Online html tutorials were my best friend with this project.
I've never done anything with html before and it was a challenge! The fact that html resembles gibberish in my eyes made it really difficult going line by line as we were instructed because I would lose my place and get disoriented so easily. Not knowing or having a vague idea with what each line's purpose was didn't help either. This, of course, went away after a few jumps into text wrangler.
After that, the hardest part was getting the layout to be nice. Most of my time was devoted to trying out different hex codes to see which color combinations would look nice and hopefully not too tacky. Also, there was a lot of trial and error within CSS in figuring out pixel sizes and playing with the borders to make them somewhat noticeable while not interfering with the images. Each picture also has a different border.
>Link<
Tuesday, May 15, 2012
Friday, April 20, 2012
Interview with Jenny
The first video here is the initial draft version of the video.
Several problems were brought to my attention when I presented the above video. One of them was how it was difficult to hear Jenny speak in the beginning where her voice was fighting with the music. This was definitely fixed. Another was on the quality of the images because I couldn't find any many pictures with the required size. To tackle this problem, I decided to make the images smaller. It was also expressed that some images and videos didn't make sense in relation to Jenny's monologue. Personally, I feel that opinion varies from person to person and therefore most of the original images and videos were left intact.
The question of why I chose to introduce Jenny towards the ending was also brought up. Because I'm such a horrible public speaker, I just said 'Oh, I thought it would've been different and a break from the usual norm' (paraphrased of course).
There was a reason. When I was going over the raw dialogue I saw there were three things that Jenny spoke about: Her family, her beliefs and her hopes and aspirations. Whenever I watch or read something I always have a very difficult time in connecting with the character. It's always, 'So what?'. So I thought, why not introduce the problems Jenny sees as the first thing? Why not catch the audience's attention with quirky families and odd things bordering on disbelief (not washing hair on your birthday) or heart wrenching matters (Asian people with no voice). I felt that most people can relate to or identify to these problems. A background was necessary to make people want to know more, to make people care about the plans of a student, hence why everything else was presented before Jenny came into play with her plans for the future. I also felt that it was a good choice because the video was able to end on a hopeful and positive notion.
And we all like happy endings, don't we?
Several problems were brought to my attention when I presented the above video. One of them was how it was difficult to hear Jenny speak in the beginning where her voice was fighting with the music. This was definitely fixed. Another was on the quality of the images because I couldn't find any many pictures with the required size. To tackle this problem, I decided to make the images smaller. It was also expressed that some images and videos didn't make sense in relation to Jenny's monologue. Personally, I feel that opinion varies from person to person and therefore most of the original images and videos were left intact.
The question of why I chose to introduce Jenny towards the ending was also brought up. Because I'm such a horrible public speaker, I just said 'Oh, I thought it would've been different and a break from the usual norm' (paraphrased of course).
There was a reason. When I was going over the raw dialogue I saw there were three things that Jenny spoke about: Her family, her beliefs and her hopes and aspirations. Whenever I watch or read something I always have a very difficult time in connecting with the character. It's always, 'So what?'. So I thought, why not introduce the problems Jenny sees as the first thing? Why not catch the audience's attention with quirky families and odd things bordering on disbelief (not washing hair on your birthday) or heart wrenching matters (Asian people with no voice). I felt that most people can relate to or identify to these problems. A background was necessary to make people want to know more, to make people care about the plans of a student, hence why everything else was presented before Jenny came into play with her plans for the future. I also felt that it was a good choice because the video was able to end on a hopeful and positive notion.
And we all like happy endings, don't we?
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Production Notes
The creation of this video was the most tumultuous project I've ever had to do! I've never realized the amount of work it takes to create a video; it all looks so simple on television and in the theaters. Splice some images and clips together, add some sound effects and boom! Done. Oh how wrong I was...
In hindsight, I've realized that planning is the most important part of this project and probably any project in Film and production. John Canemaker had spoken how he'd done things on a whim to create his masterpiece "The Moon and the Son" but I strongly believe he's mincing his words. The storyboard is everything when creating the video project. You simply cannot film with vague and general ideas of what you want to do. I found myself needing to revise my storyboard and create a transcript of Jenny's narration of her family, beliefs and aspirations in order to get a feel of what I needed to do and ultimately collect. The amount of things she speaks of and mentions is monumental to say the least. Adding to the sheer enormity of the wide range of topics she discussed is the difficulty in capturing the footage she spoke of. A great deal of the things she said had to be pulled from videos in YouTube. I simply couldn't take the video camera and go film some 'Asian nymphs' or 'dragon ladies'. I even found myself at an impasse when she spoke about community health and how she wants to use it to better the lives of her people. The best thing I could think of was to shoot something abstractly related: her studying to get to that point as an example.
