Final Project

I really like the direction I am taking with the final project, I am excited for the end result, I think I will keep the number of movies I will be projecting limited to maybe 5 or 6

project proposal

my idea for my porject incorporates my source (film score). The plan is to project scenes from different movies over people who are performing the motions of the actions taking place in the scene. the only audio will be the score of the scene being projected. I am going to film the projections over the people. The camera angles will be in the same style as the scene being projected.

broken screen: Breathless

1. Breathless
2. Jean-Luc Godard
3. In this particular scene, Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is told by the woman he loves, Patricia (Jean Seberg) that she does not love him back, and that she informed the police of his whereabouts for they were looking for him after he murdered a police officer in the beginning of the film. Michel says he doesnt want to run but his friend tosses a gun to him as the police arrive, the police open fire on Michel. Michel then run's down the street dying until he falls in the intersection. The police and Patricia surround his body as he whispers to Patricia "you're a scumbag"
4. The notion of time is manipulated in the fact that most of the scenes where the characters are speaking, including up until Michel's death, it is a series of jumpcuts. The shot of the person will jump to a shot of the same person to a different location but they are still maintaining the same conversation from the original shot.
5. The main method used is the jumpcut. the audio remains the same throughout the scene but the shot of the person jumps to different locations. This is the only method in which Godard manipulates time in the film.
6. This is one of my favorite films by one of my favorite directors. This film jump started the revelutionary filmmaking that took place in France in the early 60's. There are many technical things (such as using a wide angle lense for close-ups) which made the French New Wave films so different. And Because of these new achievements, People started to look outside the major studios to find good cinema.

what I felt about my source

I had a hard time trying to come up with a way to depict my source. My source is film score and I couldn't figure out a way to depict something like music in a way that was not time based. But then I remembered my assignment from presemester, when I had to draw sound, and did the same thing for this project. I had a to go through each song a couple of times to help myself imagine what each track looked like. I also took into consideration the what colors each track make me think of.

I really didn't like this project based on the fact that I had to work on a project in a medium that I was not comfortable with. I have to do work in my other classes in mediums that I am not comfortable in (drawing, form study) and I expect that in visual language I am able to use video and work in my prefered medium seeing as how there is no way to incorporate it into my other classes. Based on that idea I was irritated with this project and in reality, just want to move on to our next project where, hopefully, I will be able to work on a project in a time based medium again.

source

www.foureyedmonsters.com

There are a couple of things that inspire me to create but the major ones would be film and music. There are films that I watch and afterwards they make me want to pick up my camera and start shooting. This happened specificlly with one film called "Four Eyed Monsters". I discovered a video podcast that the filmmakers were doing about the process of making the film and how they met in real life and how they felt about their own work. Up until this point I knew I wanted to make movies but I didnt have anything to say in any of my projects, I felt like I was just regurgitating all the tarantino and scorsese films I have watched and was not being original. But when I saw that these people felt the same way about their work as I did about mine it really inspired me. I talked to them about this and we still talk to this day and they continue to inspire me and give me ideas about new projects.



The other source of inspiration I have is music, especially film score. the way I determine if I like a song or not is if I can feel an emotion from listening to it. It doesnt have to be any specific emotion but when I hear the song and I can pinpoint any emotion to it, I will know I can use it in a project in the future. Sometimes I will hear a song and will come up with an idea for a video based on it. So music is a key source of inspiration for me.

analysis of light

I noticed that in the morning The shadows were greater than the other parts of the day. It was much darker inside the room but very bright outside. The sides of the chairs that are facing away from the window are black because of the lack of light. And the sides recieving the light, are illuminated very subtley. This was my favorite part of the day.



in The afternoon, the buildings outside the room aren't as bright as they were in the morning but the light inside the room has gotten brighter. The light bouncing off the chairs is incredibly bright and the parts of the chairs hidden by the light are almost black.



at night there is almost no light in the room at all. The chairs are engulfed with shadows. The only light that is able to bring light to the room, is the light coming from the buildings outside.

Turrell's work at the ICA

I went in to the ICA with the intention of looking at this piece to get the asignment over with and walked into the room it was in and my first impression was "what's the big deal?" It seemed like it was just a red block of light being projected on the wall but then I noticed something, I noticed how people were putting their hands up and it seemed as if they were pushing right into the wall, it was one of the strangest things I ever saw. I went up closer to the piece and got lost in it, it looked as if it was an infinite tunnel of light and it had me perplexed. I noticed a lot of the people coming up to it were immidiately trying to see how it was done and it was irritating me a bit. If they would stop trying to look at how it was done and would just look into the light then they would get a lot more out of it. It's good sometimes to suspend yourself in disbelief.

response to camera obscura

I thought it was very interesting to see. In my high school photo class we had to make pinhole cameras but it was not as large of a scale as this. At first it was difficult to see what was going on, my eyes took a very long time to adjust to the low level of light as well as trying to focus on the image that is being projected. I don't think I was able to see the image clearly on the wall but we decided to put up the card again and we were able to see it clearly. I forgot for a moment that the image through the pinhole is shown upside down which was disorienting at first, but once I realized the image was flipped I was able to see clearly that what I was looking at was the courtyard.

ancient model of keeping time

the method of ancient time keeping I researched was water clocks.


Water clocks were among the first methods of keeping track of time that did not depend on observations of celestial bodies. One of the oldest water clocks was found in the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep's tomb. He was buried around 1500 BCE. The water clocks were stone vessels with sloping sides that allowed water to drip at a nearly constant rate from a small hole near the bottom. Other water clocks were cylindrical, or bowl-shaped containers designed to slowly fill with water coming in at a constant rate. Markings on the inside surfaces measured the passage of "hours" as the water level reached them. These clocks were used to determine hours at night, but may have been used in daylight as well. Another version consisted of a metal bowl with a hole in the bottom; when placed in a container of water the bowl would fill and sink in a certain time. These were still in use in North Africa in the 20th century.

response to Turrell's work

I thought it was fascinating. Although I wasn't quite clear on what exactly he did with light. I think the flaw is in the video made about him and his work because it didn't quite explain what he was doing it was more about him and his fascination with light. I wasn't sure if he was filming the sun's path or something like that. I did think the very first project of his was interesting, the one that was like a light tunnel at the MFA in Houston, it was intersting seeing people react to the light when it changed colors.