Re-Edit

Well I got some feedback from the class and it seems like they got the gist from the most part. I decided upon seeing it on a big screen to remove the tacky rhetorical questions overlaid on the video. It seems as if the video should explain what I’m talking about instead of tacky text. Ugh.

I hate being a perfectionist.

Also, grr to lack of communication and procrastinating because I didn’t realize the formatting of exporting the video would take so long! Hopefully it works out okay ^^;

Mandabala

This doc felt like an old James Bond flick. There were so many different players and victims involved that at times it was hard to keep up. I feel like I would have to watch it again and perhaps learn more bout the socio-economics and history of Brazil in order to appreciate it more.

However, it did a great job of conveying how dangerous Brazil was and how beautiful it was at the same time.

The director was obviously trying to make it more narrative movie or James Bond-esque because one of his interviewees reacted to one of the questions as such. He succeeded with the film stock, sweeping shots of Brazil and interesting conflicts of government officials and the people.

Editing my new Doc

I’m finally editing my new doc and I’m having a lot of fun with it. It’s hard parting with some of these shots. I want to make it longer than 10 min but I don’t want it to be an hour long thing. That’s obviously not going to work. I wish I had more people’s advice on how to initially expose my family to the audience. I want everyone to take something different from it and hopefully my vague way of editing it will work.

I wonder if name titles are important?

Spellbound

I loved this documentary! It brought me back to middle school all over again and thought of my own experiences trying to get into the spelling bee and my friends who did win the spelling bee, etc. The way the film was edited together made it so you wouldn’t be able to tell who the winner of the spelling bee was.

In fact, most of the kids had such character I wasn’t sure who I wanted to win, or who would win. I found myself being anxious with the parents and spelling along with the children feeling the same tensions that they did. When I finally thought I knew who would be the winner of the spelling bee, I was wrong, haha. I want to know their process of making this film. For as many children that went to the spelling bee I wondered how they decided which children they were going to film. For some I understood because they had been to the spelling bee multiple times.

I also wondered how long it took for them to gather all the footage they needed and organize it, considering I’m in the organizing process of my doc.

Footage of Family

I decided to put Trey’s doc aside, considering the amount of post processing I’d have to do with his pictures as well as the Skype footage. It’s Thanksgiving and I’ve wanted to do a documentary about my family for the longest time. I’m finally getting around to doing that.

Youtube/Skype Footage

I didn’t really get the specific questions or answers I needed after all—and I forgot to get a basic introduction of him. So I asked him to finally chat with me over Skype. I found a video chat recorder which recorded the audio and video from Skype and got a lot of good footage that way!

Edit: It turns out the footage was a weird format and wasn’t transferring correctly onto FPC. Also the main piece of footage has a weird watermark on it when I was using the demo. The other footage seems okay though. *sigh* This is turning out to be a bigger hassle than I wanted it to be.

Shots at his house

It’s taken a while, but I finally managed to get some time with Trey at his house and I’ll have some of Alex’s help. We finally got equipment (Huge Hassle, btw.) and Alex has a car so he was able to bring me to Trey’s House. I got a lot of good footage from inside the house, even though it was a little badly lit (we managed to find a light since he’s a photographer and had some standing lights.)

I also got some footage of him at work on his computer; which made for good B-roll. I have to figure out how to make his pictures work on After Effects!!

Hybrid

This was a very strange documentary. But I suppose it had to be considering the topic. One might find it difficult to even think about how one could make a documentary about corn. There was a lot of archival footage, however of this seemingly mad scientist of corn. It was surprising to hear that many individuals did not want to take the better hybrid corn from Milford because it seemed to be against nature. I got a kick out of the stop motion animations they had of corn mating.

Milford lived for such a long time and even after his factories closed down he still mixed and bred corn. He seemed like a very eccentric individual from the accounts as well as the footage. I think the very experimental nature of the film matched that.

I wish it had been a little shorter. Stock footage and stop motion about corn can only be interesting for so long. There were long periods of landscape that I found to be only filler.

