Sound (Chion article)

The presence (or lack there of) of sound with film has always been of paramount concern to me with my movie making and movie watching experiences in life. One reason I am so drawn to film is because I believe it is the ultimate art; that is, it combines so many different mediums that enhance so many of the senses – sound being one of the important factors here. The absence of sound or minimal sound can add stronger tones or moods to a film than a film with sound. Take a look at the Coen brothers’ film, ‘No Country for Old Men’. In the first fifteen minutes, it only uses diegetic sound and contains no dialogue. But this still used sound effects and diegetic sound. Rarely do we see films without sound. The only films I can think of without any sound are those made by Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, other Fluxfilmmakers, and a few other avant-garde filmmakers that I’ve seen recently. Even back in the day during the silent-era of movies live music would accompany a film.

Cameraless/Experimental Filmmaking

Thus far, I am absolutely loving our 6x1 class. The creative and experimental aspects of this class is exactly up my alley. I have never worked with actual film before - so obviously I have been very excited to really get my hands on actual film stock. Before I got into filmmaking/video production I was taking AP Studio Art classes with a focus on acrylic painting. The painting on film is awesome - I never thought I would actually get to paint or scratch film. I went to interview with a bunch of art schools in 2006 up in Washington D.C. and ended up interviewing with Cal Arts. That was the first time I had ever heard of or seen any examples of scratching on film. A Cal Arts student had taken some super 8 footage of roses that she had personally filmed and scratched each frame with rose thorns. This was the first time I had ever seen an experimental film where scratching was involved. Cameraless filmmaking never really occurred to be much of a possibility to me before I saw that scratch film. Of all of the techniques we have gone over so far the magazine transfer and the ink mixed with oils. The magazine transfers are probably my favorite but I think that the ink and oil will be the most appropriate for our first project. I'm looking forward to working more and more on these experimental projects in the weeks and months to come.

Synesthesia Commentary of Horrible Blogger

Since first discovering the phenomena of synesthesia my sophomore year of high school, I have been very interested in the topic. I’ve seen a couple of documentaries on synesthesia in the past one of which has stood out in my mind ever since. It had to do with synesthete-savants. Whenever one of the savants would here a number or thinks of a number a symbol or mental picture accompanied it in his head. Because of this combination of synesthesia and savantism, he was able to list off something like 10,000 decimals of the number pi. I’ve always experienced minor synesthesia throughout my life. I can remember being in elementary school and asking one of my friends as a kid if colors came to mind when he thought of a day of the week. For me Saturday and Sunday have the strongest synesthetic color connotations – Sunday is a solid brown and Saturday is a solid red. During my junior year of high school I took AP Studio Art and actually did an abstract painting that tracked a 12 minute musical jam of Phish’s “You Enjoy Myself” via an abstract expressionist-esque (i.e. Rothko-ish) color degradation on top of a black background. I’ve always had these color or graphic synesthetic connotations with music and am glad that I can try to incorporate it into a new medium.