April 11th - Self-Critique

A) The intent was to represent two different sides of an argument without taking either side. The goal was to create a film that did not tell the viewer how to feel about an issue but to allow the viewer to determine his or her own stance.

1. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say the story is a 5. The issue we chose was compelling, but some of the footage is not as convincing, in terms of production design. It gets the message across, but I'm concerned whether or not the audience will pick up on it; whether or not the dialogue shots are compelling enough to make the viewers think about the political implications of the issue: abortion and women's rights.
2. The story left me thinking that we should have shot better footage. In my edit, the audience may be distracted from the overall objective because of my failure to clip out a residual segment of one clip I deleted and the cutting off, in one clip, of the first 3 quarters of a second of audio. Not having a score doesn't help me. It's shameful really; the emotional power of the film is diminished by unnecessary errors, lack of shot variety, and poor media management, in terms of labeling all the files, among other things.
3. I feel that the main character, Elizabeth, does reach a certain state of liberation. In the final scene, she has left her wedding ring on the counter, and she's wearing an outfit that shows her legs, with high-heeled shoes. She's less conservative, less of a pushover; she has chosen not to return to the pro-life demonstrator group, as seen in her leaving those protest signs behind.
4. The source of the main idea I started with was a result of my general introspectiveness, which was exacerbated in some respects once I came to college. Although, I may seem to view the world in black-and-white, I've long known that I do not. I can and will appreciate the 'grays in between' when I deem it relevant to my ideological schema. Anyway, the kernel of the story we ended up shooting was a perfect opportunity to work around a current, inflammatory debate--the abortion wars. I can say I somewhat passionate about the issue and women's rights to make their own decisions without the endangerment of their health lurking in the corner. And, even though I'm proud of my Christian values, I'm not an extremist, and I agree in certain instances that one cannot enforce morality.
5. After the film's completion, I saw that the theme shifted away from this woman's loneliness as the driving force behind the plot and towards a woman's empowerment. The confrontation with Jeff became the cynosure of the movie. The way he treated her when he found that consultation slip on her desk embodies the chauvinistic attitude that women don't have the right to make decisions about their own bodies.

B) I think the tension was very clear, but the main conflict doesn't seem to be apparent to anyone who's seen the movie so far...

1. I say the way that the scenes ended up being structured was different from my expectations, but I saw all the scenes clearly in my mind's eye. I think it's mainly a case of actuality failing to accommodate the 'artistic vision'.
2. The part I could easily and pleasurably and easily retell is the scene when Jeff confronts Elizabeth; it's not that I don't remember the other parts, but overall they were less impressing in terms of the emotional effect. Of course, as one who worked on the film, I'm particularly pleased with some of the shots in this scene. I can recall the other scenes as well, but I'm less interested in the way they turned out.

C) I don't think the execution brought out the full potential of the story, but that's more of a production issue rather than something inherently lacking in the script.

