Sunday, April 29, 2007

Project Evaluation 3

I had a lot of fun the day we did the exposure for this project. Piling objects on the film strips and seeing very quickly how the strips came out was great. I love the instant gratification of hand-processing, and if I didn’t like one strip, I could immediately try again. Matt Draeger and I worked really well together, and I liked our footage.

While I love the instant gratification, I did not enjoy working with the developer chemicals. I tried to stay out of the way during that process. I think the combination of the gloves and the fumes sort of bothered me. Sitting in that dark room with that red light for hours was hard, but I did enjoy exposing the film strips.

As far as the editing process went, I wish we had done it differently. As the fine cut editor, I did enjoy getting to come in and see what sort of theme the rough cut editors had come up with, and I liked being in charge of tweaking what they had done. I’m not sure exactly how I would have changed the process, but I think I would have preferred to edit in small groups. I would also have liked to go into the exposure day with a better concept of what the edit would be comprised of so I could have planned a theme a little better.

I liked how the project turned out in the end, and I’m glad to have had the experience. Overall though, I think this was my least favorite project of the semester. Maybe this just isn’t an area of interest for me? I think I prefer projects with more recognizable images, because my favorite parts of this film were the parts where you could see the transferred images from the found footage. Even though this was my least favorite project, I still enjoyed it!

Project Evaluation 6

After watching Lexi Lefkowitz’s collage project at the end of last semester, I thought this would be a project I would hate. I really enjoy creative projects that have more structure, like the rhythmic edit, so the open format of this project was a little scary to me. Also, I had no idea how to come up with a subject or how to execute it. I eventually decided to do a satirical project on how food consumption in America has changed in the last 50 years by juxtaposing audio of 1950’s health films with current images of people stuffing their faces and going against everything we know to be healthy. As I looked for footage, however, I had a lot of trouble finding video of people eating. I eventually decided to just juxtapose images of the bad food that we eat against the audio (that I had no trouble finding).

The editing process really intimidated me as well. I was aspiring to make a film that somewhat emulated Lexi’s in format, and I had no idea how she did that. Once I got in the editing room, though, I had a much easier and more enjoyable time putting my project together than I thought. I was happy with the way my final edit came together. My project was simple, but I think I got my message across. I thought it was interesting during the class screening that you and several people in the class took the juxtaposition in a completely different way than I intended it. In the end, the project that I thought I would hate the most ended up being one that I really enjoyed. Aside from struggling to find footage early on, I really enjoyed the entire process.