My roll in our music video

For my group's music video I will be taking on the role of sound and lighting and while we haven't fully decided on what we will be producing, I do have a few ideas that I would like to incorporate. Since we will be shooting some of our video inside and outside i know that lighting will need to be addressed and I'm hoping that we might be able to do some cool stuff with some high contrast lighting especially if our outdoors shoots take place at night. I'd also like to do the same with some of our inside shoots but we'll have to see what all those entail before making any decisions. As far as sound goes, I'm not sure yet if we will just try and lay down a prerecorded track over the video or if we will trya nd record new audio for the songs, so that descision will have to be made first before I'll know completely what I'm doing with sound.

Creating our Images for the soundscape.

For our soundscape Evan, Chalice, and I chose 'Winking City' to add image to and were intrigued by the possibilities that it presents. Though we are admittedly still working on constructing our video, we have decided on several overall themes and how to best execute them with our audio. Because of the title, we really want to portray the idea of a city itself as living entity in a way. To do this we have employed rhythm and motion to give the images that we have chose some movement that gives the feeling that the city is itself alive. Along with this idea though we also want to give a somewhat jarring visual by using contrasting images with sound. For example Evan has been working on a specific sequence where the audio is of car horns going off while the visual is of a street light lighting up with the sounds of the horn. In this case the winking city is quite literal with the lights, but the combination of these two, even when not so overt, very much connect the title of our film with the corresponding images and sounds.

Explaining my soundscape

When M and I chose our title for our soundscape we both had in mind something that in a way would have somewhat of a story arc, though it is minimal, but would also very much represent the psyche of someone. While we were talking about what specifically to do, we decided that since our title was 'Leaving the Confession Booth' we would have to in some way convey through sound that someone was in fact leaving a confession booth. So we created the intro and outro that is heard, using the sounds of a woman walking in heels and the opening/closing of a door to illustrate this idea and as a way to give the sounds some spacial dimension we decided to use the fader to make the walking sound as if it were coming from one side of the room to the other. After coming to a decision on how to best set up and close our soundscape we wanted to have the rest of the soundscape be a somewhat dark representation of the person in our soundscape's mind. I believe it was M that had mentioned using the seven deadly sins as a template for how the sound should pregress and if one listens closely; greed, envy, lust, pride, gluttony and wrath are all represented. The only one we didn't include was sloth, which baffled me on how to properly represent. So from here we constructed each sin as if it were a seperate soundscape and tried to create each one as something that had a rythm and flow to it, but at the same time seemed also to be a bit disjointed and somewhat hectic depending on the sin. From here we then laid each sin next to one another on our master tarck and mixed the audio levels so that there was a nice flow across the entire story and finally laid down a slowed down and reversed laughter track across all the sins to give this demonic sounding background noise that really ties the entire thing together.

A response to assignment 1a

The main thing that I learned from this first assignment, aside from making sure there are no time code breaks in the tape, was sound without the presence of sight can be interestingly difficult to pinpoint at times. I understood that we often do overlook sounds and I wasn't necessarily surprised to hear the many sounds in the background that I did when I truly sat and listened, but listening to sounds again without images did allow me to hear the sounds in a new way. For example, there is a sound that was recorded by my group of a pen scraping over a plastic chair. The resulting sound though sounds at times like a zipper. As I am finding out now with project 1b, this ambiguity of sound can come in handy when creating not just soundscapes with no images, but also film that combines both sound and image.

Film Manifesto...maybe

Firstly, I have to say that I am not a fan of manifesto's as they tend to be entirely too finite yet at the same time somewhat. I would much rather like to consider this as my view of film as medium at this moment in my life. I know that two years from now and even possibly two hours from now I may and very possibly will have a drastically different view of how I feel film will function for myself.
For me at this point in my life, film is a powerful medium that can have lasting influences on humanity and as such I want to use film to help initiate and supplement positive change. The fact that film has become the dominant medium for exchange of information should not be taken lightly by any film maker and so with the creation of a film comes a certain responsibility by the creator to do something positive with the film. This isn't to say that every film needs to be some exposé documentary, but I do believe that every film should have some sort of value that benefits the viewer in a constructive and consciously positive way; that is to say film in many ways should not be used as a source for negative influence. By this I do not mean that a film need be censored, what I do mean is that film should not be used to manipulate the viewer as a means to a director's own end. Examples of this would be propoganda films created and distributed by governments to spread political ideals (and it must be noted here that in the case of this type of film, it has just as much to do with the distribution of such films as the creation of them), or marketing films that obscure truth for the benefit of a few at the expense of many, or narrative films that lend their filmic clout to ideas that only perpetuate poor ideas of those around us. I know these are general statements and I am not going to get into the ethics of film on them since it would take up far too much time for a simple blogpost on my film manifesto, but this is what I think film should be. Once again, film can have a profound effect on it's viewer both postively and negatively, at this point in time I see a film as something to be respected by it's creator and truely thought about when created. In short, film has powerful effects; use wisely.