1. The story doesn't feel complete, because some of the sequences had to be taken out due to poor filming execution and production errors.
2. Scene 1 (Elizabeth's routine): 5  The shots are too similar; there's little variety in the shot structure. Only the first sequence has a close-up; all the other shots are medium. Also, there aren't a lot of different angles, so it gets kind of boring. Also, the title is a little distracting, and the crawl, is very distracting.
1. Scene 2 (Protest): 5  Mildly interesting. The weakest point is the protest itself; I couldn't find any audio of them protesting, so I had to use presence. Also, it's mostly a one shot deal, so, lack of variety is the culprit again. There's one other shot from a different angle but it's really quick
2. Scene 3 (Alone): 4  Boring. There's no audio for the extreme close-up of the hand, but I there should have been some presence to put in there; and once again, it's all shot from one angle, one distance (except the extreme close-up)
3. Scene 4 (Martha): 6 Okay. The outstanding problem here is my cut. The transition from a close-up of Martha beckoning Jeff to a medium 2S of the same action is redundant. It's also awkward because there's no usable coverage of Elizabeth's reaction to Martha's first statement. There's also no usable coverage of close-ups for Elizabeth's reaction to Martha's set up. There's no OTS either, so this weakens the scene overall.
4. Scene 5 (Jeff): 5  The scene starts out well, but then, when they get into the living room, there's a small reflection of the key light in the bottom left corner of the picture hanging over the chair. It's distracting, but unfortunately that's the best coverage of that point, and the scene would be incomplete without it. The cut to the next section is awkward b/c I took out the part when they sit down on the floor. From there on it's all right.
5. Scene 6 (Argument): 5  The "marker" sequence is boring because it's focused on Jeff. He looks away, but there's no cutaway to what he's looking at. Then, from his exit to the confrontation is an awkward jump cut, because the footage for the connecting section couldn't be used; our sound recordist's leg and the boom was in the corner of the shot. After that though, there are some nice-looking shots, but alas, only two OTS, and no usable coverage of Elizabeth's reaction face-on.
6. Scene 7 (Reveal): 4  The first part of the shot was blown out, so it looked slightly out-of-place even after color correction. Pretty much the same issue persists; not a lot of shot variety, and the distance between Elizabeth and the group isn't really established.
7. Scene 8 (A New Day): 7  One of the best sequences, probably. Although, the shot where the character exits is noticeably tilted, and there's no establishment of her routine, so we don't get a sense of how she's breaking it. On top of that, to make up for no establishing shot, I used an additive cross-dissolve for the transition, to make up for that and to hopefully show the passage of time.

D) What I want to learn to do better is manage my time so I can get tasks done and seem more reliable. I also want to learn how to coordinate all the aspects of pre-production, so that production design and shot list don't quibble with each other on set.

1. Obviously, what was not working was the production design and the shot execution--mainly the shot execution. I was in charge of production design, yet I didn't think or have the courage to say "We need to move this" or "We can't have this in the shot," etc. Plus I didn't have every aspect of it under my jurisdiction, so I didn't even get to have a definitive say in what our main character wore.
2. Next time, I'd like there to be decisiveness among the group. There was some sort of communication barrier, so each of us didn't always understand what the other was talking about, and sometimes people just plain got shot down. It didn't help that we were uncertain about whether we were doing something "right," particularly our "leader." Tension, bitterness on my part, and lack of preparation were our downfall. I wasn't always taken seriously either, even if I knew what I was talking about, because of my "wusiness" and my poor reputation. That is, my record suggested that I couldn't be trusted to get things done or to get them done on time. To an extent, feeling the projection of those doubts upon me, if only for a moment, caused me to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Enough about myself, though. The persons in charge of the shot list should have taken into account getting different takes, with different angles and distances, of scene segments. Also, the others weren't super confident with the equipment and they didn't want to trust me (of course, I didn't assert myself), so I took way too long to get set up. And the first shot took way too many takes; so, it's partly that they just didn't approach the idea "right" or well.

Interview with an Intern

All right. Although this is tardy, I'm putting it up anyway because I did do it (before class on Wednesday, for the record). Anyhow, in my characteristic way, I over-thought what turned out to be quite a simple exercise. Here I was, thinking that some sort of professional format or structure for the interview was required, when finally, as time pressed, I realized, "Oh, I should probably ask a few simple questions that ask for pertinent information in a short form." Don't want to overwhelm the gracious interviewee. Anyway, I conducted an email interview with Krickett King, who (I've come to find out) seemed to be a popular choice. So, here's what I asked her:

1. Whom are you currently an intern for? Where is the company/firm you are interning with based?
2. What sorts of tasks or opportunities are you given as an intern?
3. Can you provide a general description of the company's/firm's interface or atmosphere?
4. When your internship is over, do you think you'll be walking away with a good experience? Was it challenging enough? Was it rewarding? Did you gain any knowledge or experience that will ease your transition into the professional world?
5. If the company/firm that you interned with offered you a position upon your graduation, would you consider it as a valuable employment opportunity?

