Reflections on Media150,

As this semester ends, I've been asked to reflect on my experience in Media 150. I found this course to be very educational and informative. I think I took a lot out from both the lecture, as well as the lab sections.

In general, I believe I learn better from lecture-type environments, and professors Anderson and Lucas were excellent at gaining my interest as well as increasing my knowledge in a variety of subjects. I also appreciated that I was able to apply what I learned in their lectures through my lab sessions. I found the lecture/lab on lighting to be the most interesting, personally. Since that day, I've looked at most television and movies differently. I now take into consideration the work and strain that a lighting director must have, and the amount of effort that goes into each individual shot, for each individual actor.

I also really liked the hands on approach we took with learning Photoshop and other computer programs. This was all very new to me, and I found it incredibly useful. My only wish was that perhaps we had gone a little bit slower, or had more time to work on our projects, as I'm not advanced as a lot of the other students and needed some time and help to figure out what exactly I was doing.

Over all, I definitely enjoyed this course, and look forward to taking Media 160 in the future.

Design I Like: Dexter

The design that I chose was the opening sequence of the Showtime hit, Dexter. Dexter is a program about a man who works for the Miami Police Department as a forensic blood analysist. He leads an average life with a home in the suburbs, beautiful wife and three children. Dexter's secret however is that he is actually a serial killer. He is a vigilant who brings justice to the criminals that have, for whatever reasons, slipped through the cracks of the judicial system. I have always been intrigued by the introduction to this show, and felt that it serves the duality of his life very well.



The introduction consists of Dexter's daily morning rituals. He wakes up, shaves, makes breakfast, gets dressed, and leaves his apartment for work. What makes this so interesting is how it was filmed and designed. It is filmed almost entirely as extreme close-ups, giving the viewer an abstract look at what they are watching. Similar to when you look at a impressionist painting up close it is just blurs of color, but when you step back it reveals an image. My favorite example of this is when Dexter is opening a package of ham. All we see is this fleshy pink meat that is being aggressively cut and diced, a moment later it is in the frying pan and begins to sizzle, and we realize that he isn't murdering someone, he's simply making breakfast. Another example would be when he is tying his shoes. We see his hands lacing his boots, and then he is tugging at his shoe laces, fiercly gripping them until his knuckles turn white.

Part of the reason I love this introduction so much is that it is decieving, especially to a first time viewer. After watching it for the first time I remember thinking about how wonderfully it was created and how everything he was doing were examples of everyone's morning routine, it is simply the angles and the circumstances that give it this creepy context.

What I See: "I am a human being."

The movie I chose to analyze for my second blog was “The Elephant Man”, directed by David Lynch in 1980. The first and most obvious visual choice made by the director was to have the film shot in black and white. Although I'm not entirely familiar with David Lynch's work or his stylistic decisions, I thought perhaps this was an homage to the 1932 horror film “Freaks” by Tod Browning, which has a similar theme about misunderstood sideshow performers and the cruelty of society.

David Lynch freely used three-point perspective with most of his shots, as well as leadroom and lookspace to create a sense of balance and aesthetic throughout the film. As lead room occurs, there are several shots where the camera is being operated in a pan style, smoothly transitioning to where the main subject is moving. I also noticed the camera angles that take place throughout the film. Most people were filmed from a medium shot angle, with slow movements to other subjects, which added to the creepy sensation that they were trying to put across to their audience.

I found that the best example of three-point perspective and lookspace took place at exactly the middle of the film. During this scene, the camera switches between two angles. One is that of the main character, John Merrick having tea with his friend Frederick Treeves, and his wife. The two of them are perfectly centered on the invisible lines that make up the three-point perspective. The other shot is of the doctor who is standing by the mantle piece, on the right hand side of the frame, with lookspace infront of him, implying that he is looking at his wife and John.

Trip to the Museum of the Moving Image

I recently joined my media/film production course on a trip to The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, NY. The MotMI is dedicated to presenting the history of film and television. We took a tour which began with simple Victorian era toys such as the Zoetrope and Thaumatrope, and led us through how the moving image has changed in history, ending with how green screens are used.

My favorite part of the tour was learning about sound editing and how different noises are put together. At one point on the tour there was a station where you could sit down and dissect all of the different noises during a scene from “Titanic”. They used a variety of sounds to get all of the effects that they wanted, such as having people come into a sound booth and simply recording what they needed said. They also have people available who design the sounds with everyday items. My favorite part was how they use stock sounds of animals to fill in for certain scenes, for instance, at one point one of the chimney stacks on the ship falls into the ocean, and to get the effect of it falling, they used an elephant. I thought it was very interesting and a creative way to get the right effect.

Numerous change have occurred in moving image technology in the last 120 years or so. Beginning with the Zoetrope and Thaumatrope, which were really just creative ways to show how the human brain can be deceived by a fast image, to the Kinetoscope, moving to film cameras that use chemicals such as silver to capture light and images on film reels. The technology has also gotten much more mobile and smaller. The earliest film cameras were bulky, and had to be set on a tripod, and throughout the early twenty-first century they seemed to only get bigger. The invent of portable videos allowed for cameras to begin to decrease in size, changing our experience with them. Now, most people have a digital recorder in their phones.