Semester Reflection

Last blog post of the semester! It has been fun. I want to give a shout out to Samantha, Dave, and Maddie. We managed to work on all three projects together. Great group. I'm going to miss you guys and Maddie, congratulations on graduating. Good luck with everything!

This semester has confirmed my love of editing. I definitely feel that it is something I am good at and a skill that I want to continue to learn about and perfect. I especially like editing audio. I realize I love making music and sound effects fit visuals. Working on Rat Bastard and having to find the best music to fit the mood of the film was both challenging and exciting for me. I had a similar experience in Fiction Field I. For our final project in that class, we had our music composed by a student in Whalen. The day before it was due, we mixed the audio with the video. It. Was. Awful. The music didn't match up at all, and it sounded like elevator music. This was a silent film. We needed playful, upbeat, music that helped tell the story. So that night, before it was due, I downloaded three royalty free songs that I sliced together to make the soundtrack for the film. I didn't tell my professor that I mixed the audio, he still thought it was composed by a Whalen student, and he loved it! I ended up telling him that I had done it, and he was impressed. It is something I like doing. To me it is like figuring out a math problem. It takes time and concentration to fit every piece together, but when it comes together it is so rewarding. Here is a link to my film from last semester.


Silent Love


Have a great vacation and spring semester!!!

Project 2 update

So we are now entering the third week of project 2, and I just wanted to show the class a couple things we were planning on doing in our film. For background information, our feature film starts off with a teenage boy (Jordan) going into his bothers room trying to find his nerd guns. His older brother, Patrick, is over seas in Iraq fighting for our country. Jordan decides to play with these guns in his front years with some friends, when all of a sudden, his brother gets dropped off in the driveway. Jordan is so excited to see his bro, and asks if he wants to play with him and his friends. He hands Patrick the gun, and this is where he starts to have his flashbacks. When this happens, we want the screen to flash to something like this:

In another scene, we are going to want o have realistic warfare sfx. I found a great site called free sound.org that has multiple war sounds that would be perfect for our film. Another post effect we want to have is camera shake or frenzy when a fake bomb goes off. We want the edges of the screen to whiten and the maybe the picture to flicker black and white to give the audience a chill. Something like this will definitely get the point screenshot.

I don't want to give too much away, but this is the premise of our film. Please give questions or comments.

8 1/2: Different Perspective Viewings

After reading about 8 1/2 for class, I could not help but realize how different of a perspective I have now. When I first watched it, I was only 17 and did not understand all the intricacies of film. Being of absorbed by confusion prevented me from comprehending the bigger picture instead of noticing little things that make this film so "genius."

The story is was really made me so confused, all I saw were random patterns of events but now after reading it from an objective perspective, it all made sense that he was running out ideas and didn't know where his life was going. The fact that he was a catholic schoolboy and then becomes a lost creative soul truly highlights what it takes to be a director or apart of the industry. You have do somethings that no one has ever thought of.

Going off of what no one has ever thought of, reading about the editing scheme contributed greatly to causing confusion inside of Guido's mind. I thoroughly enjoyed how the walls did not match to give the sense that everything is changing and his life is just one big confusion while he blames his past for not being so creative. A story is a start but the editing is where all the ideas come together to create what Fellini was trying to say the whole time.

While everyone enjoys going to the movies and seeing movies, sometimes you need to think more in depth and see the little things that bring the full picture out of confusion in Guido's thoughts.

The Music and Script of Inception

After talking about the spinning hallway in Inception during class it got me thinking about this complex and intriguing movie. Underneath the effects there are many other great things this movie has including its music and story.

First for those who have not seen the film, Inception is a 2010 film written, directed and co-produced by Christopher Nolan one of my favorite directors who has done movies like The Dark Knight and Memento. It was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Leonardo DiCaprio stars and plays Dom Cobb, a specialized thief. Instead of robbing, banks he steals ideas from the unconscious minds while they are asleep and dreaming. This is called extraction. Cobb has been on the run and unable to go home to America to visit his children because he is wanted for his wife's murder. Cobb is offered a chance to go home and have his old life back if he could perform the impossible task of inception; the planting of an idea into someone's subconscious. That is Inception in a nutshell. It is a lot more complex and a definite watch for anyone who loves science fiction, action or heist movies.The music from Inception is just beyond epic. Hans Zimmer, who has worked on movies like The Lion King, The Dark Knight, and Rango, completed the score. Now the score is described as a very electronic score but the coolest part about Zimmer's Academy Award nominated score involves Charles Dumont's 1956 song "Non, je ne regrette rien." In the movie this song is used as a "kick" to wake up them up. To know they are running out of time in the dream the song softly starts as headphones are placed on the dreamer's ears. The music builds and then they are awakened.

Now as explained in the film, time moves differently when people are dreaming or when they are dreaming within a dream. ("It's a week the first level down. Six months the second level…"). Zimmer used this information and incorporated this into his soundtrack. Listen carefully to "Non, je ne regrette rien" and then to Zimmer's "Half-Remembered Dream" from the soundtrack. Do you see what he did there? When slowed down the song, like it would be in the dream world for the characters. Check out this video for an audio comparison. Another user also did the opposite and sped up "Half-Remembered Dream" to have it sound like Dumont's song!

Two final points, one small and one large, I want to bring up involve the story and the script, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Let's start small first. Nolan was so detailed when writing the script that some of the character names are allusions. Ellen Page's character Ariadne is an "architect" who creates the various dreamscapes, which are designed like mazes. The name alludes to a princess in a Greek myth who aided by the hero Theseus by giving him a sword and a ball of string to help him navigate the labyrinth, which imprisoned the Minotaur. Ariadne in the movie aids the hero Cobb and the rest of the characters on how to navigate the dream mazes.

The other point I must bring up when talking about Inception is the ending. The ambiguous and controversial ending involves a spinning top wobbling. For the characters in the movie they each have a totem that allows them to find out if they are dreaming or in the real world. For Cobb if the top stays spinning he is dreaming but the ending fails to show if the top falls or not because of the abrupt cut. In other words the audience is unsure if the final sequence of the film is reality or just another dream. While many of speculated and even came up with theories involving Cobb only wears his wedding ring during dreams and that is your clue to look for, Nolan has denied this. When I first saw the movie I was a little confused and looked for clues to find out what happened but after my second viewing I realized how it doesn't matter what happened. Whether he is dreaming or not, Cobb is not looking at the top for the answer but is looking at his kids. If he doesn't care, neither should we. Nolan has backed this in interviews but the audience is free to believe whatever they want. Maybe they should sleep on it and dream their own ending to this wild movie.