Well, first of all it was my fault that ours didn’t work in the projector because I didn’t splice carefully enough. I don’t know what I was thinking! It was disappointing because we were really looking forward to seeing it projected. Lesson learned though. But anyways—from the few that I saw, I was really impressed! The tiny beads of paint and oil looked really intricate. In the ones I saw someone had animated an amoeba like structure which I thought was really appropriate for the assignment. Someone else animated a tiny worm inching its way across the frames. While creating ours we were sort of thinking about molecules and molecular structure of elements. Thinking of life on a microscopic scale is something that I would like to study more in depth. Visualizations of mitosis and other natural phenomenon are fascinating… .suddenly I miss my biology classes. Stan Brakhage does some amazing things through his lyrical images of origins of life on a broad scale all the way down to the fundamentals like in his Dog Star Man series. Moving images are the perfect way to integrate concepts such as these and dive deeper into making connections with these tiny objects that we cannot see on a regular basis, and then with a little imagination or animation we can see or experience their significance without just systematically studying terminology.
On a sort of related note: it’s like that show I watched when I was a kid called the Magic School bus, where the students could get into the bus and it would shrink to the size of a microbe in order to enter inside of someone’s throat and into their digestive system—or through their nose and into their brain. I love the idea of seeing things invisible to the naked eye, and when manipulating film there are still even smaller surprises that reveal themselves when projected on a larger scale.
The excerpts on this site were interesting. The St Louise one was fun to watch because of the vivid colors but I wasn’t particularly fond of the soundtrack. I really enjoyed the Elegy for Seven Falling Objects. The description of it as a “film for lost explorers” pulled me in, and I liked the geometrical shapes. I’m trying to think of what would make a film manipulation really stand apart from the others. I think if someone who wasn’t familiar with this type of filmmaking might think that they all looked very similar…
My views on this type of filmmaking have changed because after learning the process it is much more engaging to look at for a longer period of time. I remember watching some of Brakhage’s films in other classes and thinking “wow this is kind of too long” but now after watching the ones in class I was wishing that they were longer. Looking forward to trying some more techniques.
No comments:
Post a Comment