finer cut of doc

hi. could you all take a look at this and tell what your thoughts/concerns/feelings/suggestions/hopes are for this beast? please let me know about 1) the pace and timing of the animation 2) the visuals 3)if you think the audio works as far as not leaving you with a bunch of questions (in a bad way)

the audio is not mixed

the end is just filler; im animating some sketches to end the piece but they arent done yet. so basically the end will be nothing like that. eh, sorry. i already exported it.

thanks a bazillion!

http://www.vimeo.com/7861638 i’m vaguely sure that link will work

Boom!

”  ”The Atomic Cafe” focuses on the late 40’s and early 50’s, but it could not be more timely. It provides some of the background for what appears to be a continuation of what might be called nuclear-war optimism today – the unprovable assumption that nuclear wars can be fought on a limited scale without making the planet uninhabitable.”

i really wanted to say this, but found that the writer in ellen’s post has better writing skillz than i. so, i’ll go on in my own less thought-out way. “atomic cafe” was a terrificly creative and controlled expression of a continuing societal epidemic. without any interviews or shot footage, the raffertys and loader created a complete story of the nuclear attack panic after WW II that hit the united states. it flows in such a way that the issue is addressed chronologically- the enthusiasm for the bomb, the fear of an opposite and equal reaction, the preparation in response to mass hysteria (closer to obsessive fear than crowds literally running down the streets tearing at their garments), and at the end a serious examination of what the hell just happened to us all?

the coolest part is that the film was made in the eighties with footage from the forties and fifties and it is completely relevant in the first decade of the 2000′s. it is a film full of the makers’ intuitiveness about the nature of humanity. while knowing that fear and over reaction are human nature isn’t intuitive in itself, making a film about one the most horrific decisions ever made and lauded by women and men with only found footage and sound is. without sit down interviews, personal experiences, or experts to tell the audience what to think, i was able to watch the film and try to understand how this generation that i’ve never known much about felt during that time period.

the film is a marvel driven by the skill of it’s editors who were able to create a cohesive and attention-retaining story out of five years worth of compiled found footage and sound.

 

Listen

Alan Berliner came to speak at the alamo downtown last night and i almost peed my pants i was so excited. he’s just so legit.

the screening started off with two short films, “city edition” and “i totally forgot what the second one was called”. “city edition” was based on a sheer barrage of sounds like printing presses, assorted music, gun shots, etc. with stories that would be found in a newspaper visually represented through archival footage. It was really well done-every cut had some relevance to the previous clip. this was especially true in the second short, still no idea what it was titled, where every clip related to the previous one based on one of these things : color, character, situation, or action. for example, he cut from a bird doing a mating dance to a traffic conductor gesturing extremely similar movements with his arms. or a bird with a red head cut to a bird with a red chest that cut to a person with a red coat. these shorts were very enlightening for me. i think what i saw will help me edit my doc which also relies heavily (completely) on non-sync sound and video.

the feature, intimate stranger, however, i was not so hip on. while it’s always amazing to me how berliner can get you to care about someone that really isn’t overly interesting, this time i just didn’t like the guy. his grandfather wasn’t compelling. in fact, he was emotionally  repulsive. a man who leaves his family behind because he can’t handle the heat, is no kind of man. what we find out about him is that he spoke a lot of languages, loved egypt and the japanese, and always had to be in the center of pictures. and he passed up being the point man for the distribution of canon cameras.

other than that…ehhhhhhhhhh….hm.

not much. the soundtrack was auditory obtrusiveness. there were so many type writer clicks that i felt like i was in the damn thing. it was difficult to hear some of the subjects talking above secondary sound at some parts.

final point: i don’t agree that berliner should have done a doc on his grandfather. his grandmother was far more compelling, at least based on what we learned about her. one of the last lines if the film was “she was the real hero of our family”. hello muse. I don’t know if it was some sort of male need to relate to an older male family member or some sort of self-searching that drove berliner towards his grandfather, but even he didn’t give us a great answer. after the screening lauren asked him why he chose the man over his wife and all he said was that he wouldn’t have known anything about her had he not gone through his grandfather’s papers then sort of politely smiled and asked us if we were students. he’s a really nice guy but i was hoping for a more focused answer.

p.s. : he says “listen” every time he thinks of a new point to talk about. it’s engaging.

up the river w/o a paddle…or boat

up the yangtze was an enlightening documentary. you all saw it so i won’t recap.