I had a lot of difficulty when shooting footage of Jenny. People aren't so considerate; they just love walking through your shot. It was extremely frustrating and resulted in several do overs. Another problem I ran into was what to shoot...? I found myself watching television more carefully than ever in observing the types of shots they did. For one segment, I was inspired by the movie "Tony Takatani" where the entire film was shot with the camera moving from left to right. I also found inspiration from commercials! Commercials utilized short, and quick shots that get to the point of the message. When it came time to put my knowledge to the test, I found it to be much more difficult than planned or anticipated. In the end, I took establishing shots and closeups and everything else in between while being careful to keep the continuity of the shot with the 180 rule. I did mess up once though when I filmed the logo of "Hunter College East" and panned to the hallway. Jenny should have been standing there! But I forgot to ask her to and didn't realize until it was too late. If I could, I would do that over again. I would've also taken much more shots in different angles in the future. I found myself sorely wishing for variety when editing it all together.
As I edited the items I collected, I constantly found myself short of material. I was never pleased and was constantly filled with new ideas of what to add and what to subtract. One of the editing techniques that I had much fun in doing was matching the change in footage to the beat of the music at the end of the video. As I edited, I also ran into several problems. The problems stemmed from my lack of knowledge of Final Cut. I deleted some of the raw audio to make space on the hard disc! Like, what could go wrong? The Final Cut file was so large, surely it doesn't need the raw audio! I was completely wrong. The original files to create the audio was lost and the .fcp version of the audio was useless. In keeping with the constraints of time, I made a quick fix by downloading the mp3 version of the audio from YouTube to save the day. (I hope that's okay!)
Now, whenever I watch a movie no matter how horrible it may be, I will definitely respect the amount of work the developers and film crew had placed into it. It takes experience (probably months of trial and error), skill and expertise to make anything motion picture worthy. I find myself seeing the different shots they used to capture the mood of the scene and ultimately I am more aware of what is going on.
In hindsight, I've realized that planning is the most important part of this project and probably any project in Film and production. John Canemaker had spoken how he'd done things on a whim to create his masterpiece "The Moon and the Son" but I strongly believe he's mincing his words. The storyboard is everything when creating the video project. You simply cannot film with vague and general ideas of what you want to do. I found myself needing to revise my storyboard and create a transcript of Jenny's narration of her family, beliefs and aspirations in order to get a feel of what I needed to do and ultimately collect. The amount of things she speaks of and mentions is monumental to say the least. Adding to the sheer enormity of the wide range of topics she discussed is the difficulty in capturing the footage she spoke of. A great deal of the things she said had to be pulled from videos in YouTube. I simply couldn't take the video camera and go film some 'Asian nymphs' or 'dragon ladies'. I even found myself at an impasse when she spoke about community health and how she wants to use it to better the lives of her people. The best thing I could think of was to shoot something abstractly related: her studying to get to that point as an example.
I had a lot of difficulty when shooting footage of Jenny. People aren't so considerate; they just love walking through your shot. It was extremely frustrating and resulted in several do overs. Another problem I ran into was what to shoot...? I found myself watching television more carefully than ever in observing the types of shots they did. For one segment, I was inspired by the movie "Tony Takatani" where the entire film was shot with the camera moving from left to right. I also found inspiration from commercials! Commercials utilized short, and quick shots that get to the point of the message. When it came time to put my knowledge to the test, I found it to be much more difficult than planned or anticipated. In the end, I took establishing shots and closeups and everything else in between while being careful to keep the continuity of the shot with the 180 rule. I did mess up once though when I filmed the logo of "Hunter College East" and panned to the hallway. Jenny should have been standing there! But I forgot to ask her to and didn't realize until it was too late. If I could, I would do that over again. I would've also taken much more shots in different angles in the future. I found myself sorely wishing for variety when editing it all together.
As I edited the items I collected, I constantly found myself short of material. I was never pleased and was constantly filled with new ideas of what to add and what to subtract. One of the editing techniques that I had much fun in doing was matching the change in footage to the beat of the music at the end of the video. As I edited, I also ran into several problems. The problems stemmed from my lack of knowledge of Final Cut. I deleted some of the raw audio to make space on the hard disc! Like, what could go wrong? The Final Cut file was so large, surely it doesn't need the raw audio! I was completely wrong. The original files to create the audio was lost and the .fcp version of the audio was useless. In keeping with the constraints of time, I made a quick fix by downloading the mp3 version of the audio from YouTube to save the day. (I hope that's okay!)
Now, whenever I watch a movie no matter how horrible it may be, I will definitely respect the amount of work the developers and film crew had placed into it. It takes experience (probably months of trial and error), skill and expertise to make anything motion picture worthy. I find myself seeing the different shots they used to capture the mood of the scene and ultimately I am more aware of what is going on.
