Saturday screening

On Saturday, I was present for the screening of the documentary "The River of Life."  The film flows from event to event, without having a main focus. It moves on without stopping, like a river. 

In all honestly, the documentary wasn't to my liking. The project is highly personal, and at times I didn't connect with it. It wasn't a cultural barrier, as the film dealt with the universal themes of life and death. It's a very long home video, and like home videos, the person filming it will get more out of it than a external viewer will. 

I did like the concept of a man turning the camera to his family and filming every monotonous moment in his life.  It's reality T.V in it's purest form.

The River of Life is not a technical marvel. The footage is gritty and the editing is elementary. But that wasn't the point of it. The film comes from China, where governmental restrictions limit people's options for an opinion. The importance of this film lies in it's raw style of shooting. To me, it says that anyone with a camera has a voice. 

MOMI trip

I've been part of the Astoria community for some time. I spend a lot of my time there back in high school. It's an awesome place with great restaurants and apparently a great museum. After all these years, I just discovered this place. Goes to show how attentive I am. 

The architecture of the building is imaginative and dynamic. A large portion is constructed with large windows and as I walked in, I was thrown into rooms that resembled the halls of a spaceship. The walls were slanted and colorful. But despite the beautiful physical aesthetics of MOMI, what I got out of it the most was sound, and how effective it can be to enliven a scene. 

Growing up and reading up on film, my understanding of it was that a movie is a story told in pictures. A screenplay is written with pictures and motion in mind, not sound.  And yet, I witnessed a very famous scene being butchered as different aspects of sound were stripped away. 

The scene in the Titanic that has all the passengers scrambling for their lives  has been seen by millions and people can often recall with great accuracy what happens in the scene. Few will elaborate on the specific sounds. And as sad as  that is, that's the beauty and function of sound in a film, I think. Nobody will notice that you blended in an elephant horn in there, but without it, the scene is not as effective and robust. These sounds hidden in the background play in the back our heads, in our subconscious. It puts us in the emotion that the director wants us to be in. In the case of the Titanic, a gun shot was used to force us in a "fight or flight" response. 

The other very interesting exhibit was the ADR booth that had us experimenting our voices into a scene from "Coming into America."I knew that actors had to reread or reenact their diologue in post production to get a clearer sound, but I had no idea how it was done. It's extremely difficult and demanding in that it requires the actor to put himself in the same emotion that he was in when he originally filmed the scene. It just adds another layer of appreciation I have for the craft. 

interview

https://soundcloud.com/edgar-ventura-10/sound-interview-lee-rogers

What I hear

I decided to walk by the park next to my home in Flushing, Queens. It's early in the morning but it's bustling with life and lots of noise. It's not the loud, evansive sounds in the city. The sound I experienced in the park is the kind that people look for in YouTube videos to achieve relaxation.

Relaxing music sleep 

Relaxing music study 

Rain sound for sleeping 

It's a chilly day and the wind is blowing. The leaves of the trees rustle. The smaller branches creak and twist so awakerdly that I thought they might break at any point.
The wind subsides  but it woke the creatures that sleep on the canopy.
I hear an orchestra of songs chirped by a number of birds.
The squirrels scratching on the bark
The dogs without a lease running all around the park. The owners yell out for them to return and the dogs react with bark after bark.
My footsteps become a dialogue between me and the environment.. Every footstep sounds different, depending on what I step.
When I walk on the pavement, the steps sound louder.  Ocassionally I might step on a twig.
When I walk on the grass, the sound is absorbed by the ground.
As I walk down the hill, I immediately hear the loud quaks of the ducks that circle around the pound. But they aren't loud enough to drown out the curses of the competitive tennis players. The tennis ball is hollow and as it gets hit by the racket it creates a noise that echoes across the park.
Just a few steps over, a couple of old buddies are playing bocce. The ball clash and bounce. I don't understand the game but I know it's not going well for one of them. The man grunts and bickers under his breath.