Times of Harvey Milk

We watched a small clip of this in class and from the small clip I wanted to cry. This was an older film, but it was still very moving. The accounts were honest and although there were many night shots in regards to the candlelight scene the riot scene, it was very well shot considering it was film.

My friend had been telling me to rent this for a long time before I had watched that scene and she wanted to watch Milk once it came out with me. I don’t know what it is about these very factual and socially charged documentaries but those are the one that seemed to be most inspiring . I related this documentary with another older doc called “Who Killed Vincent Chin” as this movie also takes various accounts of a murder as well as a very in depth description of the main character.

The way the b-roll, photographs, interviews and footage were all cut together just flowed so nicely together. The documentary makers didn’t even need to add dramatic music to make an individual seem like a criminal, the archival footage simply spoke for itself.

Order of Myths

I watched a free screening of Order of Myths at the South Lamar Alamo Drafthouse where the director appeared at and after the screening. It was revealed at the end of the doc that the director had very exclusive access to all the individuals within the film which made it seem much more realistic and involved.

I loved looking into the Mardis Gras culture in Alabama. I’m so used to the idea of it being in Louisiana that I kept comparing the two throughout the movie. I’m glad to see that despite a deep rooted racism that might be prevalent throughout the South, there is still some progress trying to be made.

It honestly took me a while to figure out what the Order of Myths was and why it was so important to the story—but I think its title was two fold, so it didn’t necessarily need to have a huge role in the story, since it was only one order out of the many orders there were involved with Mardis Gras.

Trey Lecture

Professor Darling was kind enough to let me use a wireless mic to use during Trey’s lecture. I had been in this class before and this is how I met Trey, so I knew that it would be dark, but that the actual audio from the lecture would be important.

It was just as I expected. Although I tried getting some reactions from the crowd, the projector light was not bright enough. I hope I can use this audio in my final project.

Office Shots

I met with Trey today and went to his office downtown to get some exposition/B-roll shots of his office. His office is very swanky and unlike a depressing cubicle type place. Unfortunately it was very dark since it was nighttime and I didn’t know how to adjust the white balance on Alex’s camera. I also tried to get some footage within this restaurant we went to but it was too dark in there.

I also didn’t have good audio! This was mostly a test run to see what I could get and see if I could use any of it, but I don’t know, most of it seems like I can’t use it.

Southern Comfort

This was a very sweet film. I liked seeing Robert’s personality. His personality as well as all the transgendered people within this film lent a window into their family lives as well as social events. It helped you understand what difficulties they had to overcome as opposed to homosexuals or bisexuals because the doc made it seem like they faced a lot of bias.

I felt like this was a good example of a very thorough documentary with not necessarily the best film quality in the world. It looked at what makes a documentary a documentary. The director was there for most of the important events; but some of the cinematography was lacking.

After watching this I wondered what happened to each of the characters after the filming of this documentary. Did Lola ever find someone new? Has the convention Southern Comfort grown after this documentary?

Chris Landreth's Ryan

This is a short film about an award winning Candian animator named Ryan Larkin. Ryan Larkin created several short films, including a short clip called "Walking" in 1969 and his life has slowly fallen into decline. Chris Landreth interviews Larkin and close friends of Larkin to examine Larkin's life from different perspectives.

Chris Landreth's film is all rendered in CG animation, giving each of the characters a visual depth which is not necessarily something that can be capture just by audio or video. It may be an animated film, is a very interesting example of what forms a documentary can take.

Tarnation

This was an amazing documentary. I can’t believe that he edited this on iMovie. It makes me wish I had recorded all of my life on video (not that mine was as half as interesting as his at ALL) or started to work with film or something a long time ago. Since he had such good access, obviously to this footage as well as to his mother, it seemed like it was very easy to know how to edit this and how to splice them together for dramatic effect.

