Top to bottom: automatons (super 8), pi (16mm), Roger Corman's Undead (probably 16mm)
Monday, November 29, 2010
kalinin k7
The Kalinin k7 puts the ekranoplan to shame. A 144 scale model is available from anigrand.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Singing the noisy blues
My latest take on Noise film is to make it black and white. I've been looking at some b/w films for comparison. Automatons was shot on super-8. It's way grundgier than noise film. Pi was shot on 16mm. I don't think 16mm has to look that grainy. Noise is somewhere between the two. My conceit is that I'm doing it at 2.35:1 unlike 16mm's 4 x 3. One problem with Noise film is that I shot it with the histogram way too left-leaning. So any attempts to make a shot brighter makes the noise evident. I was looking at the channel information and found that the blue channel is incredibly noisy. So I'm just substituting the green channel for the blue and it looks fine. I'm now doing the color in AE. The popcorn FCP to AE script works incredibly well. Only one small section didn't come out.
Friday, November 19, 2010
EHRE [honor]
Here's an easier-to-shoot version of the story. Only three easy-to-get locations.
We see the face of a 10 year old boy as he looks admiringly at a poster on a brick wall. There are the sounds of bombs in the background. German-sounding media fill the air. The poster says EHRE and shows a V-2 style rocket with a porthole. In the porthole is a heart. The image is romantic as the rocket shoots off into space.
Cut to a photograph of the same poster. Then more photos of aircraft and rockets but looking overdesigned and overbuilt, some with dozens of wings and engines. The photos have a strange, pixellated look to them. We see that a woman is looking at them. French. She is in a dark room. Newspapers cover the windows. The room is lined with all sorts of old electronics. We hear French newscasts dimly in the background. She looks at her watch (or clock). Then, as if on schedule, the sound of beeping morse code fills the air. She begins writing numbers into a grid left to right, top to bottom. We dissolve to see her painting in the numbers in gray and then finally, we her standing before a large, poster size image. The image is composed of the black and white squares she was drawing. It appears to be some kind of metal apparatus with tubes and holes. Very abstract. Fade to black.
Title: 5 years later. We fade up on a medical scene. Very close up with shallow DOF. Muffled voices. Heart monitors and equipment beeping. We see tubes being injected, fluids flowing out of bandages. Chaotic imagery and then the woomph of a vacuum seal. It's inordinately bright and we can barely see a face through a series of wires and tubes. More electronic chatter. Then everything starts to shake violently. We hear the roar of rockets. The mouth filled with tubes contorts into a smile.
THE END
We see the face of a 10 year old boy as he looks admiringly at a poster on a brick wall. There are the sounds of bombs in the background. German-sounding media fill the air. The poster says EHRE and shows a V-2 style rocket with a porthole. In the porthole is a heart. The image is romantic as the rocket shoots off into space.
Cut to a photograph of the same poster. Then more photos of aircraft and rockets but looking overdesigned and overbuilt, some with dozens of wings and engines. The photos have a strange, pixellated look to them. We see that a woman is looking at them. French. She is in a dark room. Newspapers cover the windows. The room is lined with all sorts of old electronics. We hear French newscasts dimly in the background. She looks at her watch (or clock). Then, as if on schedule, the sound of beeping morse code fills the air. She begins writing numbers into a grid left to right, top to bottom. We dissolve to see her painting in the numbers in gray and then finally, we her standing before a large, poster size image. The image is composed of the black and white squares she was drawing. It appears to be some kind of metal apparatus with tubes and holes. Very abstract. Fade to black.
Title: 5 years later. We fade up on a medical scene. Very close up with shallow DOF. Muffled voices. Heart monitors and equipment beeping. We see tubes being injected, fluids flowing out of bandages. Chaotic imagery and then the woomph of a vacuum seal. It's inordinately bright and we can barely see a face through a series of wires and tubes. More electronic chatter. Then everything starts to shake violently. We hear the roar of rockets. The mouth filled with tubes contorts into a smile.
THE END
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Erstaunt
I just got a new camera--a Nikon d3100 so I was thinking of shooting a short. A really short. Something easy to shoot. I started mish moshing some of my old ideas and looking at my available talent and resources. Here's what I came up with.
Exterior late noon old world brick wall. We see a poster on the wall. A young child is staring at it. In the poster, there is a rocket with a porthole and in the porthole, a heart. There are bold letters reading "erstaunt." The child turns as if being called then runs away. A woman's face enters the frame. She crosses the street as we see the child running down the side walk. We see the woman's face again. She is looking very intently. There is a door. A man in a dark suit and hat bursts through the door in a hurry. The woman glides into the door unnoticed.