Her answers were:
1) She's an intern at IMC Studios, in Russellville, Arkansas.
2) She creates concept art for a series of fantasy novels.
3) Since she's working remotely, the interface with IMC is mostly through email correspondence and postal services.
4) She values the experience of working with clients. She says that getting feedback (on her designs I suppose) and being able to create a product that clients are happy with is a good skill, which this internship promotes.
5) When it's all said and done, Krickett says that she wouldn't pursue employment at IMC Studios because it's not an animation job (which is what she's in school for), but she enjoys the experience enough that she would like to continue working on this particular project.

And there you have it. I hope y'all like relish on your hotdogs, because I did a little bit of editing in the responses.

Write Up March 28th/After the Storm

Well, the overall experience of class that morning was harrowing, and the several days leading up to it were quite disastrous in outcome, to say the least. I grossly miscalculated the amount of time needed to complete a sufficient edit, as well as misunderstood exactly what was due. I knew we had to have the picture-lock done, but I, first of all, wasn't putting it all out on the timeline as I went, which caused problems; secondly, I thought the sound and the clips had to be matched perfectly, which ate lots of time; and on top of that I thought that a more finalized edit was due, as far as footage choice is concerned, which caused me to be over-analytical, anxious, and hesitant, causing yet more problems! Hence, the simple explanation is that I, against my better judgement, underestimated the difficulty of the task before me, waited too late to get started on the edit, and stressed out, slowing my performance

 Regardless, I do realize that despite the reasons the result is the same. I ended up doing something at the last minute, didn't have done on time and in a satisfactory manner, and despite my best efforts, fell asleep in class. I am embarrassed about that, and my grade will suffer; however, what's done is done, and I'm moving on. I know from the get-go to accept responsibility for poor decision-making and how to deal with the consequences.

Movie, movie, movie! I can't wait to see!

The cinematic experience! On a student level, that is. I imagine the professional world is both more difficult and much easier at the same time. I won't go into why I think it's harder, since we all probably have similar ideas of that, but I do think it's also easier because 1) that will likely be one's major professional obligation to begin with (no other classes, other jobs, few other projects), 2) one is likely to be more established in general (or so I assume), and 3) one, by that time, will have had plenty of experience on the student level and possibly through internships (so someone who does this for a living not only knows what to expect but can anticipate it emotionally as well).

So, to the real nitty-gritty... this shoot was hard. I'm aware that a few of my sentiments were a bit selfish; few people want to spend what should be vacation time doing something they've never done before for a grade. Unfortunately, I just happened to be too vocal about it; but after a couple of kerfuffles I learned to shut the **** up. Anyway, I was glad to get the hell out and even gladder that I happened to be there for the more difficult day of the shoot anyway. Our group managed to finish in two days, which is wonderful. The emotional stress on me is the main thing that got to me.

But enough about me. It seemed that the group's biggest difficulty was keeping track of the minor details.  I think the distress that was floating around and the time constraints imposed by the actors' schedule were the major contributing factors. And, in one case, Angelique noticed that the LED 900's reflection was visible in the bottom left corner of a picture across the room. That ended up in a shot; on top of that, when Yubu or Aminah had the camera, they didn't remember to check that the shot was level, but when we were doing the living room shots and Rah had the camera, and I was 'needed,' (the bedroom was too small for all of us) I was looking on the screen and reminding him to get the shot level and helping out with that. Consequently, since that didn't happen during all the shots, there were some shots that were slightly crooked. So, we had to redo what we could practically redo. At least, the second time around the setup was much quicker.

Lighting Exercise

Even though I had fun doing the lighting exercise, the quality of the shots in terms of the assignment criteria might not be so great. I still have trouble understanding how to manipulate the focus of the shot. I know how to get a shot in focus, but I'm not sure of how to play with things like the depth of field to field of view relationship, and then, there's the depth of focus to consider as well. Theory makes it seem simple enough, but messing with the camera itself it gets complicated because there's the lens type and menu settings and camera to subject distance.