An Evening with John Canemaker
During this special screening, we had the opportunity to see two animations by the laudable John Canemaker. John Canemaker has a very special style in his animations. It is a style that transcends the loud sounds and shocking realistic images that many productions tend to rely on in capturing the audience. Instead, it is able to delve itself into the hearts and minds of its viewers by using innocent images full of meaning to evoke emotion.
The first of the pair premiered was titled “Marching to a Different Toon, Confessions of a Star Dreamer”. A very simple story of a woman telling us of her dreams and aspirations to become an actress since the age of four.
The second of this set, which had the most profound effect on me was called "The Moon and the Son, An Imagined Conversation". It is a personal essay of John Canemaker in relation to his experiences with his father that portrays a true story without relying solely on the expected norm: home videos, pictures, and artistic shots of the person in question. Instead, it defies all sense of realism through animation. Watching this production had been very enlightening because I always strive for realism. John Canemaker has tossed all of that aside.
He believed that he had to exaggerate to make his personal essay work; that he had free himself from the constraints of realism. He wanted to make it bigger than life. To do this, he utilized a myriad of mediums that ranged from watercolors, crayons, ink and even the type of paper! To further illustrate the tumultuous relationship he had with his father, his style in animating the characters changed too. When he was illustrating his angry father, he would use big, bold and coarse lines. Juxtaposed, to create his timid young self, he delicately held his tool and created thin and quiet lines to display a child quivering in fear. And lastly, to create the dear mother he loved, he drew her as a big, encompassing and malleable blob colored a cheerful green; a blob that shielded him and his brother from their father's anger. Canemaker even went beyond creating human renditions to illustrate the people he speaks of. He gets to the point where he personifies objects where a cleverly placed bolt of lightning would represent the anger of his father striking down upon his family.
Before Canemaker could have done all of that, he had to draw inspiration. During the questionnaire, he cited George Dunning as one his sources for inspiration and the style of Disney as something he works to distance himself from. After the inspiration comes the storyboard. It started from initial transcripts and drawings but then bloomed from there. The storyboard was slowly created based on his instinctual gut feeling. He didn't sit down and say 'Okay, I'll use watercolor here.'; no, he did what he felt fitting and edited and altered it from there. He simply just took a chance to just try it. It ultimately was a process of trial and error and of opinions from his coworkers. Where, at the end, he achieves a stunning and dynamic piece.
I mentioned that the opinions of his coworkers had a part in creating this piece earlier. John Canemaker was fortunate in finding the perfect producer when he was producing this piece. She had encouraged him to go deeper into his memories; to go further in order to learn more and to attain closure with his father. This project was not just another film, it was a step in learning from the past and using it to build the future. I would go as far to say that this production wouldn't have reached such monumental heights had he not have had the perfect teammate.
The first of the pair premiered was titled “Marching to a Different Toon, Confessions of a Star Dreamer”. A very simple story of a woman telling us of her dreams and aspirations to become an actress since the age of four.
The second of this set, which had the most profound effect on me was called "The Moon and the Son, An Imagined Conversation". It is a personal essay of John Canemaker in relation to his experiences with his father that portrays a true story without relying solely on the expected norm: home videos, pictures, and artistic shots of the person in question. Instead, it defies all sense of realism through animation. Watching this production had been very enlightening because I always strive for realism. John Canemaker has tossed all of that aside.
He believed that he had to exaggerate to make his personal essay work; that he had free himself from the constraints of realism. He wanted to make it bigger than life. To do this, he utilized a myriad of mediums that ranged from watercolors, crayons, ink and even the type of paper! To further illustrate the tumultuous relationship he had with his father, his style in animating the characters changed too. When he was illustrating his angry father, he would use big, bold and coarse lines. Juxtaposed, to create his timid young self, he delicately held his tool and created thin and quiet lines to display a child quivering in fear. And lastly, to create the dear mother he loved, he drew her as a big, encompassing and malleable blob colored a cheerful green; a blob that shielded him and his brother from their father's anger. Canemaker even went beyond creating human renditions to illustrate the people he speaks of. He gets to the point where he personifies objects where a cleverly placed bolt of lightning would represent the anger of his father striking down upon his family.
Before Canemaker could have done all of that, he had to draw inspiration. During the questionnaire, he cited George Dunning as one his sources for inspiration and the style of Disney as something he works to distance himself from. After the inspiration comes the storyboard. It started from initial transcripts and drawings but then bloomed from there. The storyboard was slowly created based on his instinctual gut feeling. He didn't sit down and say 'Okay, I'll use watercolor here.'; no, he did what he felt fitting and edited and altered it from there. He simply just took a chance to just try it. It ultimately was a process of trial and error and of opinions from his coworkers. Where, at the end, he achieves a stunning and dynamic piece.
