Reflections on Our Class

Film and Media in a Digital Age Fall 2009 at Hunter College has been a magnificent experience because it would have been impossible for me to learn all of this information by myself. When I started this course I knew nothing about blogging, HTML, CSS and Photoshop, and then my knowledge of it has grown tremendously. I could never imagine having my own webpage; now I see myself in the stamp that I designed and in the blog that we built.
On the internet and even in the class we are so close to each other but so distant at the same time. Each one of us worked in the labs with Cristina and it was like dreaming because she retrieved each one of our blogs. It was exciting to see everybody’s work!
This blogging business has shown me that there are even more ways of expressing myself; in media reaching this point in technology it is as rewarding as it is scary. I realize that if we put our information on the internet, anybody can have access to it, and this can be positive, but also very dangerous. So, this has taught me to be more careful about what information I provide.
We posted clips of movies, music, our own photos and the stamp. The stamps made by students in the last lecture were very creative. I think all of us were having fun in the Digital Age class. We learned things that, in this age, are necessary because technology is improving so rapidly and is so important to our education and careers. So, this class was a very valuable experience for me.
I would also like to say that it could not be possible for me to transfer to HTML videos, sites and picture without the technical support of Mr. Rashaan; hopefully next semester we can have his presence in the Labs because he an expert and we can learn a lot from him.

And speaking of new technology- google The Onion News "Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop with No Keyboard"
It seems pretty silly to us now, but you never know what technology will come out next...

“Design I like: Zeitgeist Movie Poster”

For more information about this film, go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeitgeist,_the_Movie

Poster Design:
Alignment tells people what image is important, by presenting it in a way that attracts the eye’s attention. In the case of this poster, all we see is the large letters of the title, and a large but partly shaded image of the world. Zeitgeist means the “spirit of the era” in German. So, if we see this word in large letters, and then see the world trapped in a cage, we may imagine that the “spirit” of the era is negative, or that the movie has a critical view of modern times. In this way, the alignment of the words and image gives viewers a hint about the ideas in the film.

The poster does not really make use of the grid system, but there is an actual grid present in the poster. The world is in a cell. This seems like a pun because a grid system in Media Design is meant to organize an image and make it appear harmonious to our minds. However, in this image, the grid is bent and placed around the Earth, trapping it in a cage. This creates a feeling of discomfort in viewers: it sends the message that humanity is caught in a prison. This relates to the idea of psychological constraint, because it makes people think about the limitations of freedom on Earth- which is actually a key theme in the film. Thus, it prepares people for what the film is about.

The font of the movie title may also be significant to the meaning of the film. The font is Courier New, and “as a monospaced font, it has recently found renewed use in the electronic world in situations where columns of characters must be consistently aligned” (Wikipedia). So it is possible that using this font for the title of the movie is a hint that people are being organized and controlled, as this font is used to organize things and keep them neat and easy to see.


By using this specific alignment and font, and by playing with the idea of the grid system, this poster reveals to viewers the meaning of the movie it is advertising.

Out At Work

“Out at work”

It is a documentary film from 1993 made by Tammy Gold and Kelly Anderson, two filmmakers and professors at Hunter College. The movie it is about discrimination, threats and abuse against lesbians and homosexuals in their work place. The film captures three people’s stories: Cheryl Summerville, cook at Cracker Barrel restaurant, Ron Woods an electrician worker at Chrysler automakers and Nat Keitt, a worker at the New York City Public Library. Cheryl was fired for her sexual orientation, Ron was protesting to support gays and lesbian rights and received threats from his coworkers, and Nat was prevented from including his partner, David under his health insurance plan as a spouse.


Fear: These two stills depicting the discrimination against homosexuals in the workplace, and the dangers they face.







It is amazing that workers who are trying to make a living have to face abuse because of their sexual orientation, which is something that has no affect on their job!







Cheryl hides inside a car because an angry mob is ready to attack her. This is a shot of a windshield and the sky.


Awareness: Gay Rights supporters raise awareness of injustice through protest and information sessions.




Woods talks about how to change the attitude at workplace to allow homosexual people to exist in peace like everyone else.





Activists are protesting against discrimination at work. One protests is outside Cracker Barrel restaurant that fired Cheryl, and another gay protest. These protestors are sometimes arrested for standing up for their rights.


Seeing the Filmmakers:






Professor Anderson, I see you!