Write-Up 2/29

I didn't have any true technical difficulties this past week, but meeting with the group was kind of stressful for me emotionally. But I acknowledge my own mistakes and that I overreacted somewhat; I got upset when we were doing the lighting exercise and left, but I felt guilty about it and I know not to do it again. I don't have much else to write about. Except I'd like to express my gratitude to Carolina and Tyler for letting me assist them with their lighting exercise, and especially, for helping me with mine; otherwise, I would have been screwed. Anyway, it was good equipment handling and technical experience. Were it not for time constraints and lack of notice and hands, I would have liked to play with the reflectors, but people have other obligations to meet, jobs, class, etc. Regardless, I'm happy with the results, and I had fun doing the exercise. Of course, Tyler's company made things much more enjoyable, but the mood among us was good too.

Shots in my Apartment to Inform the "Look"

Assignment Write-Up for 2/22

Last week's assignment was a little daunting. I don't think I'm alone in being unused to working on a single assignment for six hours straight, but that gets punctuated when you have to be out in the cold for six hours straight while having to wait your turn for a majority of the time. Luckily, I brought my notepad to do a couple of thumbnails in. There are a lot of aspects of the location we plan to shoot on that are just beautiful compositionally; consequently, I wasn't sure how to scale the thumbnails. Being tiny sketches, and my being averse to omitting detail, I only knocked out three on location, but I'm going to try to fill the rest of the page in with memory sketches. Of course, I didn't think to bring my little outdated digital camera, but fortunately, Aminah had her nice camera with her; she took some location photos on her own when we were downtown. As fate would have it, we realized, after we had gotten to the other location (which is indoors) and after it was dark out, that we had had the wrong Kelvin set the whole time--couldn't tell when we were shooting, looked good enough onscreen. As a result, by the suggestion of Rah, we did another set of shots at the school on Monday, with the correct white balance, to show that we understood the material and our mistake. Putting the camera together still isn't second nature either. As of yet, none of us has had opportunity to sit down and play with it a couple of hours, but it's hard to do that as a group anyway. Woe unto me that besides not being given a chance to really put parts of the camera together, because of a strong anxiety about the equipment amongst my group members, I further diminished my own credibility by narrowly escaping an accident on Monday when I didn't speak up loud enough to get assistance adjusting the tripod. It scared all of us, and by reflexive action, I protected the camera (or I did my best to). Everything was okay, but my group members were so shaken by that, and I was already discontent that day, that I took everything to personally again and completed my own humiliation by giving in to a petty emotional response. I'm still ashamed of it; and since that immature reaction was preceded by my failure to exhibit extreme caution and trust of others, my credibility is probably utterly ruined, I'll probably be brushed off more, and I'm sure I won't be trusted to do any equipment handling, even the most minor of tasks, until I get in another group later this semester--assuming that I succeed in redeeming myself and proving my competence.

Write-Up 2/15

I found this week's assignment very informative; a lot of the information covered in the post reaffirmed and buttressed the notes I took in class. It was easier to get clarification on certain concepts in the reading than it was by my asking questions in class. There's just so much to cover. The part that really excited me was about Lord Kelvin. Science is one of my interests, and when Kelvin was mentioned in class I immediately thought about the scientific measurement of temperature. Luckily, that curiosity was satisfied in the reading.

