Reel Comments (on 4 other blog posts)

The IDP course comes to an end and so does this blog. Keepin' it reel. (:
Here are the 4 blog posts which I've commented on:

1. Alex - Stationary
2. Kevin - Movies and CGI Imaging
3. Cormac - Save The Trees, Watch The Movies
4. Alphie - Coldplay and Stop Motion

Animated Typography / Motion Type

Basically, here's a throwback to 2009 when we were first starting IDP. Well, it wasn't that long ago really.

After doing short animations and grueling pixelations, the class of nine had an opportunity to create "word clouds" after being inspired by Internet tag clouds and Wordle.net. Personally, I liked the whole idea of animating text and bring personality to each word and letter and sentence. We used LiveType and it was tedious keyframing. I also liked the idea of making a art piece (video installation) from poems created from our English course.

I was actually very excited to create words clouds because they reflected an earlier passion of mine: animated typography. I saw this upcoming clip on YouTube before IDP even started and it left me questioning how they were created and looked so awesome! Basically, animated typography or motion type is a form of animation where speech is translated and shown visually with sound effects, type effects, imagery and unity. It does have a certain flow to it thus creating appeal. I found some famous speech from Kill Bill, Family Guy and also the Dark Knight. These lines from the films/TV shows were then interpreted through imagery and animation. Some times, the users would draw some pictures or simply gave the words personality through the use of effects. While many of these were created using Adobe After Effects, I still found it interesting that we had to use Apple LiveType and learn the harder way. Below is a Kill Bill line interpreted into animated typography and also the word cloud in which I made.

"Sleeping Sonnet" is basically my dislike towards the act of sleeping. It is a short typographic animation attempting to outline a world without slumber. While sleeping does provide necessary benefits, it averages out 9 hours a night multiplied by 7 days a week results in 63 hours. To put this into perspective, if we did units for 63 hours straight, we could get at least 10 of them done (which is almost half of the course!). Ironically, this is a reality for some of us with that procrastinating nature.

Sleeping Sonnet is sad and comic relief allowing us to laugh at one person's feeble and naive desire to overcome sleep!

YouTube: Kill Bill Animated Typography / Motion Type Example



Sleeping Sonnet - Word Cloud from Michael on Vimeo.
I wrote a piece of poetry and turned it into a work of primitive art. Kaboom.

In the nine or ten hours that we spend slumbering, what if we didn't have to? Perhaps, then we could get more done. If we could just remain conscious 24/7 without consequence (such as eye bags, tiredness, etc), that would be my utopia. Maybe then, I could get all my work done.

Done with LiveType and finished in Final Cut Express. Accompanying music created in GarageBand.

A project based on the phenomenon of "tag clouds" found on the Internet.

The Trotsky (2009)

A film which I wanted to see for the longest time since it was released to theatres nationwide is the Trotsky written and directed by Jacob Tierney. After watching the trailer, I fell in love with the whole story and concept. Basically, the movie follows a young teenage boy by the name of "Leon Bronstein" who attends private school. However, his mindset and personality is derived from a Russian revolutionary by the same name. In short, Leon (Jay Baruchel) thinks that he's the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky from 1897-1949. His goal is to unionize students at his new public school because there is a lack of power and influence between students and administration. As the viewer, we can see that the teachers and principals are after disciplining the students and maintaining order. The students are apathetic and do nothing else but abide by the rules of the school. Leon hopes to break down and rebel against these barriers and constraints and create a new (world) student order by joining the Student Union. He leads the student boy to strike just like how he did to his father's company, a clothing factory. He falls in love with Alexandra (Emily Hampshire) because he's trying to live out his name and legacy since Leon Trotsky married an older woman during his time.

The music is created by K'naan and Malajube which I think are appropriate because it reflects the teenage angst and rebellious cause in which this movie is going for. One aspect of this movie is the Canadian-ness of it. It takes place and is shot in Montreal at Montreal West High. The casting is all Canadian. The musicians are Canadian. I appreciate the whole patriotic portion of it and it won some international awards too including some from Tokyo and Atlanta.

Personally, I'm going to go watch it once it goes onto DVD. Since producers only ever get money or return once it goes on DVD.

The Calm /After/ The Storm: Tempest Art Show 2010 Review

Having being part of Mary Ward's art show for the past three years, I always looked forward to watching the student-produced films. This year, however, I got to write, create, produce, film, edit and screen a movie
through with my group members. The past month before May 3 was filled with intense amounts of planning, shooting, and editing. Mostly editing.

