Apr 07
Dan Budnik
Ellsworth Kelly, Betty Parsons Gallery, New York - November 1963
(Source: imageinfomood, via sweethotdrift)
Blog For Intermediate Moving Images, Winter 2013
description
Apr 03
mustbethemusicwhenwewereyoung:
best video ever. it deserves more cred.
we asked for it
Apr 03
In the scene where Jack is writing and gets mightily upset when Wendy interrupts him, the chair behind Jack vanishes and then reappears. This was intentional from Kubrick. The audience was supposed to get a subconscious feeling that something was wrong.
(Source: oakenshielld, via redb)
Feb 04
Film Art: An Introduction
By David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
As I have been working my way through this course’s texts, I am realizing how utterly clueless I am about how film operates and how Iview it. It’s weird, because I feel like I watch a lot of movies, not as much as some, but more than average, and not thinking about all the mechanics at play.
Film Art: An Introduction is great for cinema idiots like myself. I was dreading some of these textbooks. I thought I was going to have to deal with a bunch of black and white pictures from DW Griffith’s Birth of a Nation. I was fearing a dry look at the beginnings of film. It is informative, but at the same time reads as easy as a high school textbook. It delivers information in an efficient manner but has a lot of good anecdotes and insights about film production. This book kicks it off by talking about the advent of the digital camera in mainstream movie making by talking about Michael Mann’s Collateral. It talks about having the LA night being a main character in the film, and how they were able to use a digital camera to capture qualities of the Lipstick City skyline during the witching hour, the haze of the light pollution and the silhouette of black palm trees against the hazy orange-ish/brownish glow of the night sky. If they had shot the movie on filmstock, the skyline would have been rendered a deep black; shooting digitally allowed the camera to pick up the subtle shades of night.
Film Art is able to make clear points about the movie-making process, jumping effortless-ly from example from the most mainstream of films to classic example of the avant-garde (is that the right term to use?), going from Star Wars to Maya Deren then back to Lethal Weapon. It has been great for me, allowing to expand my viewing and reading list. At the end of each chapter, they have a great section, a “go deeper”, that is a viewing list and reading list provided by the authors. I’ve read two chapters, and so far, under recommended viewing, they say that the “making of” featurette for The Golden Compass is quite good while the movie itself is mediocre. The book also has a lot of great anecdotes, one particular one being that “Somewhere Over the Rainbow was almost cut out of The Wizard of Oz; one executive thought that the song slowed down the picture, while another thought that it was undignified that Judy Garland was singing it in a barnyard. I think that the Wizard of Oz would have been a very different movie; I always associate that song with some of the implicit meaning of the film.
There was also this great Robert Bresson quote about the creative process as it applies to filmmaking:
“A film is born in my head and I kill it on paper. It is brought back to life by the actors then killed in the camera. It is then resurrected into a third and final life in the editing room where the dismembered pieces are assembled into their finished form.”
Robert Bresson
Feb 02
As I said before, I’m ignorant to most of the language of film. Taking this class is opening up a big wide world for me. I am trying to read/watch as much as I can. I like the freedom in this class, how we’re left alone to explore our own route, with the blogs to aid our exploration of what we’re interested. In order for my quest to find examples of good editing and what is good sound design, I went to wikipedia and typed in “academy award editing.” I looked at a couple of the winners and nominees, made a couple of notes, then typed in “academy award sound design”, made a couple of notes for films to look out for. Of course, I could have just looked under the syllabus for the editing intensive week; I plan to watch those films, but I also like to keep the illusion that I am making my own path, doing my own research, and “keeping busy” by aimlessly searching on the internet.
While I was looking for academy award winners in sound design and editing, I came across the academy award winner for animated shorts, and I had the thought that I could probably watch all of them and blog about all of them by the end of the quarter. It makes sense, since I’m working with animated shorts for my thesis. (note to self: animate shorts. as in Bart Simpson’s eat my shorts. whah-whah. I always keep a long list of possible things to animate, since I’m in the flailing experimental exploratory phase of this process.) So watching every academy-award nominated short and blogging about it is something I’m going to do. They are going to be short, paragraph long entries. As I mentioned before, looking at academy award nominees on wikipedia isn’t the best way to approach the medium, but it’s a start.
Going in order, the first film I watched was a Silly Symphony; Walt Disney’s Flowers and Trees from 1932. This was Disney’s first film in color, and it will be interesting to see how the techniques that he’s developed in his shorter works make it into some of the feature films. The title of the film says it all; flowers and trees are anthropomorphized and given human routines and emotions. They wake up, yawn, do calesthenics, dance, play, flirt, get jealous, then try to murder each other by starting a forest fire. The animators have fun projecting human traits onto the trees; one tree wakes another tree up by shaking her leaves. There is a bad tree who is grey and dead and has a lizard for a tongue that sticks out when he talks. Old time orchestra movie music plays throughout the film. The soundtrack is punctuated by bursts of diagetic sound that happens in rhythm to the soundtrack. Mushrooms pop through the ground, birdbeaks puncture the clouds to create rain, there is a rhythmic stick fight, and vines are strung across a bent tree branch to create a harp. Each flower action is given it’s own sound.
This animation is what the video game would refer to as a side scroller. We are looking at all the action that is taking place as if it were on a stage, similar to the shots a Melies movie; it will be interesting to see how animated films develop over time; when close ups and POV shots get introduced. The plot of this short is straightforward; but it has all of the inspired lunacy and just below the surface sexuality that we’ve come to expect from Disney’s character design. The female tree practically does a strip-tease. If you want to know where Robert Crumb comics come from and what makes the drawing so good, this cartoon would definitely be part of that flotsam and jetsam of their genesis.
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