i said in class that i like the fact that i couldn’t identify with the subjects very well. their culture and mannerisms are far removed from mine (mine from theirs?) and having never even step foot on a farm, i have no idea what it’s like to live by the seasons and by the fluctuations of the water. who i DID identify with were the obnoxious American tourists on the cruise. they looked at the people with the same emotions…wonder, detachment, misunderstanding. i’ve been the affluent tourist with a camera amongst impoverished natives struggling along.

this annoying kinship struck me harder than my western pity. it’s best to have who you are slapped in your face occasionally, as i learned from this film. it was very clever of the director to include the reactions of the tourists. any somewhat self-aware person cringes at the things those people say (condescending with a side of wishy-washy guilt), partly because it sounds so damn familiar. i thought, just me speaking for myself, that the same excitement to be in asia with the asians, doing asian things, watching asian people live asian lives until everything got a little too asian then going home with photos to send to family members and friends at christmas was the exact same thing i do when traveling, though i think i’m doing it out of want of culture, out of curiosity, and out of the desire to understand other ways of life.

really, mostly, this film made me acknowledge myself as the uneducated visitor who won’t be able to actually connect with others unless something inside is altered. bravo. now i have to change my game plan.

Crazy Sexy Cancer

the title alone is enough for a person to cock their head to one side. “crazy” “sexy” “cancer”. they don’t seem to go together, but the film tries to create the tie. it’s a very personal documentary directed by a young woman who finds out that she has a terminal form of cancer. she launches the film in higher spirits than one would expect. her story is expressed with a definite sense of humor. she explores alternative treatments for her illness. some of them (like laughing out the toxins or applying a healing stone to the skin) are obviously unfounded. but then she tries raw food diets, yoga, and spiritual training. Her journey becomes darker as she addresses the camera directly with her frustration and weariness. the camera, btw, is her boyfriend. they fall in love while he’s helping her shoot her film.

that part is short, thank goodness. as she narrates her film, she tells the story of how they get together. i would have rather seen it than heard her talk about it. it’s so schmultzy. while i applaud her educating audiences about cancer and it’s effects, the way the film was narrated, shot, and up-beatly edited kept me from understanding her pain, physical and emotional. at times the mood definitely gets more tense, but in general i was confused about whether to laugh or yell at her for not reacting to cancer as i believed she should. which i guess is part of the theme. cancer doesn’t have to ruin your life and so on and so forth. while i feel like she could have made the film more serious, i appreciate that she kept it positive. the constant smiling she does lessens the viewers comprehension of her struggle, it does show that horrible situations can be dealt with positively. i still don’t see the “crazy sexy” part of cancer, but this woman found happiness when others often can’t and made a decently enjoyable film about it.

I just knew he had that one song

So, apparently, Tupac Shakur was more than just a rapper that died. I vaguely remember my older brother talking about him when i was young and thinking that someone named “biggie” killed him. or something.

But Tupac’s documentary was really engaging. As a person, he was more well-spoken than i thought he would be. His ideas and talents were really highlighted in the film which showcased his music and lyrics. His music was played even while he was talking, giving equal importance to his words and his art. Using staggering amounts of interviews, Tupac’s life was pieced together as it played out in reality. His faults weren’t hidden, but neither was his importance to American society downplayed. He became famous in a time of increasing violence among young people. While giving huge numbers of youth someone to idolize (and idealize) he also helped to cement some fears that rappers were becoming the poster boys for gang violence. Footage of him talking about the woman who cried rape and surveillance video of him kicking the crap out of a man demonstrated this.

I’m glad that they chose to have Tupac narrate his own story. It makes it more powerful knowing that he’s no longer here.

and i just despised flying over the sand dunes and skimming the clouds. what the hell was that? hardcore rap, an intelligent rapper who never seems to escape his circumstances, bam! cue clouds and said rapper’s slowest beats. bleh.

People are Icky

We Live in Public is more “experienced” than “passively observed”. As it moved through the wildly intelligent and totally misguided life of an internet mogul,  I kept thinking “what a fucking tool”. The guy is a total control freak, sociopath, and creep. But he, and Timoner, are right. He did correctly judge the future of the cyber world, as scary as it has proven and will prove.

I did love how Ondi Timoner immersed herself in her subject. She became one of the residents of quiet in order to document the happenings and spoke during the q&a about how she believes that keeping a distance from documentary subjects is detrimental to the product. She’s right, but that takes practice. It’s intimidating and even awkward at times to fit in with your protagonists. It’s definitely a learned skill.

