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

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

A Play On Words.

When we first started experimenting with making word clouds, I thought it was fun. The site made our poems or text into visual groups of words; with differently sized words which depended on its frequency. I thought that it was also neat how we could change the colours, arrangement and fonts of the words. I kept playing around with my free verse and sonnet until I came to the final results. I think it was smart of the IBM employee to create an application based on "tag clouds" on blogs and websites. Unknowingly, it has become a great art form. With playing with typography, we could make clouds from Obama's speech for example. Another example would be an outline picture of Rihanna or Darth Vader created from her song lyrics and the screenplay of Star Wars. There can be many art creations from making word clouds.

I also learned how to print-screen on a Mac: Command-Shift-3!

My poems were simple and plain and with wordle.com, they became alive, in a way. My first poem, Letter To A Doppelganger, was a free verse on mistaken identity, ranting, and trying to find some individuality. I wrote it partly because I have been mistaken for another person and I was inspired by Diane Chea's video which we watched at NFB. After importing it on wordle.com, it formed a mask like a Venetian mask. Get it? Identity and holding or hiding behind a mask to hide one's actual feelings. Also, the biggest words were: "Identity", "Name", and "Receive".

My second poem was a sonnet based on how much I dislike sleeping. Honestly, we could get so much more done without having to stay in bed for 9 hours everyday. In that time, I could've finished 1.25 units! So in this poem, I chose a dark background and some reds, grays, dark blues, and light blues to match with the themes of lack of energy, bloodshot eyes, and being nocturnal beings. With this poem, the most commonly used words were: "Sleep" (obviously), "Without" and "Less".

In the end, word clouds were fun and easy to make. I can't wait to get started with LiveType and Final Cut Express to make them appear animated and alive. It'll probably take long with rendering though. :S

Here's both poems superimposed onto wordle.com:

"My Child, My Land" (1998)

When the child starts chasing the chicken into the field of landmines

This short cell animation directed and written by Francine DESBIENS shows two different families living in different parts of the world.


Within the 4 minute short, it started off as a suspenseful tone with the typical American family playing: the son was playing, the mother was cooking and then the mood changed; the father was making some sort of weapon. In fact, he had a whole stash of bombs, grenades within his shed where he was producing them. Then the scene changed to an Asian home. I'm assuming Vietnamese because that was where the US/Vietnam War took place.



Again, there was a happy family and their house (which was surrounded by a fence and landmines). A mom was taking care of her baby while her two sons were outside feeding the chickens. She had a flashback about the war and soldiers who fought in the war. The America soldiers planted antipersonnel bombs throughout the land. I really liked how the animation showed an entire army planting bombs everywhere. It put more emphasis on how many numerous land bombs were planted.


Later, the father returns with crops on his bicycle. The older son, mother with child go to greet him in the house while the younger son is outside unattended with the chicken pen. Suddenly, he picks one of them up and it starts to run away. He chases it into the land filled with potential bombs. He sets one of them off and it explodes. The whole family watches in horror and surprise. Then the animation goes to the American family eating and talking over dinner. It ended with a depressing, ironic end.


I thought that the animation was meaningful and sad. It's message holds true because in many war-stricken countries in the world, it's a reality that there are landmines everywhere. In fact, hundreds of people die from it every year. I thought it was sad because the son died from innocently chasing the chicken and unknowingly triggering the bomb. However, it's ironic because the source of the bomb is a source of income to support the Western family. Its further irony comes from the fact that the Americans were in the war and they produced in the first place.


The animation itself, was well-drawn. When the mom looks out into the window, the window transforms into a flashback. I thought that when the soldiers were planting the bombs, it was further emphasized by the grid. I also liked the smoke effect when the father carries his child. I liked the animation for its message and I think it came out very strong.