Assignment Write-Up for 2/8

Finally, I've gone through the readings; I found them very helpful, very enlightening. It made the concepts easy to understand, without oversimplifying them. I also found them entertaining to a certain degree, but then again I have a sometimes simple sense of humor. Over the past week, our group has met a few times to discuss the plot, the character, and the premise. We settled on a plot, but in the process Rah and Yubu shot out a couple of different possibilities and an alternative backstory element. We discussed how we might be able to show certain aspects of the backstory and made some decisions about our main character's character. Our meeting went up to over an hour because we all had something to say and questions to ask. As a group, we've been preoccupied with the presentation of the pitch and which idea we should present. It's advisable that we stick with the more-developed backstory since we already know its relation to the plot, but I do like the alternative backstory element, and I think it should be kept in the rosters for further development. I don't want an idea that excludes all other possibilities before we even get to the scriptwriting part.

Write-Up for January 25th

The most challenging aspect of this assignment for me was part A: Have confidence in your vision of the world. It's difficult for me to talk about myself on a somewhat personal level to a group of people, even if I know most of those people. The difficulty laid in deciding what to present about myself that I don't think is too personal; I don't want to feel vulnerable. Though, in a sense, that vulnerability is a prime example of the inner struggles I will make mention of; untangling my self-perception from how I think others perceive me. The first two prompts were the ones I was more weary of, since I couldn't think of anything off hand. I spent a couple of days thinking about it. For one thing, I feel that I've lived a blessed enough life that I never experienced a significant amount of conflict, but again, that's my perception of my life. A family member may think of several instances I wouldn't have as formative conflicts. The first one was just hard because although I can easily think of personal peculiarities, I couldn't readily imagine anything that stood out any more than anybody else's. For the first two, I had to get suggestions/evaluations from my mom because I felt I needed that sort of outside viewpoint to guide my 'self-searching'. Equally difficult, was that once I got my information, I had trouble summarizing it satisfactorily; I don't want to leave anything out, but I have a tendency to talk too much plus stage jitters, which make that tendency worse.
          Part B was interesting because I was excited about watching a clip in order to evaluate its structure in relation to the theme of the piece. However, I was unsure of how to evaluate them without a proscribed temple, but I began to enjoy that liberty, since I should know how to evaluate. "Meshes in the Afternoon" confused me, and at first I took issue with that because I'm linear plot-oriented, until an exchange with a peer made me realize that maybe it's supposed to confuse me. She suggested that it's experimental, and that made it clear to me. The way "Meshes in the Afternoon" is shot intrigues me the most, of the four, particularly because of the sound effects, occasional non-traditional background music, and the choice of what to leave out of the frame, selection of extreme and medium close-ups and the disorienting camera angles in a couple of parts in the sequence.

Grand Finale! (cue the fireworks and streamers)

A Week Late, but here's my self-InDesign project

Hot Potato, Cold Potato (these are cold)

A bit overdue, but here are my perspective artworks that were due last Monday:

 I should have posted this piece of junk a long time ago, even though it is currently a stand alone image. Besides, as many hours I blew on this one, I am not remaking a two point perspective exterior. I'll just get this one over with.

I'm beside myself with joy!

I finally got this gorilla off my back. I hope my client likes it. Ladies and gentleman, I present to you the brochure I designed for my "client":

Layout Options

Here is what I'm working with for my "client's" brochure:

It's not going to be so busy of course. All the other things are supplementary designs I'll choose from.

Perspective Assignment

I guess something is better that nothing... Fear not, I will turn in the rest late, but in a timely manner, so hold on for the completed assignment, please.

Illustrator "Live" tool designs

I decided to get funky with a couple of the shapes; I really enjoy that "add anchor points" feature. This is probably the most fun I've had during my experience learning to use Illustrator. So, first I am posting the shape design, which I'm proud of having completed earlier than I've completed any thing so far...

And now for the live trace of the teacher:

  

I had a heckuva time getting this one together folks. It may not look like it, but I spent about a couple of hours on this baby. Not so elaborate, but I was primarily focused on playing the paintbrush tool and blend options... of course it would be after I post the thing that I just remembered I could take it to Photoshop... Oh well, I'll leave that chore for another day.

Illustrator Designs & Logos

Ten Illustrator Designs: So much for simple and quick