The whole doc is something like what Hunter S. Thompson might have been like as a child/young-man before he became a huge drug addict rock journalist. I know this may have been because of the speed at which the film he was using was changing rapidly (the video quality changed a lot) but I liked the quality it had.

Even though my life may not have had as much events as his life had, it made me want to record my own experiences. These are the kind of docs which really let you into someone’s life and feels very personal and seems like a way that you can connect with other people. Or know that someone might be experiencing something far worse than you.

After Man on a Wire

I forgot to mention I went to Ellen’s house after we saw Man On A Wire and we saw a bunch of the Grad students’ works. They were all very interesting to watch and Ellen’s house is AWESOME. I also got to talk with some of the grad students and I made friends YAY!

Man on a Wire

Today we watched a free screening of Man On A Wire. This movie, although it was a documentary captured the feeling of a heist narrative. Some parts of the movie were a little cheesy, such as the introduction shots of the individuals involved in setting up the wire where they moved a light over their faces for dramatic effect.

I was surprised they had so much old footage from him walking on the wire. I was wondering whether or not it was old footage or if it was footage that he had recreated. From what I could tell later on within the movie it was not a re-enactment. It was very insightful on their parts considering they didn’t even know if they would be famous; the recording of their plans could have been used against them. It was as if they had known that this documentary was going to be made later down the line.

This movie’s structure was very well organized; the tension was built up very well, and the moments that were re-enactments still somehow involved the viewer, so you felt like you were there right along side of Philippe Petit. At the culmination of his finally walking across the twin towers, the movie doesn’t just fade away, there is such an expression of beauty as the shots of him on the wire and the viewers below are placed together.

The only thing that might have let me down within the movie was the ending. I was sad that he didn’t end up with the girl he had originally started with and that it didn’t end with just the walk. It faded away right at the very end when it just seemed incomplete. But I suppose life doesn’t have its perfect endings.

MORE AMODA

That footage wasn’t actually mine, but I was interviewed for Artebone, a small production company which is trying to gather together and look at different artists within Austin especially focusing in on Digital Artists.

This small documentary they were making was for the Austin Museum of Modern Art and the Digital Art Festival they were holding. Some of my favorite 8bit artists were there and I loved seeing the different displays that were up.

I made some new connex, with some of the people there and hopefully that’ll lead to something good later.

I still need to check out AMODA. I wish I had a car. :(

Morgan Spurlock

Morgan Spurlock came as a Distinguished Speaker to the Union. Super Size Me the documentary was one of the documentaries that I found very captivating when I first saw it. ; You might say it changed the way I looked at documentaries. I honestly hadn’t watched as many as I could have before then, but this probably was a turning point for a lot of people. For someone to make something and for it to create as much of a snowball effect as it had done was very inspiring.

Morgan was very honest in his way of speaking, but for a large portion of his speech was more pushing against the unhealthy ways of McDonald’s and how it’s a big evil corporation and so forth. Not that I don’t agree, but I wanted him to talk more about his process.

Once he finally got talking about his process though it seemed like it was just a miracle idea that just popped into his head. He decided to create Super Size me over a Thanksgiving coma when he was watching television and saw a clip of an indivual who was suing McDonalds for making them overweight. And he gathered all of his resources and went out on a limb and did that.

It seemed more like a comedy act than a speech. It was a pretty dynamic speech but it just made me want to stumble upon something that’ll give me recognition like him.

Realms of the Unreal

This was a very eerie but beautiful Doc. It was a little on the long side. It felt like Alice in Wonderland meets Van Gogh meets Peter Pan maybe? I am very impressed with they way they animated Henry Darger’s work. I had actually seen his work before this documentary, but finally learning more about him was enlightening. I wish that I could do the same things they do with animation in flash or after effects or whatever they used.

In looking back at it, most of the film was the illustrations, b-roll, photographs, stock footage and documents. All of the individuals talking were simply underplayed beneath his work. This conveyed the importance of audio and what you can do with only audio. I’d like to implement most of the things I’ve seen in this doc to mine.