Project 4 Statement

Scarlett Correa

Project 4

Due: 11/6/13

Statement

After rehashing my ideas multiple times, I went from wanting to film illogical actions like pouring water into rain boots, but decided to shoot a humorous take on the trials we go through in the mornings to get ready for class.

I was inspired by Pitch Films’ video in which people were videotaped going through normal actions, but one or more objects were replaced by objects that had no place in the shot (a man eating a plate of spaghetti, but the spaghetti is a pile of shoelaces). I compiled a list of actions over the course of a few hours on the bus ride home and ran through them with my brother who agreed to help me. The video ended up being a very entertaining process to complete, though we ran into issues with being able to shoot a whole scene without laughing. It definitely gave me a better appreciation for comedy filming.

One of the problems I ran into was when I transferred my video from Final Cut Pro to my computer to finish editing. The files began disappearing and I continually received a notification saying the files were missing or corrupt. Other than that I found the project really enjoyable.

Esteban Arturo Project 4

One Second: Artist Statement

I truly struggle with this project. More than usual. I believe most of the reason for that was due to the broadness of the topic and free range we had for the idea; while limitless, it also proved limiting. That being said, I was able to finally pinpoint a topic/ idea with inspiration from the Fluxus attitude. Watching many of the videos authored by artist of said influence, I came to the conclusion that less is definitely more. Fluxus artist didn't create a narrative with their videos, but an idea; a theme. They commented on societal assumptions and topics, in innovative ways, leaving the interpretation up to the viewer. In "One Second...," I am commenting on the notion of time, and the space in which I personally fill it with. I chose to position my self in circular motions that mimic the turning of clock hands, in simple mundane places that I find my self in daily- my room, my closet, my kitchen, the bathroom, school, work, outside campus, etc. As I circle, I transition using a Cross Dissolve from scene to scene, zooming in ever so slightly to create yet another circle within the moving frames. I also transition from areas of openness outside, to those indoors, to add to this feel of my world closing in rounds. I start with a slow motion clip of my room spinning a a fast rate to show the progression of time, as well as its stillness. This clip evolves into a normal standard ace circular movement, and then further progresses to fast pace clips of video and stills of different origins. These represent my memories. They are fast fleeting, and not always present in my everyday life, so they appear to linger less so than my average routine, yet they are still present. As quickly as it started, these "memory" clips transition back tot the fast slow-motioned clip that I began with, creating a never ending cycle, and yet another circle motif.
I came up with this idea in correlation to the Fluxus's fascination with circles and spirals, and motion in their work, alongside my own awe at how many times I, and other around me insist or ask for “one second." I opted for a tripod, for I wanted to show the wavering and shakiness and unease we feel for time, while it is the most steady unit on earth. I played with the Ken Burn effects to add sharpness to the quality of my clips and images. My audio consists of the ticking of a clock, that stays consistent throughout, except when matching the speed of my "memory" clips- this correlates to the fleetingness of my memories, as well as to our feelings towards "time flying" when having fun.

Experiment Video: Chemical Make-Up

Chemical Make-Up is a video striving to shed light on makeup’s power in society, and bring attention to women’s ritual to abstract and cover her face, rather than pressure my audience to feel a certain way about makeup.  Although makeup is a part of so many people’s daily lives, I feel like many people do not bother to consider beauty’s pervasive influence, and do not consider that the reason they are applying makeup may be due to subconscious societal pressures felt since birth.  We may experience the pressure of not feeling “beautiful enough” with media serving as a constant reminder of today’s standards of beauty, but I do not think we recognize how far we will go.  The audience is allowed to process this information, and then decide on their own how they feel about the subject. The makeup gains a personality of its own in the video, since I chose not to photograph the act of using my hands to apply the makeup, giving the illusion that it’s applying itself.  I found my sound through a collection of tutorials, celebrity interviews, makeup commercials and gossip TV, such as Fashion Police.  Each serves an important purpose individually, but together, all of them point to the idealized and glitzy people society defines as beautiful.  For example, it was important to me to include makeup commercials and interviews with celebrities about their makeup routines, because we idolize them.  Even though Hollywood and magazines are known for being fabricated, airbrushed worlds, we try to bring that into our own lives, so this video focuses on what makeup covers up.  The sound includes people from multiple countries and multiple generations, and in most cases, there is a dialogue between the sound clips that symbolizes recycled beauty ideas since makeup’s conception.