The film relied heavily on archival footage. This really helped the film by giving the audience context. Without all of that gloriously cyber-projected footage the main character would not have been brought to reality as well. He said that the footage his people shot was his, that he owned it. Now anyone seeing this documentary owns him, in a small way.

The whole film was really well edited. Just had to throw that in.

Jordan

winterbottom’s guantanamo

the road to guantanamo comes four years after in this world, the film i just saw and on which i posted. i think prolific winterbottom downgraded on this one, though it was very engaging. guantanamo suffers from looking much more like a narrative (but, you twit, it was one!)…yeah i know. but the power behind in this world was that at some point along the story line, the viewer forgets that the film is a re-enactment. the amazing access to everything that happens at guantanamo reminds the viewer constantly that this is definitely happening after-the-fact.

enough of that. it’s a great film that made me squirm around in my seat. I felt outrage for the prisoners and disgust with most of the armed forces. the inclusion of small acts of kindness by the guards (pizza, killing a harmless tarantula, not beating the shit out of men on a consistent basis and instead relying on racial and religious epithets as humiliation techniques) was a small gesture of impartiality by the director.

Note: i don’t think the director was impartial about a thing, and although my parenthetical phrase seems sarcastic i really do mean it. though i believe it’s naive to think that the united states military doesn’t perform the same atrocities that other countries do, the horrors imposed upon other cultures and ethnicites, and individuals, make stinging words seem like childs-play.

…which just proves my de-sensitivity to violence, as brandon talked about earlier. which might have been a theme of the movie. which i just now got.

i appreciate winterbottom playing our logics against each other. inhumane practices are to be abhorred and rallied against. but i also don’t want to get too hippy-dippy and deny that there are indeed bad people with evil thoughts and big guns in the world. how to balance the scales? homo sapiens: the ultimate de-evolution?

In This World

In This World is a film by Michael Winterbottom about the journey of two young men fleeing from a refugee camp in Peshawar (home to 1 million of the world’s 14 million refugees) to England. Their dangerous journey leads them along the “silk road” through Pakistan, Iran and Turkey towards London

http://www.imdb.com/video/screenplay/vi1755840793/

The film is unique in multiple ways

1) there is no really meaningful dialogue. most of it is just the chatter of boys who are lonely and the bare minimum of negotiation for human-smugglers that the audience needs to understand most of what is going on. the director, didn’t, however, see fit to put in enough dialogue for a viewer (maybe just me) to fully understand what was happening. there is no explanation for most of the jumps that the boys make from one place to another (how did they get there? where did they find this place? what did he just say?) and some of the dialogue in english is too heavily accented to comprehend.
BUT! it’s refreshing to see a film that is based on moving images to tell a story. big budget films tend to have vapid conversation or over-explanation. the film is narrative, but is well-disguised as a documentary with limited, unpretentious conversation.
2) it goes with the flow. the actors know what to say and what emotions to convey, but they are released into the actual world and followed with cameras. while the acting is controlled, the stage is not. this allows for spontaneity while filming and makes it look even more like a true documentary.
3) it doesn’t dwell on the tragic. something very sad happens. we are in and out of the scene within a couple of minutes. there aren’t any flashbacks, sappy close-ups, or slow-mo sequences. the film stays true to its POV and stays with the main character’s present being.
4) there is no attempt to deviate from the story. a british guy explains what is going on in Peshawar at the beginning of the film, and comes back a couple of times later, but there is no real “save the children” feel. the main character isn’t even that endearing. hardened from poverty and resourceful by nature, he’s at once clever and unfriendly. he’s the beggar in the street, the kid who steals your purse at a cafe, the boy who has seen too much to ever be a boy again. i didn’t like him that much, but because the camera stays with him all the time, i did feel like i could understand his mind a bit better than i would have if the director had chosen to split the story between the boys and their families or concentrated more on the smugglers.

it’s a powerful film but at times challenges your ability to pay attention;some shots and silent sequences are held for a little long. the cinematography is impressive. a lot of shots are from the car or running after people and still have dynamic compositions and lighting. i would love to rip off this style of filmmaking. narrative writing has never been something i liked dealing with, but the way that Winterbottom creates such a hybrid is remarkable and has enough elements of documentary that i am really interested in trying something like this in the future.

jordan