Reaction to the Saturday shoot

Ok so maybe not right when I woke up at 11:30 AM was I THAT excited to head to campus to shoot on a shitty Saturday. But man, I was freaking pumped when I left! Quick recap of how the shoot went for me.

So I hurriedly threw some things into a bag that I thought might be useful for the shoot, it was actually all food because I thought we were going to do this "shoot somebody eating and reverse it in post to make it look like they're throwing up whole pieces of food" thing. Then I decided to bring my DSLR to shoot on too just in case we needed it. We changed our minds right when we gor to campus to do a gnarly guitar smashing scene instead. Right when I got there, I had to set up the camera and the projector to do video transfers. The camera was easy enough, but the projector took a little longer. Couldn't find the lens, then couldn't focus it quite right. I finally got it, because I'm basically the man, and ran a few tests strips of film to confirm when the call was made that we were actually not going to do video transfers!!! AHHH ANDRE! Just kidding, I definitely needed the practice of setting everything up. 

So finally, after waiting around for the other groups to finish, we got the coveted BOLEX in our hands! Yes! We ran through our scene a few times and made sure we'd have enough time to get everything in before we ran out of crank. Then, the moment arrived. Everybody was ready. Tension was so thick you could cut it with a steak knife. And…"ROLLING!" The scene took off and everybody was going nuts! I don't want to disclose too much about it, but it was nearly flawless and even better in some parts than I expected! After, I headed to the dark room to prep developing while Caleb and Eliza helped another group. We developed and got an awesome image, I think we had it in the developer for about 10 seconds total? When all was said and done, the image that came out on the film was one of the most rewarding ones I've ever experienced as a filmmaker. Way more satisfying than log & transferring footage in FCP! I loved every second of the saturday shoot. It was absolutely absolutely awesome!

Until next time, peeps.

Knocker

Response to Roots and St. Louise

Man, the attention to complexity and detail on Roots really astounded me. The colors and shapes all came together to create a rhythmic, 3-D animation that manipulates color schemes in conjunction with the background to grant an aesthetically pleasing contrast. While I could not make out an apparent narrative, I did notice several of the film manipulation techniques such as coloring of the film in different layers, scratching, dying and bleaching, and creating several 3-D animation planes. The transformations in shapes and backgrounds was pretty incredible.

For St. Louise, I loved the accompanying score with Soul Coughing. Actually, I think it might've been a music video for the song? Regardless, definitely a lot of scratching being employed fairly often and quite obviously, but in conjunction with more bleaching of film and manipulation of words, shapes, and patterns. I really enjoyed the split frame insert of the boy shooting with the Super 8 camera and the parts of immulsion that were scratched out. It provided a relieving contrast to the constant motion and variety of the patterns. The intro was really cool in that the text slid from frame right to frame left across the screen while the film was actually being projected in a vertical manner. I'm sure that was a tough part to animate but it came out looking awesome!


While I may not have always thought it,

is actually super badass.


Until next time,

Nocker