    The video’s indoor apartment setting served to imitate a common setting for makeup tutorials.  But I was careful to keep every surface (wall, table) empty to create a formal environment that echoes a staged photograph or painting in a studio, which is reinforced by the video’s use of still images. The still-images and stationary camera angle provides a timeline from the beginning of the look, to after the makeup’s removal.  The viewer can observe the change in face shape and posture, but the passage of time and changing light is especially noticeable through photographs.  The beginning of the video has an abundance of natural light, but the light is yellow by the end.  The sunset and I gradually turned on more lights in my room, the increasingly artificial light mirroring the increasingly artificial face. I chose to call it Chemical Make-Up to play on the idea of the chemicals we are naturally made-up of and the chemicals we smear on our face in the form of make-up.

Artist Statement

Fo this project my primary concept was based around mother-daughter relationships and the harsh conversations that may occur within these relationships. At the start of this project I wanted to use kitchen sounds and evolve form that but instead of primarily using kitchen sounds I chose to use snippets of common phrases amongst mother-daughter conversations along with the kitchen sounds in the background. I chose to use repetition for these sounds. The associated footage with the sound shoes different mothers and daughters in conversation and how they interact with one another. I chose to use different video footage to show that although the environment and people may change most of the conversation tends to stay the same. The reason for keeping kitchen sounds in the background is to give to the idea that a woman's domain is supposedly the kitchen and this place typically helps form the mother-daughter relationship. The video starts out calm but quickly and abruptly changes. I chose to use the 50's TV filter over the video to give a home video type of feel to seem as though viewers were actually looking the mothers and daughters having a conversation.

Project 3 Statement

Scarlett Correa

Sound project

Due: 10/16/13

Artist Statement

     The premise of my concept, after many reevaluations, was to create a video based on sounds that many people, including me, find frustrating. The sounds I focused on are all incredibly bothersome to me: heavy breathing, vibrating alarm clocks, sniffles, coughing, loud chewing, and scratching, recorded with the help of my roommates who are incredibly loud when eating no matter what they do.

     In order to emphasize how these sounds can elevate blood pressure, I began the video with the softest sounds - breathing - so the audience would have to strain to listen at first. I then increased the intensity and frequency of the noises throughout the video. All layered over each other, they should grate the audience's nerves by the end of the three minutes.

alice on strings: artist statement

alice on strings takes Disney's 1951 animated classic Alice and Wonderland, and replaces its sound with the sound of a sole violin. Every thud, firework, tea kettle, and lyrical passage originate from my violin. The visuals and sound work together to produce a "version" of reality that is similar to the realm we experience, but with an unexpected twist of fantasy.  While Alice is a believable child character, the animals sing, she grows and shrinks based on what she consumes, and the landscapes become "curioser and curioser.”  The sound shares a similar function, because the viewer will identify with the sounds in the scenes, only to discover the multitude of sounds came from a single source. Alice in Wonderland is a highly imaginative literary and artistic work, so it seemed the appropriate visual backdrop for a sound experiment, where I don’t try to trick or suspend the viewer, but recreate Alice’s original soundtrack.  The visual landscapes and auditory soundscapes are fantastical, allowing the viewer to question whether this dimension is tangible with one’s reality, and more specifically, the validity and believability of sounds’ sources.  Since the violin is being used in a non-traditional way to imitate everyday sounds, the goal is to surprise the viewer that thinks a firecracker is the only thing that can make a firecracker sound, or a clock’s gears are the only things that cause it to tick.  Some of the sounds in alice on strings are realistic imitations while others are abstracted, such as the bird call, due to the medium and my ability (or inability) to produce an accurate sound.  This mix of narrative versus lyrical representation of sound showcases the tonal and textural range of the violin, and adding interest to the work.  I found my video not only mimicked recognizable sounds, but also the history of music.  In the beginning, the breeze is a calming harmonic chord, which represents music’s earliest interest in creating melody and a transcendent experience using sounds unlike those heard in everyday settings.  As the video progressed, the length of the sound files got progressively shorter.  Arguably, towards the end, the video sounds emptier.  However, the middle and ending were the hardest and most time consuming to create because the video clips required sounds that were more percussive, more relatable to our everyday lives.  This represents modern and contemporary music, which often sounds odd because it is breaking away from “pretty” and “sensible” to create something different for a new generation.  For the latter portion of the video, though it sounds emptier, I had up to five or six layers of sound accompanying the action.

