could still laugh, the great human joy and relief! The acknowledgment of one’s mortality! Joy! It was the only medicine to get someone to take care of themselves and go running and eat right.
So, sick (but getting better), still alone too often and self-absorbed in my project I set out to make something simple and funny for my midterm project. I decided that helping the class and my friends (all college students) not take themselves so seriously was a good angle. I created storyboards for each of the 22 set-ups from a scene in the movie Rules of Attraction and thought that would be a great technical challenge for me to replicate the shots well enough for the design of a good spoof. I then thought up a few different scenarios. Basically I wanted one person to walk through their day happy and calm because they ate right, worked out, loved other people and life and take that to an extreme that someone could laugh about. I then thought the other could be exhausted and awful, and that at the end they would interact and it would be sad/funny. This is sort of what I did. However, having problems shooting had me reshoot once and with a worse camera and with my friends instead of actors. That being said, on a technical level the rules of attraction spoof could have been much better but story/concept/editing/acting wise I felt alright about what I got. It was good enough to give me the courage to start writing again everyday and when I edited it and watched it it made me laugh and I was glad to have come to such a joyous conclusion after such a struggle with things not as fun.
If I could do it again I would plan a whole short film around a funny tragic character who has trouble socializing and speaking well because he/she is tired and stressed unnecessarily from a bad diet and lack of sleep.
I began to fear going to sleep fretting that I may never wake up at the time that I wanted. Over the summer I was running a bit in the mornings and walking everywhere in Portland. This exercise kept me from wanting to smoke cigarettes. It also made me want to eat better, do more, and all of a sudden I was getting sleep, breathing fine, and not needing 3 or 4 cups of coffee to get me through the day. Oh Yeah, I smoked, had a pretty bad diet, and drank tons of coffee every day.
These habits had developed over the last three years slowly and I never thought too much about equating these habits with my sleep and sickness problems. Pretty stupid. I was glad to have solved my own health problems without thinking too much about it and had a great summer.
The first week of school rolls around and I decided to join the human behavior group. I regretted not joining the hands-on building group but remedied this later in the term. I chose to think practically rather than romantically about human behavior because in the past I had been so romantic about it all. (writing stories, making movies etc). I sat down to think about what would be practical in addressing human behavior and it occurred to me that taking a look at the brain and how it worked might give me some insight. I hunted around on Ted.com for videos on neuroscience and what a goldmine that site is!!! After watching many I ran out and bought Oliver Sach’s book “Musicophelia.” I had also taken a liking to Jill Bolte Taylor’s examination of a stroke and what it revealed about the brain’s spiritual sense of connection and separation correlating to hemispheres. Soon what started as a small amount of research on the way the brain works turned into an obsession. A whole new angle or lens for me to observe the world and human behavior with! My junior year the obsession had come in the techniques of Buddhist and zen meditation and the mystic poetry The Upanishads. I became very obsessed with the idea of connecting the understanding of this organ that controls us with a better understanding of existence. Its fair to say I became romantic about my notions of discovery.
The love of my project research had me branching out to new articles which branched me to new articles and videos and books and magazines and of course I needed to stay awake and focused for all of this so maybe I should just have a cigarette and drink coffee and stay up late. I’ll just get up early and drink more coffee it’ll be fine.
That’s how I got sick. I had a bad cold which turned into swine flu as well. It was not the strongest sickness by any means but you better believe it threw off my whole sleep cycle again. I despaired. Whats the use. I can’t do anything right. Blah Blah Blah helpless blah blah.
The point of all this is that What occurred to me while I was sick was oh gee, I fixed all these habits over the summer how could I have fallen back into them. I kept researching. I bought a book called In fitness and In Health. It explained the direct correlations between compounds in our foods and a healthy happy brain. It explained the connection with energy and happiness to exercise and that one can’t work without the other. It explained how in order to be happy and have good relationships with friends and family you had to be in the moment but to do that you had to be healthy. It was this book that had me get out of my head again and back into my body.