I mentioned that the opinions of his coworkers had a part in creating this piece earlier. John Canemaker was fortunate in finding the perfect producer when he was producing this piece. She had encouraged him to go deeper into his memories; to go further in order to learn more and to attain closure with his father. This project was not just another film, it was a step in learning from the past and using it to build the future. I would go as far to say that this production wouldn't have reached such monumental heights had he not have had the perfect teammate.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Tuesday, February 14, 2012
Interview Questions
Possible interview questions:
1. Can you tell me your name?
2. How would you describe yourself? What makes you unique?
3.What are you currently studying at Hunter?
4. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in ten years?
5. What or who has influenced you to choose this path?
6. Can you tell me about him/her?
7. Can you tell me of any events that made you think "This is what I want to do", that made you sure it was your calling?
8. How would you like to be remembered?
1. Can you tell me your name?
2. How would you describe yourself? What makes you unique?
3.What are you currently studying at Hunter?
4. What are your goals? Where do you see yourself in ten years?
5. What or who has influenced you to choose this path?
6. Can you tell me about him/her?
7. Can you tell me of any events that made you think "This is what I want to do", that made you sure it was your calling?
8. How would you like to be remembered?
Thursday, December 22, 2011
A Most Difficult Predicament
This was a very exciting project that took approximately four days with a lot of surprise challenges and bumps a long the way. The first step to making this film possible was capturing the footage. Steps 2 to the end was editing. Editing took up the majority of the time in making this film.
Day 1
Samantha Putri was able to get her friend to be our actor, and he is very good at his job. We would pass the camera around the three of us to each have a chance in shooting some footage. Because Samantha had a large part in creating the script, I pretty much gave her the job of director everytime I had the camera in my hand. This meant that I looked at her script at what she wanted to do, she had instructions for what kind of shot she thought was good for that situattion, and then asked for her confirmation before filming. She was calling 'action' and 'cut' too; it was quite amusing. Several times we had to make practice shots to make things flow more smoothly or know that we were capturing the right thing. This mostly had to be done for action shots where people were moving into the frame and leaving it. Now, I'm not criticizing Samantha's work, but unfortunately, we recorded very little footage because she did not take the editing process into account and we (me and Gisselle) did not realize this either until it was too late. Our video was very linear to the point that if I played all our raw footage, we had our story.
Capturing the footage presented had some initial difficulties. First of all was the crowd! They were constantly getting in the way! It was very annoying to say the least. We also had to buy out the Snickers, so everytime someone would go up to the machine we had to ask them to not purchase it for the sake of our project. I'm glad we had no grumpy people that had to have it no matter what!
After finishing, we had our second challenge of the day: recording the sound. Remember when I said our video was recorded in a fashion where we didn't have to edit to get the story accross? Well, this came back to bite us on the back the day of editing through Final Cut Pro. We had the actor watch his footage and as he was watching it, he would read the script to match the duration of the footage. There were a few problems to this: the footage was too long being one case; but once again we didn't realize that this would be a problem for editing. Because the footage was so long, the actor had to do a lot of improvising. Going further, due to the duration of the footage, we actually recorded each sound file with the same length. Each footage was about half a minute long if not longer causing us to capture the noise of the slamming door of a moderately quite staircase. We really couldn't find any quiet place due to our time limitations.
Day 2
Editing would have been a nightmare had Martyna not been there to guide us a long the way. Me and the rest agreed to do our own editing. This meant creating three different films with the same footage. My first goal that day was to finish the assembly edditing and make some rough cuts. Which entailed making and taking clips from the raw footage and putting them into their general order. This took longer than it should have due to my inexperience with Mac computers and with the program overall. It took the entire class for me to do so with unfavorable results at the end: it was absolutely unexciting. Finally, we all discovered we had a problem with sound that day. Our sound files wouldn't work with what we edited. The sound files were too long and would've sounded chopped up had we made them shorter.
Day 3
More rough cuts were due today to be followed by final cuts and then rendering it all together. Editing started to become fun now that I got the hang of the program. I was able to execute what I wanted with few difficulties. Though...after speaking to Martyna about it, it turned out I had a few editing problems such as needing to extend or create an establishing shot (which we didn't have much footage of) and needing to create a rhythm for the film to make it flow more smoothly. This rhythm entailed increasing the length of a lot of my shots. It did not produce favorable results so I had to cut the long shots shorter and move more footage (about 3/4 of it) around to their new timeslot. Martyna also didn't want us using any effects to make artificial flow and to try to imitate the editting method of the films we saw in the lecture. This too also required a lot of cutting and rearrangements.
Day 4
It was presentation day! I was sad to see that my other partners were not present; without them I couldn't see how they managed with the editing. I also sadly had not solved the problem of sound and the film had to be in silence. I was even thinking of some catchy tunes to go along but, alas, I didn't have the class time to add it in. I didn't even know how to edit it in so...shame on me for not doing research on my own time.
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