Speaking with Animation: Frog in a Blender

The animation “Frog in a Blender” (Linked here) is an old interactive Flash animation by Joe Shields of Joecartoon.com. It is not really a cartoon with a message, or with much cultural importance. Shields would even put the line “Joe Cartoon, brutally pointless since March 20th, 1961 11.30am” at the bottom of his animations. However, it is still an interesting creative work because it is one example of a popular Flash game from the early days of internet use, and, honestly, it is still amusing.

The animation is not mechanistic, but it is not very lifelike either, because it is 2-D and the style is very simple, like a children’s drawing. The frog blinks its eyes, spins slowly or quickly depending on which blender button a person presses (this animation uses ActionScript commands such as “MouseEvent:Click”) or spits out a fly. It also teases the player, encouraging us to click on the blender button with the fastest speed. When we finally do, the blender almost immediately blends the frog and all we see is red water with some parts floating in it. On the one hand, this is very morbid, but on the other hand, by giving the frog such an unpleasant personality, it makes the player feel okay with killing it. Actually, this is pretty cruel, but this cruelty seems to imitate sophisticated video games that kids like to play, so it is not so unusual. If anything, this animation reflects video game users’ desire to see violence and have control over it. It just does it in a much simpler way.

Making My Video

I decided to make a video tour of Hunter College for High School seniors. Before I started shooting, I did the storyboard first because I wanted to make sure that I show all of the important images of the college that would appeal to high-schoolers. I wanted to make it feel like the viewer is walking through the college. So, I started with the images of the outside, included many images of the inside of Hunter, and ended with the image of the outside again. After I created the storyboard, I was waiting for a sunny day to shoot my images and I spent almost four hours shooting the footage.

The editing process was the best part because I had all the shots that I needed and I just had to put them together with Final Cut Pro and Quick Time Pro. I chose the Baha Men song “Get Ya Party On” because it has a fast beat, and would appeal to young people who want college to be fun. I chose to use a lot of pans in my video may be because I want the viewers to feel that they were looking around the school themselves. For the library shelves shot, since I didn’t have a dolly, I put the camera in my backpack and dragged it across the floor. I made sure to include shots of the pool, and I used a ripple effect to make the viewer feel that they were in the water themselves. I also used my tripod to get shots of The Hunter entrance from the terrace by extending my camera over the terrace fence. I like the editing part because I can take random images and make them into whatever I want. I have to say that I am grateful to Rashan, the network administrator at Hunter, because he helped me publish my video to the web. I think my video represented all the important things about Hunter in a way that would give prospective students a good idea of how it really is.

Artists are Not Bullet-Proof

What really impressed me about Natalia Almada was how dedicated she is to the truth. In her film The General, she shows the Mexican ex-president, who is her great-grandfather, in a balanced way. He is both a man with good intentions but also someone who is seen as a dictator. It must have been difficult for her to handle the film in a neutral way, since she is writing about someone from her family, but she does it well. She also goes on to show the struggles of the poor, who try to cross the border in hopes of better opportunities. She is not shy about showing the violence, abuse and drug trafficking involved in the process. She says, “I am not the one to judge it. It’s time itself.” You can really see her passion toward truth and filmmaking in her film.


The honesty of her film is admirable. The General was made in 2007, but today the violence at the border has increased. Almada says the she will continue to show things as they are, which is one of the roles of an artist: to show the reality of a situation through their work, even if it is difficult or unpleasant. However, this made me realize the danger of being a filmmaker. People in dangerous areas do not always respect artists or the media. Artists can find themselves in dangerous situations, or even be killed as a result of pursuing their desires. The work of Almada, and many like her, is the result of a gamble with their own lives. This is both honorable and terrifying to think about, and reminds us that artists are heroes, who risk their lives to bring us what they have seen.

Shutter Island Trailer Editing

For this blog I chose the trailer for the movie “Shutter Island” by Martin Scorsese, because I think the editing made a huge contribution to the story telling in the advertisement. The way the shots are organized is to introduce the viewer to the story and build suspense from the beginning. The trailer is mostly made up of alternating close ups, long shots, and wide pans.


The first shot of the trailer is a ghost ship, which tells the viewer this is will be a scary movie, with a few quick flashes of hanging hooks and naked disturbed-looking people. Then, the camera pans through the gates of the asylum from the viewer’s point of view so it is as if we walk through the gate ourselves. Now, we are trapped on the island with DiCaprio. After that, the images become scarier, with multiple long shots of dark, leaky hallways, dramatic contrasts of light and dark in the lighting, and more close-ups of DiCaprio, where he looks stressed out, sweating, washing his face and panicking. There are alternating aerial pans of the island, with its jagged rocks and dark water, and shallow shots of drowned corpses or crazy inmates. The final shot is of a cliff, with DiCaprio’s hand barely hanging on.


In terms of composition, this trailer is excellent: even though the cuts are obvious, the viewer accepts them because of the story they tell. The long hallways, the dramatic contrasts, and the changes of the actor’s face all function to get the viewer interested in spending the $12 to see the rest of the movie. The trailer is edited specifically for this purpose, and it succeeds. It includes a narrative, builds suspense, and introduces a conflict, but gives no resolution. We want to know: will he pull himself up from that cliff? Will he get to the bottom of this mystery?