Professor Gold, I see you, too!







This is a shot of Nat and his partner David celebrating Christmas together. The Filmmakers did a wonderful job showing viewers a loving relationship.
I think this shot is very artistic because in this frame David disappears in the left dark side but Nat’s silhouette is framed by the window-frame and backlight at the right. By the end of the film, Nat is still alive but David will die from AIDS. By capturing this scene of them celebrating together, the filmmakers show the most human side of both of them: they love and care for each other, and this makes viewers more sympathetic to their struggles.







Tammy Gold and Kelly Anderson clip of Nat and David’s Christmas dinner. This is one of the moments or shot when the filmmaker’s presence is suggested in the film. The filmmakers are rarely in front of the camera, but the two extra plates on the table suggest that Nat and David accept the filmmakers into their lives, and show appreciation.






Queer nation activist is recording the protest and an anti-homosexual protester punches his video camera. This shows how risky this profession can be. The filmmakers put their safety on the line in order to cover issues of discrimination and abuse.

CLICK IMAGE TO WATCH MOVIE


This is a clip from the Question and Answers session after the film at Hunter College on November 19 2009. Tammy Gold talks about the focus of the film. She comments that the film technology has greatly improved since the documentary was made in 1993 (digital format has been invented) but the protection against discrimination for homosexuals in the workplace has not really advanced as much.


For me, the people that the filmmakers chose to feature in the film are an inspiration. They struggle with fear and discrimination, but they keep fighting. Even though they are victims of society, they show the will to survive.
For Tammy Gold and Kelly Anderson, it is not just about making documentary films. This should be the purpose of a every documentary filmmaker: to show a problem or a situation in a humble way try to or help to ease the pain situation by making people aware of the problem. By erasing their ignorance and promoting sympathy, the film encourages positive change. People’s attitudes toward the problem will change, and this encourages positive results. That’s the biggest accomplishment of documentary filmmaking. The struggle is still on, but this film will a be historical record of the advances of human progress in history.

What I See in Babel!

So often, when I watch movies I don’t know how they make me feel so emotional. Now I understand that this is the “magic” of the camera. The cinematographer uses the camera to help make the viewer feel a specific way. In the film Babel, cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto and director Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu use different techniques to make the scenes reflect the themes and feeling of the film. The film takes place in Morocco, Mexico, Japan and the United States. The themes in the film include love, desperation, and uncertainty, as the characters try to solve their different problems. The techniques in the film include using grainy film, switching film types, using a handheld camera, using unbalanced shots, and selective focus. The overall effect of these technical choices is a film that makes viewers feel involved in the emotions of the characters.






This scene takes place on the roads in Morocco, where Prieto used grainy film to make the setting look even drier, dustier and older than it really is. This makes viewers feel the foreignness and emptiness of the place. I could feel the harshness of the lives of the people who live there.
In this scene, Richard Jones (Brad Pitt) is running to get help for his wife, Susan (Cate Balchette), who was shot. He is scared and desperate, running for help but not finding anyone. The scene is shot with a handheld camera, held by someone directly behind Pitt. The result is a scene that looks shaky, unclear and unbalanced. This reflects the feelings of the character, who cannot get help for his dying wife. Viewers can really feel sympathy for Richard Jones because we see everything exactly as he sees it: everything is scary and unclear.







In this scene, Abdulla (Mustapha Rachidi) holds his son, Ahmed (Said Tarchani) as he is dying. He has just been shot by police because they thought he was the one who shot Susan Jones. This is an extreme close up of the dying boy and the grieving father. Because we see them so close up (intimately), we really feel the father’s pain, and are able to empathize with him.
Again, the film is grainy, which makes the Moroccans’’ clothes look old and colorless. This helps to add to the unhappiness of this scene.









This scene takes place in the dessert of Mexico, where Prieto captured brighter colors. You can see the difference between the Morrocan sand, which is pale and colorless, and the Mexican sand, which is reddish and bright. This is because in Mexico, Prieto used 35mm film and in Morocco, he used 16mm. The difference in quality of the film makes similar settings look different.
In this scene, Amelia (Adrianna Barraza) is looking desperately for help because she needs to find her employers’ young children in the dessert. This is a wide shot, which captures the huge desert and the sky. This shot shows viewers how helpless and isolated she is: we can see that all around her there is nobody to help her. The shot is also unbalanced, with more room to Amelia’s right than her left side, which makes viewers uncomfortable. This reflects her own feelings of discomfort and desperation.








