Hyper Haiku - MEDP 160

Link to Hyper Haiku

MEDP 160 Portrait of the Person & the Production Notes

Interview with Jesse

Finishing the assignment, I am proud myself that I actually created something with my own strength; however, I cannot get 100 percent satisfied. Once a small thing catches my attention, I tend to focus to small details rather than big structure, so I am really bad with planning consuming time stuff. Whenever I listen and repeat, I find something that bothers me so I keep doing small corrections that are not necessarily noticeable. It causes the result with the poorer quality of animation because the animation was in the last part of process of the work. I wanted to make the animation look nicer with more images but the time did not allow me to do that. In addition, there were a footage I wanted to insert, but I could not find right part to insert without disturbing the flow of the story. I wish that if time was more allowed, I might spend more time to find right part for it.

          

           I learned that it is hard to manage everything myself for one piece. Excluding the matter of the amount of the work I was supposed to do, it was hard to monitor everything in the neutral point of view. Since everything was done my ‘me,’ once I made up the direction of work, I was stuck with the idea. It was hard to stop and see whether my direction works good or bad while I work on the piece. I learned it helps a lot to get feedbacks from other people often.

           Even though I do not have 100% satisfaction, I am happy with the video I made overall. The story flow is continuant without interruption. However, I feel like that I took easy path by taking literal representation. I think that if I had another chance, I might make very different video by using creativity that conceptualizes the idea of being athlete such as the way John Canemaker does his animation

John Canemaker Screening

           There was a special lecture with a special guest; John Canemaker who is the Oscar awarded animator in MEDP 160 class. At the lecture, two animations of Canemaker were screened. One was the Confession of the Stardreamer and the other was the Moon and the Son: an Imagined Conversation.

          

           Both of the animations were amazing. The story is great but the thing that most stunned me was that the illustration used for each cut. Not the recent animations majorly done by computer works, all the illustration that screened were drawn (or painted) by hand on the paper in old fashioned way. Canemaker did not limit the way to represent his story by using various types of the medium in his illustration and colors. His organic process of making animation gives the animation life and vividness. In addition, the hand drawing delivers the sense of humanism, I mean by the feeling of the pencil line and brush stroke the animation alters the mood of the story even though it contains heavy dark stories.

 

           I remember some scenes that use the symbolic representations really well I though. One is the way the narrator’s father was depicted as a pointy arrow that represents his temper in the early of the film. Moreover, another memorable scene was that the father’s big fist heats the table hard and the son is scared of him and hiding under the table. It depicts that the relationship between the father and the son. After the screening, we had discussion time. Canemaker defines the animation is a technique that allows live action and it can be used in any kind of genre. He emphasizes that the reason why we use this technique in the work. To him, needs of animation is to be beyond the physical representation. He uses various mediums in variety of style by concepts for particular scene. By using symbolic representation and cliché, it conceptualizes ideas and brings it to the physical form.

Interview with Jesse edited ver

Portrait of Jesse from Milip Park on Vimeo.

Interview with Jesse about wrestling

Media 160_Sound-Image and Image-image Relationships

Primal Fear (1996)

I choose the Primal Fear upto first three minute as this assignment.

This clip has lots of shot-reverse-shots that show face expression of Martin and Aaron by turns.  The shot size of shot-reverse-shots shift dynamically by the feeling of the moment. For example, when Martin came to see Aaron, the shot starts with medium shot. While Martin and Aaron exchange eye contacts the shots it alters to medium close-up shot. When Martin comes into Aaron’s jail cell the clip shows Aaron and Martin together as a long shot and by the time they are catching up the news the shot captures one person at a time with closer shots whenever it shift from Martin to Aaron and from Aaron to Martin showing their intimacy to each other.

It works really well when Martin, who trusted Aaron, gets suspicion against Aaron. It captures Martin’s face as medium close-up shot that shows his face-expression and background music starts coming out. The music has high-pitch and slow tempo creating tension. Martin looks back to Aaron and the camera comes back Aaron’s face.  As if it follows Martin’s point of view, the scene shows hand-held camera movement. It shows Aaron’s side face that cannot be said if he is smiling or not. The tensional music builds up the feeling against Aaron who looked innocent just a minute ago. 

Aaron is captured in medium close up shot at the time and at the scene that Aaron admits the truth, it cutsaway Aaron’s hands with close-up shot. The close up carries so strong impression with Aaron’s voice tone. Then, the scene captures Aaron as medium shot that looks farther away and it carries much less intimacy comparing the scene that they were catching the news.

MEDP 160: Questions for the Interview

How did you start wrestling?

What do you think about wrestling?

How is it like to be a college athlete?

                -Good side?

                -bad side?

How do you train yourself? How long?

How do you push yourself?

When do you feel that you want to give up?

Who has motivated you most to keep doing what you do? What lessons did that person teach you?

When do you feel most happy ever since you started wrestling?

How did you choose Media Studies major?

What do you aim for after graduating college?

MEDP 160: What I hear

Main Street in Flushing, Queens. Photo: Will Steacy
Photo from http://www.nycgo.com/slideshows/must-see-flushing

This exercise has two parts. First part is spending an hour doing a “soundwalk” which was invented by R. Murray Shafer. Soundwalk is a kind of walking meditation to increase sonic awareness. While doing a sound walk doing anything but walking and listening is not allowed. Second part is blogging about the experience.

I walked around the subway station in Main Street, Flushing, Queens between 4:30 to 5:30pm. The area is like a little China Town and it is a very busy area so it has lots of popular brand stores and lots of Chinese stores at the same time. In addition, there is a High School nearby and it was time for the students to leave the school.

When I started doing a “soundwalk” I could hear all the sounds mixed together in low base. Buzzing sound from the traffic and chattering sound from the people on the streets. Since all the sounds were loud, all the sounds were blended and sounded like droning. After a while I was able to start recognizing the sound separately. From the traffic, I could hear drone sounds from buses constantly near to far away. I could keep hearing the subway noise under the ground because one of the three trains departs or arrives in the station all the time. The background sound in Main Street is the screeching noise of the trains and buses.

I hear cars beeping sounds with high pitch and airplane noise once in a while. Sometimes I hear loud giggling sounds from teenagers who just came out of school and door slams from stores. Those sounds caught my attention so I will call them foreground sounds or sound signals.

Definitely the soundmark in this area is the Chinese language spoken everywhere. It was more common to hear Chinese than English or other languages in Main Street.

It was an interesting experience. When I tried to recognize the sounds separately, I was able to do it. However, whenever I was distracted all the sound combined together. The sounds would pile up on top of each other because they were all occurring simultaneously; it was so hard to focus for one hour on one sound so I kept finding myself just hearing instead of listening. The varying sounds would sometimes cancel each other out in my head and my focus would at times move to my eyes. I have never noticed all the sounds I might have overlooked (overheard) prior to this exrcise.