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.

Mr. Popcorn's Tragedy

Group work is good because it allows distributing responsibilities. By sharing the thoughts and techniques of individuals, the group members put less time and the outcome is greater than individual work than doing entire work by oneself. However, since the responsibilities are distributed, once one member misses to do certain job, it affects every other member’s plan so it is hard to cover that job. Our group did not start with clear theme and distribution. So the work was even harder than any other work I have ever done.   
The first idea started with fruits in the fruit truck outside school. We wanted to do lots of special effect but it was not possible for us who has never made videos. While the brainstorming, I got the idea of pop corn.  I thought it would be interesting if we contrast between human having fun eating pop corn and the pop corn hating being sold and eaten. Kimberly had idea that what if we make it as a form of advertisement so we slightly twist actual advertisement in cynical tone. 
The first plan was that I and Ring edit the video and Kimberly work with audio. Kimberly collects the background sounds. I edited first half of the video and Ring edited last half of the video.  It was simple rough cuts because we wanted to consider Kimberly’s review. We spent a week trying to keep in touch with Kimberly but she did not respond. A week later, Kimberly brought another video file because she did not like ours. I was mad at her not keeping in touch with us but I actually liked her video more than we made so I and Ring discarded and developed the video Kimberly worked. Ring and I edited Kimberly’s video cutting some parts out and putting some footage more and we added the sound.
When we recorded the video, in some part, sound was recorded very loud or very low. With final cut, the sound level had to be adjusted for each cut in order to keep the sound in consistence. In addition, we loop sound in some part to give a sense of continuity.
As a result, the Mr. Popcorn’s Tragedy was created!

Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image has current ongoing exhibition, "Behind the Screen." It was interesting exhibition because it required the audiences’ participation. In this post, I would like to write about the demonstrations I participated in the museum.

 Through the MEDIA 150 class, I could have the live demonstrations by the museum staff, which was about the sound editing in the movie Titanic (1997). The museum staff showed a clip of Titanic first. He explained about the sound layers, which were the dialogue, music, sound effect, loop and foley. He set up the sound so only one layer of the sound could come out and he repeated with the other layers of the sound. It was interesting that dialogue had huge difficulty to carry out the emotions by itself and the combination of the sound creates different effect. Moreover, the way director Cameron uses sound effect was amazed me. For example, putting animal sound when the Titanic was sinking gave the ship a sense of living object. Also, when the ropes connected to the ship fell down into the water, the sound from the ropes is similar to the gun fire sound to represent the sense of danger. I did not know it is impossible to record sound at the field. All the background sounds we hear in the movie, such as the door slam sound, were made in the studio. In the Tatinic, the sound of Rose falling down on the floor also made by chair and big sacks so it could create gradual sound of body parts that touches floor at the different time.  

When I watch movies, I had paid attention on only the movie scenes. After this exhibition, I realized that sound is as important as movie to create proper mood and emotions.

Design Assignment - LG CF

Design is everywhere. For this blog assignment, I would like to talk about the Commercial Film series I like.

This is the one of the CF series of LG, the electronic equipment company. Design supposes to function to carry information and to attract attention at the same time. I think LG CF fulfills both functions. First of all, the use of the famous masterpieces approaches to the public friendly so it attracts the attention of the public. In addition, the products of LG are blended into the paintings so it creates the effect that they are accepted to the public in easy sense. Also, the use of the masterpieces is effective with the color and the composition. It creates the sense of elaboration and it correlates with the brand image of LG so it keeps carrying out the idea that the products of LG would be the same level quality of the masterpieces.

LG had released two more CF of the masterpiece series.

 

The copy of the commercial is very simple. It keeps repeating the "saranghaeyo, LG," which means "I love, LG." The simple melody and simple copy strongly engrave the brand name in the head of the audience. Besides, those two CF not only introduce their products and brand name but also carry humor. I think it is brilliant idea that gives the masterpiece that have serious and classical images the intimate and fun narratives.

I like the design that attracts the audience's attention not in graphic and sensational way but interesting way. Therefore, I would say that the LG masterpiece CF series satisfy beauty with use of color and composition, functionality as the commercial, and interactivity with the audiences.

Haiku assignment

It is a assignment for creating Haiku-like video. Kimberly, Ring and I shot short clips and this is the edited version by me.


This is the video using same clips but created by Kimberly

and by Ring

It is interesting that we created different video with same clips.