Scarlett Correa and Madeleine Lachesnez's artist statement

Scarlett Correa and Madeleine Lachesnez

Stop motion project

Due: 9/30/13

Artist Statement
"Henry"

Our story revolves around the process of animation through a short glimpse in the life of a curious and enthusiastic octopus that has a very difficult time making friends. We found this to be a topic that allows the audience to empathize, while also being something we don’t give much thought to when it comes to animals, who can be social creatures like us. So in spite of being very kind and friendly, whenever our cheerful octopod protagonist approaches another sea creature, they ignore him or are too busy to stop and say hello.

We chose to animate all the creatures in a very loose style that maintained artistic integrity where it was still clear that each frame was hand drawn, rather than going for a polished Disney look. We took care to use perspective and framing to our advantage by emphasizing certain scenes that were pivotal to the story, the most important one being the introduction of our octopus friend, Henry, who is an example of the illustrative process. Although we could only do 8 to 10 frames per second given how labor intensive our approach was, we aimed to make the movements as smooth as possible through subtle changes in each frame.

                  There is some difference between our animation styles, which we decided to keep in since animators typically work in teams and work around each other to come up with a final product. Since our video focuses mainly on the beginning stages of that process, we let the audience inside our world as creators.

Altogether this project was hugely insightful and allowed us some firsthand experience in the world of animation, a field we already had enormous respect for. We learned some tricks for simplifying and looping images that reduced our work load while still allowing us the smooth movement of characters. We enjoyed the process immensely and hope to be able to work on something like this again in the future.

Tara and Tatyana's Artist Statement: Dil and Duh Go Get Coffee

    In "Dil and Duh Go Get Coffee," Tatyana and Tara wanted to spoof a normal event, meeting a friend for coffee, by adding a surreal twist using Dil and Duh, two matchbox-sized Play-doh shoes, and making a human-sized kitchen look like an expansive and arduous landscape.  Along the way, Dil and Duh encounter any hiccup possible: water, dirty dishes, refrigerators and ovens.  Viewers are able to relate to the shoes’ journey if they have ever experienced a day where it seems like they would never get to their destination because they hit every obstacle along the way, but what separates viewers from the shoes is the obstacles they face are not the obstacles humans face, and their destination is one that would take us two steps, which creates a humorous effect.   Many of the stop-motions shown in class were thought provoking because the artist slightly shifted reality, such as the one with the man making guacamole, and the event appeared believable because photographs seem to provide evidence that it happened, yet it is fantastical, because the viewer knows it cannot happen.  We played on this contradiction in thought that stop-motion creates by portraying a believable scenario in an unbelievable way, literally and metaphorically providing a new perspective on a familiar setting.  Dil and Duh is short for Diligent and Dumb, symbolizing the characters’ personalities and approaches to their journey; Dil is focused and aware on his journey, while Duh seems oblivious and lost.  A third character is introduced, that of a ubiquitous owl who appears throughout the video whenever the shoes experience a problem.  He seems to be responsible for the obstacles the shoes face, and serves as a constant to balance out the two extremes, to unify both the shoes’ turbulent travels.  Lastly, we used narration and dialogue for sound.  The shoes’ speech can be described as “stream of consciousness,” because they voice what is on their mind, and narrate what is happening to them as it’s happening.  Without speech, the stop motion runs the risk of looking like a string of random events, the shoes wouldn’t be as relatable, and their motives wouldn’t be as clear from the beginning.  Also, the hyper speech and dramatic inflexions compliments the stop-motion’s quick tempo.  Lastly, we chose to duplicate some of the images, especially close-ups of the characters, to create dramatic and/or awkward moments, where we wanted to grab the viewer’s attention.