This is a shot where Prieto uses selective focus to suggest to viewers who is responsible for the shooting of Susan Jones. In this scene, Ahmed’s father gives him a rifle and tells him to shoot Jackals. Then, the adults leave the boys in charge of the rifle. After this scene, one of the boys will shoot at a tour bus, just to see if the bullet will travel that far. The bullet hits Susan Jones, who is in the tour bus.
This scene suggests that the adults are responsible because they left the boys alone with a gun: The boy is in the foreground and he is blurry, the adults are walking away in the middle ground, and the camera focuses on them so the audience can see them clearly walking away. The background is of the mountains that the boys will shoot on without supervision, and hit the tour bus. By shooting the scene behind the boy’s head, the audience sees what the boy sees: his father leaving him alone with a gun in a huge space. We are meant to feel the boy’s freedom, which is what makes the boy shoot at the tour bus.



The cinematographer and director can manipulate the audience by making different technical choices- and that’s what makes a movie unique. In Babel, Rodrigo Prieto uses different film gauges and filters for different settings. He also uses close-ups, wide shots, unbalanced shots, selective focus, and a hand-held camera to make the viewer feel the emotions of the characters in the film. This way, we feel like we are travelling to each country ourselves just by looking at the movie, and we are feeling the emotions of the characters, as if we are there with them. The technical choices Prieto makes are different for each scene, but these specific choices are constant through the whole movie, and make each scene unique.

Museum

MOMI in Astoria NY, what a trip!

This is like an amusement park transporting you into the history of film. Film as art, is demonstrated as an explosion of human creative imagination, of image, sound and magic. If you are planning to work in the film industry; this place shows the birth, development and rise of a digital era converging the world wide web into a powerful tool whose main goal is to use strategic computer games to hypnotize brains, planned in such a way that it is part of our daily life, we love it, we enjoy it and we paid to be hooked. When you exit the Museum you feel that you went to the moon and came back to earth disarmed, looking desperately for a cell phone to be wireless or electrically connected. Whitout baterry power you will be lost.

You will find all aspects of film, television and digital media. Costumes, make-up collections such as the Elephant man, the Exorcist, Frankenstein and pictures of famous Hollywood actors: Greta Garbo, Charles Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, etc. The 1st silent block buster “The Great Train Robbery” is 11 minutes and the special effects were painted frame by frame. This was like a magician film, traveling to different theaters because there was only one copy. The Kinetoscope by Edison was the 1st home projector, it runs less than a minute and people used to pay a nickel to see it. The Movies did not make much money but marketing with mini-toys, contest like Charles Chaplin look-alike, Photoplay and Picture Play magazines produced profit to expand and create wonders in this business where innovation is improving so rapidly.

The 3rd floor is really cool because is more interactive, children and adults will love it, it begins with the origins of Moving Image with the Victorian Optical Toys. The Thaumatrope illustrates how motion picture works, (bird in the cage) it has Greek roots that means “magic that turns”. Behind the Magic Lantern you can see the “Persistence of vision”: moment of rest, light and speed.

My next stop was the ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) room, where I had hands on experience of being a voice actor. Vioce acting involves practice, rehearsal, record, play back, record. I think every body enjoy it, it was cute and funny. In the next room we chose a video and edited the sound with music to give a sense of scariness, happiness, etc. The movie “Twister” with country music sounds ridiculous. Our guide told us that MOMI used to be the film processing for Kauffman Studios.

The MOMI has this 10 minutes movie: Pioneers of “Stop Motion Animation: Making “King Kong.” The filmmakers used different views of New York, Times Square was a set to work all night long with 400 actors; it creates a view of New York City in 1933, they were supposed to concentrate on the meticulous work. This really impresses me because of the amount of work involved in making the movie. If you were shooting 150 frames-shot for 6 seconds long it takes 6, 7, or 10 hours, depending on how complicated the scene is, it involves technique, photography, persistence and artistic vision.


Peter Jackson in his “King Kong”, researched about the Empire State building, and retrieved the original blue prints of the building. He spend few months trying to research locations from different views using a kind of hypnotized software to rebuild NYC from the air and different views from street level; from tall buildings he could shoot down the street, they have the perfect setting to create magical imagination on the screen.

I really enjoy my visit to MOMI!