4/27

Today I had an individual crit on my progress with my research video. My topic is water. One of my original ideas was to somehow express how much water humans waste. I was going to show a drippy sink and then after a few minutes, zoom in to show how much water had collected in the sink. However, after Vanessa showed us Andy Warhol's "Empire" piece, I used that as influence. My video now consisted of a beautiful, well lit, and well focused shot of a sink. It shows the sink dripping for several minutes, and the drips are very slow, and only continue to get slower as time progresses. I also extracted the sound because I thought it was cool how even though there was no sound, you can almost hear each drip. When Anne looked at my piece she helped me to explore ways to push it a little more. We talked about what I was trying to express and the emotions like boredom, frustration, and being in the zone. I thought that maybe a few ways to push the idea of wasting water were to plug up the faucet with my finger at the end of the piece, or to softly introduce a background noise and then at the end have a loud sound of the faucet turning off. I plan to experiment with the audio some more before our final crit next week.

What I learned in Class today

4/20

1. We watched the video "Empire" by Andy Warhol. Watching just a small part of this 8 hour video I experienced fustration. I was constantly waiting for something to happen. Eventually the blurry image of the empire state building wasn't the center of my focus, but instead I looked at what was happening to the film. The imperfections and decaying on the film was the only action or change. It made me question his intention. What was the purpose of this? Was there even a purpose? We also disucssed the value of entertainment. Was Warhol playing with his audience knowing what emotions he could provoke? Apparently "Empire" gave birth to reality tv.

2. We also watched part of a film called "Weekend". In this particular scene, a couple is fighting their way through a traffic jam with loud horns blairing in the background. I was extremely frustrated by watching this film. I felt involved emotionally in the film. At the end when we see that the traffic jam was caused by an accident and bloody corpses are strewn along the road, I felt angry at the director for putting me through such an emotional rollercoaster. Once again, this film like Warhol's piece plays with emotion and entertainment.

3. Today I learned how to use a video camera. I learned all the different aspects of the camera that I could control, and we used 13 important buttons including: P mode, On, Playback, Eject, Menu, Focus, AV jack, lens cap, wide ange, DV port, rec search, AE shift, and dial. We learned about the general way these cameras are set up, and experimented with the use of these buttons in our own film.