The three Grade 11 films, Gameboy, Sooper-hiro and Hellogoodbye were made for the art show.
Hellogoodbye was a great film which unfortunately didn't make it in. While Gameboy was a short film telling the story of a young teen's struggle with losing his most prized possession and instead end up
finding friendship/true love, Sooper-hiro was a mockumentary about a person who claims/wants to be a real life superhero finding his own true love against the perceptions of the student body. Hellogoodbye told the
story about a young couple faced with many issues: leaving each other and finally reuniting but another problem comes up. I thought that these films were great in their own respects and dealt with issues many teens faced making it appealing.

A film which I thought were especially meaningful and also well-shot was "Plug In, Baby!". I thought that Plug In, Baby! was different and thus, innovative. Throughout the film, we don't see the characters talking to each other in real life. Instead we see them talking to each other through IM, text and other social media sites which is how many teens are communicating in today's world. The audience sees what they text and type displayed onscreen. The "Mom" scene was pretty hilarious too when the character referenced the Blackberry mistakenly called a "strawberry". All in all, the cinematography, colours, lighting were visually appealing. And the little details such as the pings and other sound effects helped to develop the whole environment of texting.

Some pixelations which I thought were interesting were The Friend Zone and With You. The Friend Zone was interesting because the music matched the video. I especially liked the vibrant and saturated colours, it had. It made the school look even brighter than it should! It carried a story about how a boy can't go out with a girl because he's more of a brother than than boyfriend material to the girl, per se. With You was pretty innovative too. Innovative, in the sense that it did pixelation and stop motion but through everyday electronic devices. There was a scene with a hand scrolling pictures with an iPhone, pictures on a laptop's slideshow, photos from a DSLR. At the end, the viewer sees a person calling on the iPhone. Again, With You was innovative but I had to squint my eyes at times to adjust to the glare on the DSLR's screen. Other than that, I thought it flowed very well.

Viewing a film on the computer after editing and screening a film to the public evoke two different feelings altogether. While I was viewing the finished product of Gameboy on the computer with my group, I felt accomplished (mostly because we were finally done) and relieved (because we were done). We laughed together at the parts and we noticed our mistakes in continuity. Viewing it among your peers is a totally different perspective. With your peers, it's a case, best described by Andy Warhol's "30 seconds of fame" phrase. We casted some friends as extras and during the film, they would say "DUDE, I WAS THERE! I'M SITTING IN THE BACK! I POURED THE WATER!" At the same time, more people laughed because they saw a familiar face on screen. In terms of screening to an audience, void of knowledge of the main characters, it's different. They laughed at the funny parts and even the not-so-funny parts. While I sat amongst them within the crowd, I heard their reactions. They whispered and murmured words of praise. Overall, they enjoyed the movie and thought that it was a great love story and "cute". Which was what we aimed for. During the art show, I even had the opportunity to present it and screen it to a younger audience, which were the elementary schools. I gave an introduction and described the premise basically. Afterwards, I facilitated a discussion. During the screening, the elementary kids laughed at basically every scene: dream sequence, Gameboy breaking scene, and even the mom scene. They thought Gameboy was funny. Mission Accomplished. But they didn't have many questions to ask about production and video-editing.

All in all, screening films was fun and I can't wait for the IDP/Film/Engish course next year. :Db

Free Post: Confusion (2010) - Entry to Video Pool Media Arts Centre

Not related to IDP... Here's my entry to Video Pool's MIY (Make It Yourself) 60 Second Contest which I paid $10.50 to submit into. Haha.

Making The Movie: Gameboy (2010)

Gameboy (2010) was a collaborative short film created and produced by Alphie, Justin, Jayne and myself. It features music by our composers, Alfred and Kyle, and background music by Alphie, Justin, Edward and the other people whom are mentioned in the credits! (I forgot... Carlo? Charles?) It stars Alphie and Jayne and there are other actors... I just don't want to spoil it. Here's the premise: A boy loses his most prized possession only to end up finding his true love after realizing what he was missing in his life... which turns out, wasn't his gameboy. However, we find that truly, Andy is not only a "gameboy" addict, he is a gameboy by nature; constantly playing on it.. even in the shower! I think that this film can relate to many people seeing as, a lot of the people born in Generations X/Y had played or seen Nintendo Gameboy's growing up.