Click here to view "Shutter Island" video

Interactivity

The way I use media today is amazing and its accessibility and speed is unimaginable. Mostly, I enjoy the interactivity aspect of modern media. I use Yahoo to send mail to friends and family members and Skype to talk and see people who live far away. These types of media make it very easy to stay in touch with everyone; years ago, this kind of interaction took up a lot of time and money, but today it has gotten so easy and inexpensive! I also really like my cell phone. If the GPS in a car doesn’t work, I can look up directions on my phone, I can call and email people, I can listen to music, take pictures and videos, and it connects to the internet. On the internet, I also like to use search engines such as Google for everything from homework to movie show times, and look up information on Wikipedia. I also frequently visit news sites such as BBC, New York Times and the Associated Press. However, the type of media I use most often is television (CNN, Democracy Now).


Except for my blog, I don’t create web content, but I appreciate the fact that people can post information on the internet (such as the human-rights violation videos we talked about in class) because it gives regular people access to information that governments and corporations want to keep hidden. It really gives people a better opportunity to make decisions than we ever had in the past.


So, it looks like my relationship with media is mostly based on the idea of interactivity: I like to interact with the information available to me from media sources, and I like to be able to interact with people I care about using new media.

Darius Khondji

When I looked up information about Darius Khondji, I realized I had already seen many of his movies: The Beach, The Interpreter, Se7en, and The Ninth Gate. Actually, these are all movies that were memorable to me in some way, and now I know the man responsible for that. I found a quote from him that says, “filmmaking is the orchestration of emotions through light.” Now that I reflect on these films, I see that this is true.

What I like most about Khondji’s cinematography in these films is his use of wide pans, light, and how he captures details. He lets the camera pan over the beautiful or exotic scenery like the tropical island in The Beach or the mysterious European mansions in The Ninth Gate. I also noticed that he is not afraid to place the camera at unique angles, to enhance the mood of a scene. Se7en is a great example of this, since the camera slowly moves over each horrible crime scene that the killer left behind, making the viewer feel as sick as the detectives who found it. Also, the close-up of Brad Pitt’s face at the end of Se7en is absolutely unforgettable, with the clear blue sky behind him, and his eyes swelling with tears and rage, right before he shoots the killer in the head. The long shots of Nicole Kidman running in The Interpreter are so sharp and full of detail, and so are the scenes filmed inside the giant auditoriums of the UN where her character works.

The depth of field (the front to back range of focus in an image) in some of his scenes is filled with detail, yet they appears clear and sharp. Some examples are the UN auditoriums, or the many library-room scenes in The Ninth Gate where, if viewers take their focus off Johnny Depp’s actions, they can probably see each book individually. Khondji doesn’t miss anything! He must have the eye of an eagle to make sure all these details are included.

Out of Order 2 Exhibition

I saw all the short nonlinear pieces from the Hunter Integrated Media Arts Program graduate students in Brooklyn at Monkey Town. These stories and documentaries were very short and used multiple screens that displayed information in unique ways.

The first video was an Interactive Installation, Untitled by Laurie Sumiye Filiak. The film shows a forest but when people walked by in front of the four sensors installed under the screen, the video image changed to the death of nature. This experimental work was easy to understand because it uses only two screens. Another film Untitled by Julie Mazo was extremely overwhelming. There were four screens on each wall and the people in the film were talking at the same time and were moving around from screen to screen. One girl was talking about consumerism, another one was speaking Spanglish, a choreographer was talking about African dance, and a police officer was talking about dead bodies. It was difficult to focus because they were talking at the same time. t.b.i. by Kathy Conkwright and Victoria Estok shows the life of a man with Traumatic Brain Injury after a plane crash. For me, it was very difficult to really concentrate on one screen only because there were four screens running at the same time and everything that he was saying in each screen was important.

Don’t tell anyone by Caro Montalvo talks about confessions of adultery. The audio was confusing because the viewer heard different voices talking at the same time about “cheating”, “double life”, “laughing”, “fighting”, “love” and “secrets”. The four videos on black screens show these words in white for few seconds and then they change to another word related to adultery. I tried to see everything at the same time but it was impossible because it was all moving too fast.

Smoke and Mirrors by Jennifer Jacobs is an amazing artistic animation created with a kind of Japanese anime style that uses a lot of details. on each one of the four screens there were showing different dolls taking off a kind of scarf that disappeared in front of the doll’s body. I think it was cute and the animation was very creative, but I felt like I could not fully appreciate them because there were four and they were moving so fast that I could not look long enough at any one of them.

The last film that I saw was Breve Espacio by Cristina Herrera, about “holding on to a lost memory.” This black and white video uses only 2 screens showing the same image and sound at the same time. One of the shots that she record showing the faucet dripping water just made me feel that sense of loss (beautiful shot, lighting, sharp and clean). As a viewer, I felt the grief that she talks about when she mentions that she is missing her father who is no longer with her.

Overall, I know that these projects were experimental, but I could only suggest that for the audience it will be easier to view the four screens in a place that shows the projection in a more comfortable space, like a planetarium. This way, viewers can appreciate the students’ work more, because they would be able to see the multiple screens together, instead of missing information becoming confused by looking from wall to wall. This is what happened to me when I looked at most of these projects, with the exception of Breve Espacio, and Laurie Sumiye Filiak’s Untitled.