6x1: aFORTable and fun!

When I was told to bring sheets/blankets and a pillow to sit on, I was super ready for some fort-building. I deduced that we’d be building a fort, because I remember you mentioning something about forts involved with this class, and I figured that if we needed a pillow to sit on, we’d be on the floor. So I came super ready, and man was I excited. I absolutely love building forts, just last semester my roommates and I created a pretty epic one that took up the entire living room, so I was ready to bring that skill into a new venue: a classroom.

It was even cooler, when I realized that we’d be projecting our films onto a bedsheet within our sheeted fortress. It’s a whole new atmosphere, something elementary and really fundamental about it, yet unique. And the feeling that we made the screen and the fort, made me feel more like a pioneer than a filmmaker. Because we made those things. Also, we made a great feast, which was super appreciated. (I was really excited to make my buffalo chicken dip for the class, it’s one of my show-off party foods :p )

It only heightened the experience that we all had our own personal, individual, hand-made 3-D glasses. Even though I’ve made forts before, and I’ve seen 3-D movies before, and been to potlucks before, and had my movies screened for a crowd before, this experience felt like something totally new. I felt like a little kid, and at the same time felt really experienced in film: not many students have made a 3-D film from start to finish. That’s pretty cool.

It also was another chance to be resourceful and creative, which really followed the theme of our 48-hour video race. We had few resources (few people brought sheets to work with), and had to pick something that would work effectively. It was great having access to the equipment room, and I was glad that Barrett read my mind in using a butterfly kit to get a lot of height and area for our fort. It also promoted our class to once again work as a team to accomplish a common goal, which I feel has really encouraged a bond to make us feel more like a team than a class. We had to make due with what we had, which definitely ties in with the idea of the limited resources in the 48-hour video race, and the overall concept of rough theater. This was one of my favorite classes ever, and sorely wish that UNCW offered a fort-building 101 class.

My Ruff Theater

The whole idea of rough theater is stripping art of its ornamentation and just having the bare essentials. By making something rugged, it feels more accessible and more true to natural life, which is what makes it so appealing at some times, and so terribly un-escapist at other times. The themes in my films are generally pretty outlandish (my favorite works i’ve made include a stop-motion of broccoli sheep getting eaten by a wolf made of okra, and an animation with hand-drawn characters and sounds produced entirely by me to create a window washer who rides a jetpack), but I like to use simple, accessible styles. For the stop motion I mentioned, Green with Envy, I shot with a standard definition handicam, and I think that its low quality and sort of grittiness is what makes it feel really fun and charming (I hope). For the jetpack animation, I wanted it to feel like a four-year old made it (I have the drawing skills of a four-year-old, so it was kind of unavoidable) so that it would have an elementary, homemade quality.

Rough theater also involves using the materials you have at hand to make your vision work. Myself and probably every other near-broke student in this university are very used to finding work-arounds to spend as little money as possible to achieve our artistic visions. For instance, Flicker Film Society went without a sound recorder while shooting our large crew projects this semester, so we hooked a mic into a mixer, and hooked the mixer into a computer recording the audio with Garage Band. A bit ghetto, yes. But it worked (mostly). I think there’s definitely a charm to rough theater, and working with what you have. It forces you to be resourceful and creative, given whatever limitations you are facing. This goes hand in hand with the famous quote that limitations inspire creativity. I think this is absolutely true, because you often find happy accidents when trying to solve a problem, and those accidents end up being way better than anything you had initially planned. They would not be possible without the limitations in the first place. Also, I generally have problems thinking of an idea out of thin air, but when given a set of rules and a bit of a prompt is when my best thinking occurs. So I think the rough theater is really inspiring, and I subscribe to its philosophy on a regular basis.

Beet Streeeeeeetch

Listening to Beet Stretch was an interesting experience. My first impression was “wow, the first movement is 5 hours long”. I chose to listen to the first movement, because I thought the beginning was just a logical place to start. When I first began listening to it, it felt like listening to a pit orchestra tuning, but for five minutes. Hearing the music resonate, it almost sounded like the instruments were out of tune at a few instances, as you heard that pulsing sound that they tend to make when out of tune. I don’t know if that’s really how it is, or if it’s due to the creation of sound artifacts when you stretch the audio file. Either way, it was almost trance-like. Then when it kicked in a bit, it was really soothing. I’ve been a musician since I was 8, alto saxophone being my first instrument. If there’s anything I’ve learned from playing saxophone, it’s that it’s really difficult to control your dynamics, especially in small increments. That’s one thing that I thought was really incredible about Beet Stretch. A simple crescendo in normal time is really incredible in Beet Stretch, because it just keeps growing into a fortissimo little by little, something that I couldn’t possibly ever hope to achieve with my saxophone. (The air control that requires is absolutely astounding, and possibly impossible for anybody except Kenny G)

I also think it was super epic. The way it builds on itself made me think it’d be awesome in a climactic scene of a movie. When the tone shifts to being a bit darker, it’d be perfect for... well, I imagined the scene in Lord of the Rings when Saruman is creating the Uruk-Hai, but you could say just a really sinister scene. While listening, I must admit that there were points where I just wanted it to speed up. I tend to like melodic music, not ambient music. And at times, I was definitely frustrated with Beet Stretch because I wanted some more moving lines, but obviously that’s not exactly the point of Beet Stretch. So in that way, though, it’s interesting, because most music of today is relatively upbeat, and this purposely makes us anxious to hear something faster, and leaves us frustrated. However, maybe if I were tired when I listened to it, I would’ve loved it, because it probably would’ve been relaxing.

mall-oh-tov and x-ta-c

“On the Rights of Molotov Man” was a very interesting article. I understood immediately why you assigned it to us: because it’s the very thing we’re striving for with our recycled footage assignment. We will be taking work of other people, be it news or films, etc, and recontextualizing it into our own piece of art. This is the very thing that Susan Meiselas argues against. I think that this recontextualizing can really be a good thing, though. It can make a really powerful statement, when you take something that is familiar in one context and then turn it into something totally different. However, I do understand Susan’s viewpoint in this particular matter. The Nicaraguans reproduced this image in ways which payed honor to their history, remembering “Bareta” as a hero. Joy’s painting depicts him as someone starting a riot. I think that I side with Joy in this case. I think it’s a shame that Susan attempted to stop reproductions of Joy’s paintings, as so many people had made re-representations of her photograph so many times. Why did she have a problem with this one, in particular? He may look like he’s starting a riot, but he did throw a molotov cocktail and brandish a rifle, both of which are acts of violence. However, I think that maybe Joy should have looked into the context of the photo, and maybe treated the subject matter a little more carefully. She could’ve made his heroic acts a painting that was just as powerful as the painting is with the subject starting a riot.

I thought “The Ecstasy of Influence” was also really interesting. It brought up a good point: are references to older works creative, or just short of plagiarism? I think that in film, this is something that is constantly an issue. Some films get away with it, and some don’t. When you’re watching something like Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho”, you feel really excited when you pick up on the various Shakespeare references. It makes you feel like an intelligent film-viewer. It’s planted in there, for the people who will make the connection, to feel a surge of intellectualism, so that they feel like they’re the elite who gets the reference, sitting in a theater with a bunch of people whom the reference washes right over. Yet on the other hand, tons of people dislike James Cameron’s “Avatar”, because it’s the same story line as Pocahontas and Dances with Wolves. When is it OK to reference a later work, and when is it not? I think that it’s inescapable. Artists like to view other art. Musicians love music. We’re bound to be influenced by the things we love, and so our work is almost guaranteed to have traces of the things we’ve seen.