Working as a group, we had so much fun editing and creating this final video for our course. Part of our motivation was the tight schedule which we had and the possibility that it wasn't going to make it into the art show. It drove us to our wits and ends by the time it was finished. We went out to our locations and shot scenes. It was easy to schedule our shot list considering we had mainly two actors: Jayne and Alphie. I acted as either cameraman/boom mic operator during the set and Justin played a role or did the camerawork. Either way, we all shared a part in helping create the movie. We all did interchangeable roles whether it was: Camera/sound/directing or cinematography. I think that on set, we had fun and had our laughs but it was a creative process with every scene. We shared ideas on how to make the film look better at each scene. I can recall some conflicts over creative ideas but we compromised in the end. At the same time, we knew our roles each time instinctively. During editing, we would have fun as well as edit on separate computers. This seemed like a good idea until we had to export and combine all of the scenes which we distributed on the different eMacs. All in all, it was a hectic and tedious post-production. (Which is now over on account that the files were deleted and tapes were lost in the process.)

There was some conflicts though especially with the creative visions of the composers. Although we used their music which they composed for the film, both sides' demands weren't met. Due to time constraints and therein, lack of communication, we weren't able to collaborate as much as we should have. Sometimes, we would be late sending in our material and that postponed their parts in composing. However, we did use all of the songs in which they produced for us. Since this was our first film production, I think that this was an important lesson that we definitely learned from.

During editing, I created a poster (as seen above) and our production card. We had a fun photoshoot and took some great pictures with appropriate lighting. I created both items on Adobe Photoshop CS3 / cmyk.

Check out the trailer:

The Ultimate Showdown: James vs. Cuarón

Personally, I enjoyed the book, Children of Men, written by PD James. From my experience with Harry Potter, Lord of The Rings, The Notebook (yes, THE Notebook with Rachel McAdams), Eragon, Spiderman, Batman, Romeo & Juliet, Alice In Wonderland, etc, I usually prefer the novel(s) first and foremost. If I decide after reading the book that it seems decent enough to see how a director tried to interpret and adapt it, I'll then scrounge for change enough to pay $7.50 to see it. (Or go to Cineplex on Tuesdays). To me, the book is always the best source. I am a visual learner, but reading a book helps me consider and imagine how the characters would feel and act. For me, adaptations are just another way to imagine a book's scenery. With The Children of Men, however, it was an entirely new concept which Cuarón devised. Sure it maintained the same themes of finding hope in a lost cause, looking on the bright side, a race against time and the last dying generation of human beings incapable of giving offspring; but there were new characters, new scenes and new conflicts within the movie's plot.

The adaptation in this case, in my opinion, is great. For me, I enjoyed the visual interpretation and the cinematography. If I were given the task of recreating a world of despair and hopelessness filled with illegal immigrants and pre-apocalyptic chaos, it would not look as good as the movie for sure. In the film, there were burning cows, pollution, wide pans of the countryside and technology (produced by special effects). The feel and atmosphere from the movie was well carried out and I felt it was accurate visually to that of the book, if not better. To me, Cuarón did a fantastic job because the scenes were very detailed. The plasma screens, the props, the debris and the shootings and bombings everywhere helped establish each scene and made me feel as if I was watching an apocalypse happen before my eyes.

The characters were well casted. I particularly liked watching Clive Owen act in this movie because he has played out angry and brave, yet sentimental characters before. I thought that the person who played Julian, Julianne Moore, was not only casted based on her talents, but her appearance. Unfortunately, we don't see much of her due to her death by the Omegas early on. The actress who played Kee was a decent actress since she had to fake the accent, go through birth and act scared most of the time.

The film exceeded my expectations of what I thought the book was about. Sure, Cuarón made Theo die and he added an illegal refugee to carry the baby instead of Julian, but it all made sense. I think that Cuarón did these changes to help the conflict and make it more realistic to the audience. Having the main character die is also another way in which to pull the audience closer emotionally. However, I think that we saw less of the scenes which went on in the book including the Quietus, Theo's and Julian's baby accident and Xan's antagonizing ways. This is where adaptations lose out to a novel. Since the film has to have a certain length, the events in the book have to either be shortened or cut off. Thus, the film doesn't establish the mentioned events and only mentions them briefly. The audience doesn't understand the same context or meanings as deeply as those who read the original book. However, adaptations do allow people to visualize the scenes better with either CGI, the use of green screens, set designs and props and costumes.

I guess this was all the fan-girl craze about Twilight was about. The original book by Stephanie Meyer versus the movie starring Robert Pattinson and Kristin Stewart. I suppose Edward was too much of an idolized and dreamed after persona to be portrayed by a lowly human being such as R-Patz.

 Image Source: http://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight