I had a lot of fun at Museum of Moving Image with our tour guide. She showed us a couple of exhibits. The first exhibit she showed us was Music. She selected a scene from an old film, where an old man was observing a lady viewing a painting. The subject of the painting was the lady at a younger age. There were a couple of soundtrack options for us to match with the scene. We all agreed on a classical, more somber choice of music. I discovered that this specific aspect of media production is very important because matching the wrong music will set the wrong mood.
Moving on to the sound effects / Foley effects, we watched a scene from the Simpsons. One of the Simpsons was taking a test and there were a couple of the acts that required appropriate sound effects: the clock ticking, her scratching and erasing the test paper, the unicycle bouncing, the lights flickering, and the eyebrows twitching. This exercise was little harder because some of the acts had more than one choice of appropriate sound effects. The group I was in had disagreements on which sound effect was more appropriate. I discovered that this specific aspect of media production is tricky, especially with foley effects when you have to find right objects to make the sounds.
We also went to the exhibit where dialogues, music and sound effects all play into part. The tour guide first showed a scene from the Titanic when it was sinking with complete sounds. Then she played the scene with only dialogue, then only music, and finally only sound effects. We realized that the dialogue was a voice over because it didn't match the actors' lip movements. We also realized that the sound effects were mostly foley effects. The had to use a backward lion roar, shot gun sounds, elephant sounds etc. I was intrigued to watch the scene separately to see how it came to life.
I definitely experienced the correlation of what we learned from the lectures at the museum. The changes in moving image technology changed the way moving images are created, how they look and how we experience them with music, sound effects, visual effects and of course many more.
Thursday, April 16, 2015 Blog #3: Relationships Between Shots
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMIfScB9aY0
I decided to focus this blog post on a three minutes action short film. I believe the editing made a huge impact on the storytelling and feel of the piece. The relationship of the sounds to the images is a solid one because it's an action film, and we would like to hear intense background music, exaggerated sounds of the weapons, footsteps, heavy breathing etc. The relationship of the images to one another is organized by different shot angles and movements. While the two characters are fighting with light sabers, the shots would interchange from a wide angle to close-up to lower angle.The shots also change from their sides through the holes of the walls or behind the two characters or zoom ins on their facial expressions. There's not many colors because the focus was more on the light sabers. Most of the shots aren't that long because they wanted the fight to maintain within three minutes so they tried to fit in as many shots and angles as possible. The order of the shots were placed in were determined by the story line. The cuts were pretty obvious because the angles would interchange very often. If the fight wasn't three minutes there would be a "right" place to cut or not cut but since it is three minutes, I wasn't bothered by the obvious cuts.
The special effects of the wounds of the character need some work because obviously they didn't look real, but I'm guessing the genre isn't horror but rather action. Overall I prefer the content over the editing because it was exciting and left some questions in mind. But with action films we should expect obvious cuts because of the rapid movements.