The woman walks briskly down a dark hallway. As she walks, she reaches into her hair and pulls out a bobby pin. She seems to know exactly where she's going. She stops. Voices in the distance. We're tight on the woman's face now. She's looking down, but her eyes see everything. She then goes to a door, spends a few seconds working the lock then enters the room. A filing cabinet slides open. With a flashlight she rifles through folders then opens one. In it she finds various designs. Medical looking charts with numbers. Exaggerated photos of super planes that look like they would never fly. Then, she sees what she is looking for. A photo and plans of a small round chrome device with wires and tubes. On it, is stamped a heart. We slowly transition to time lapse clouds.
We're in a white room now with beeping medical noises. We see a series of wires being connected to a body. More wires. Then we barely see a mouth and face through a series of wires and tubes with fluids running through them. The image starts shaking as we hear the sound of a rocket taking off. Lips curl into a smile.
Exterior late noon old world brick wall. We see a poster on the wall. A young child is staring at it. In the poster, there is a rocket with a porthole and in the porthole, a heart. There are bold letters reading "erstaunt." The child turns as if being called then runs away. A woman's face enters the frame. She crosses the street as we see the child running down the side walk. We see the woman's face again. She is looking very intently. There is a door. A man in a dark suit and hat bursts through the door in a hurry. The woman glides into the door unnoticed.
The woman walks briskly down a dark hallway. As she walks, she reaches into her hair and pulls out a bobby pin. She seems to know exactly where she's going. She stops. Voices in the distance. We're tight on the woman's face now. She's looking down, but her eyes see everything. She then goes to a door, spends a few seconds working the lock then enters the room. A filing cabinet slides open. With a flashlight she rifles through folders then opens one. In it she finds various designs. Medical looking charts with numbers. Exaggerated photos of super planes that look like they would never fly. Then, she sees what she is looking for. A photo and plans of a small round chrome device with wires and tubes. On it, is stamped a heart. We slowly transition to time lapse clouds.
We're in a white room now with beeping medical noises. We see a series of wires being connected to a body. More wires. Then we barely see a mouth and face through a series of wires and tubes with fluids running through them. The image starts shaking as we hear the sound of a rocket taking off. Lips curl into a smile.
The End.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
Fault tolerance, idiomatic performance, etc.
Here are some concepts that came up during various discussions this semester.
Fault tolerance
I've realized that one reason why narrative filmmaking is so hard is because it's fault intolerant. If you're missing a shot it causes big problems. There are four ways to handle fault intolerance:
1. Redundancy (e.g., shoot coverage)
2. Iteration (reshoot/pickups)
3. Substitution (fill the hole with another shot like a cutaway)
4. Improvise.
Idiomatic performance
If you have a beeping noise and play it metronomically it will sound like a beep. Play it in chords like a marimba and the beep will sound like a musical instrument. The negative is also true. Play a string sound like a piano and the strings will sound piano-y, not like strings. Learning to play idiomatically is a big part of making a synth sound like a particular instrument.
We tend to reduce things to physics; sound is a waveform, an image is a series of pixels. But resemblance goes beyond capture data. It is related to an idiomatic understanding of performance. This is similar to the phenomenological idea that we hear words and voices--not waveforms.
A performance, therefore, is a way of restoring this understanding to technology.
Angle of greatest movement
This is a way of making a Vokrapich-ean construct more explicit. "Angle of greatest movement refers to the amount the camera has to move to capture a gesture while shooting tight. Choose the angle that allows for the maximum or minimum movement depending on your needs.
Fault tolerance
I've realized that one reason why narrative filmmaking is so hard is because it's fault intolerant. If you're missing a shot it causes big problems. There are four ways to handle fault intolerance:
1. Redundancy (e.g., shoot coverage)
2. Iteration (reshoot/pickups)
3. Substitution (fill the hole with another shot like a cutaway)
4. Improvise.
Idiomatic performance
If you have a beeping noise and play it metronomically it will sound like a beep. Play it in chords like a marimba and the beep will sound like a musical instrument. The negative is also true. Play a string sound like a piano and the strings will sound piano-y, not like strings. Learning to play idiomatically is a big part of making a synth sound like a particular instrument.
We tend to reduce things to physics; sound is a waveform, an image is a series of pixels. But resemblance goes beyond capture data. It is related to an idiomatic understanding of performance. This is similar to the phenomenological idea that we hear words and voices--not waveforms.
A performance, therefore, is a way of restoring this understanding to technology.
Angle of greatest movement
This is a way of making a Vokrapich-ean construct more explicit. "Angle of greatest movement refers to the amount the camera has to move to capture a gesture while shooting tight. Choose the angle that allows for the maximum or minimum movement depending on your needs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
