Final project

The idea of a narrative sounded very interesting but due to creative differences, my partner and I decide to do a documentary. The hard part was finding a subject that would bounce off the screen with personality and charisma. My first choice was Lee Rogers but I hesitated to pursue her for the project. Lee Rogers is mistrustful of others. She doesn't connect very well with people and she believes she was a secret agent in the 80's, saving kids in an underground mission from a cannibal. I have approached Lee many times and I never know what I'm going to get. Most times she's a very nice individual, but there are times where she can get very agitated. It was my luck that I found her in the latter stage whenever I wanted to approach the idea of filming her.
My mission was to capture a woman who recently sued a filmmaker for putting out a documentary about her. I almost decided not to go on with it but little by little I realize that if I talked with  her long enough, I was able to record her when she was calm. I recorded most of the footage and all the audio. I didn't know how to prepare for her so it was me deciding when and when not to film her.
I picked out some of the jazz in the video, as I felt that the beats complemented very well with the rhythm in Lee's voice. I edited a rough draft of the project but it did not come out the way I envisioned it. Maybe I was too close to my subject and I was trying to show more than the running time permitted.

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=92AmGY8P2po
This scene from 12 years a slave is one of my all time favorites. It's something that stayed with me till this day. The goal in everyday scene is to say as much as possible with as little as possible. Too much dialogue and the scene might drag down, too little and the meaning might be lost.
This scene meets in the middle. It says so much with very little. It doesn't even use music and it stirs so much emotions in its audience.
The very long shot doesn't feel dragged out because the audience is given an active role. We have to look around and see what is going on in the background. It's nothing but mundane activities, but it is so fascinating because it almost feels like we're actually in that time.
Writing about this scene makes me look at editing in a whole new way. When I was working on the final assignment, I was flipping and rushing through the shots. But it is very important to carefully plan out the scene if the motivation is to have the viewer experience the work.

Asia society

I went to the Asia society museum with a couple of my classmates. We were all unfamiliar with Nam June Paik but we had very similar options on his artwork. It was very difficult to understand the underlining themes in some of his pieces, but I was fascinated with how different they all were. There were several quotes of his displayed on the walls, and from this I understood that he was trying to introduce the emergence of technology with ourself. His motivation in some of his pieces was humanizing the wires and cables that he worked with. In one piece, he took a small television and colored it with paint the same way a little kid would.

 He was creating these pieces at a time where technology was accelerating so fast people were uncertain where it would all lead. Some of his pieces tackled this problem by asserting that technology will one day be a huge part of our lives, so much so that we will have a hard time distinguishing the dividing line with our devices and ourselves. I think this theme echoes louder now that we pretty much live in our phones and we have become like the very robot that is on exhibit