FST 302 Experimental

I learned a lot about light during this exercise and I prefer it over the sound exercise. When taking pictures on campus, it was midday and the sun was directly overhead. Worse experience with pictures because of the brightness. My pictures ended up over-exposed even though we used the light meter. The sunlight reflected off of the boulder I took a picture of and overexposed the entire composition. The picture came out as a gray blur. Honestly, it's pretty accurate - my eyes burned with the intensity of the light outside. I think the nearby pond contributed to the reflected light too, and maybe next time I'll consider a subject that isn't in the worst spot ever for film. Film is so scary to use but at the same time liberating. Scary because you don't know for sure how the picture will turn out and you can easily damage the reel with light. But liberating because when we took some shots downtown, there was an added texture. I took a picture of the bulb of a street ligh...

In doing the sound exercise last week, I learned a lot about how certain sounds can compliment each other and the different moods that you can create based on what you select. For our project, Melody-Fayth and I wanted to create a soundscape that was warm and nostalgic. We selected sounds that reminded us of childhood, references to old films, and had a rhythm to them. It was hard not to make music or a narrative through our soundscape and I questioned whether or not we were staying true to the experimental spirit. We kept close to abstraction, feeling each sound in the sound bank before selecting one to fit into a specific section of the track. I ultimately learned how to be precise and careful. It was a surreal experience overall for me as I'm not an audio person and describing what I wanted everything to sound like felt awkward. As for Lynne Sachs, can I first start out by saying that it is pretty awesome that she collaborated with Chris Marker? Moving on, Sachs is an interestin...

I think Matthew was a perfect fit for Jonas Mekas and I like how he perfectly captured the energy of his pieces. Mekas has always been one of my favorite experimental filmmaker as I love the intimacy behind his home-video type style of film and the quick cuts he uses to show life events in a stream of conscious way. I always feel like I'm floating in another universe and getting a glimpse of someone else's being. It's so simple yet remarkably intimate. Melody-Fayth's presentation on Viking Eggeling and Hans Richter was interesting too and I still can't help but wonder the exact nature of their relationship. How do you have such a close friendship splinter so quickly? They obviously kept each other's influence throughout the rest of the career. I wonder what their work would have looked like if they stayed friends and collaborated more. But then again, it's probably for the better that they didn't, as they both went on to pioneer early abstrac...

Last week, we worked on a sound based project in class where we were assigned to collect ten minutes’ worth of miscellaneous sound effects. My group had a ton of fun with the experiment and we spent a couple of days in total preparing the sounds for class. At the very beginning of our recording session, I was concerned that we would be able to find enough variation of objects or sounds to record with our limited resources. Most of the items we used were hard and either wooden or metal, so I assumed that we would have a collection of near identical sounds. However, to my surprise, that wasn't the case at all and each item had a distinct sound. For example, I assumed that using coins in a case and then keys dangling together would sound too similar. However, the coins were duller while the keys had a higher pitch. They also had a longer reverb while the coins were sharp and short. I would love to see the cymatics of the coins that we shook versus the cymatics of...