Musicophelia had led me to a fascination with out “glitches” and I began to wonder about how machine-like we really are. This led me to a new obsession with science fiction and as midterms rolled around I could only listen to Del Tha Funkee Homosapian, Kid Cudi, and the master David Bowie. I also watched star wars and The Fifth element all the time. I began to despair again over the existential worth of existence as the love of mystery in my world view turned into a belief that we have peaked out the foodchain, and dusted the skies to a point that all life on this planet will die unless we learn to repurpose everything.
I do still wonder about that.
But a great thing happened to me while I was sick and struggling. I came home late one night from the studio and threw in my VHS of wayne’s world (which I hadn’t seen in like 6 years) and laughed my ass off ! !! I realized that no matter what, whether we all need to change our lives to save this planet, whether disasters come wave after wave and we have to think about survival more and more, we still need to laugh. And that as wrapped up in an apocalyptic worldview as I had been by reading up on different things (and science fiction which reallllly makes you paranoid) I could still laugh, the great human joy and relief! The acknowledgment of one’s mortality! Joy! It was the only medicine to get someone to take care of themselves and go running and eat right.
So, sick (but getting better), still alone too often and self-absorbed in my project I set out to make something simple and funny for my midterm project. I decided that helping the class and my friends (all college students) not take themselves so seriously was a good angle. I created storyboards for each of the 22 set-ups from a scene in the movie Rules of Attraction and thought that would be a great technical challenge for me to replicate the shots well enough for the design of a good spoof. I then thought up a few different scenarios. Basically I wanted one person to walk through their day happy and calm because they ate right, worked out, loved other people and life and take that to an extreme that someone could laugh about. I then thought the other could be exhausted and awful, and that at the end they would interact and it would be sad/funny. This is sort of what I did. However, having problems shooting had me reshoot once and with a worse camera and with my friends instead of actors. That being said, on a technical level the rules of attraction spoof could have been much better but story/concept/editing/acting wise I felt alright about what I got. It was good enough to give me the courage to start writing again everyday and when I edited it and watched it it made me laugh and I was glad to have come to such a joyous conclusion after such a struggle with things not as fun.
If I could do it again I would plan a whole short film around a funny tragic character who has trouble socializing and speaking well because he/she is tired and stressed unnecessarily from a bad diet and lack of sleep.
Big ol' Slice of Humble Pie
Design Lesson of the day: Keep It Simple Stupid.
Or better yet. The alltime favorite: save your work.
I just spend the entire evening getting this cool file set up in indesign but it crashed on the export and i lost most of the work, soooooooooooo. keep it together keep it together. ahem. Ill be typing it out plain since its now sunday morning and this is ridiculously late.
Ill be (simple just for proof of work) writing up my project one lessons write up, how to build a film dolly tutorial, and project two write up, as well as posting the pics of my mind maps.
I still want to write up something special about the bigger picture of what I learned in the last ten weeks, most of which is related to reading up on both the science of the brain and recent advancements in technology. I ll find a good way to organize it again or just save and work in indesign again for later this week just for fun.
Or better yet. The alltime favorite: save your work.
I just spend the entire evening getting this cool file set up in indesign but it crashed on the export and i lost most of the work, soooooooooooo. keep it together keep it together. ahem. Ill be typing it out plain since its now sunday morning and this is ridiculously late.
Ill be (simple just for proof of work) writing up my project one lessons write up, how to build a film dolly tutorial, and project two write up, as well as posting the pics of my mind maps.
I still want to write up something special about the bigger picture of what I learned in the last ten weeks, most of which is related to reading up on both the science of the brain and recent advancements in technology. I ll find a good way to organize it again or just save and work in indesign again for later this week just for fun.
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Big Post Hours Away
Car trouble on the icy I-5 Last night. :-( Finally back in Portland now. :-) Big post hours away I swear it John.
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