Speaking with Animation

This animation was more time consuming than I have imagined. I want to be an animator when I graduate but going through this assignment, I feel like I do not have what it takes to make a full-length animated film. I did not enjoy this assignment as much as I thought. The reason is probably because I do not have a good experience with using Flash. This semester I took Game Programming, all we did was use ActionScript, and I did not get the hang of it and dropped the class. When the animation assignment was announced that we had to use Flash, I got nervous.

I do not have a good feeling about my animation. If I had more time I would probably make the process go a lot smoother with each branch from the tree growing according to the beat of the background music. I would also make the "newspapers" more realistic and pile them together instead of just having four figures. I had the most trouble writing the action for my button. I did it many time but an error kept showing. I was also frustrated because while making the animation, I kept getting a message saying that I am low on memory and I could not fix it. Overall, I think I'm just not familiar with Flash and get frustrated because I do not understand the program.

Production Notes

This video project was very exciting but intimidating at first. Although I took the class before Media 160, learning about how each angle work and how shots were made, I never actually held a camera to make a film. I also never used the program Final Cut until this project. We first drew up a storyboard indicating how we were going to shoot each scene, the story came to us without any complications. During the next class, we began shooting each scene that was indicated on the storyboard, and thankfully finished right on time before class ended. After filming, we sorted out which clips we needed and which clips we can delete. We then started editing the film during our free time, which is not a lot since we all work. While editing, we narrowed down the definite clips that we were using and started editing them. We had to cut each clips and tried putting them together so that it would flow smoothly. After the video editing, we put some background music to make the movie more effective. We had to play around with the music, making it play lower/higher.

Now that we finished the film, I wished we had more time to shoot some more scenes and edit the film to flow even better. In our film, there are still some cuts that you can see that were sketchy. I also wanted to film a scene where the main character walks to the bathroom after running down the stairs because we didn't have that transaction in our film, which ended up as a bad cut. Overall, I really liked how our film came out, the music fits perfectly and some classmates actually thought it was scary. In this project, the one important thing I've learned is that it takes a huge amount of time to edit films, but the outcome can be rewarding.

What I Hear

Living in New York City for so many years, most of the sounds start to get drone out and become the background noises that we don't pay much attention to. Many of us does not even hear the background noise but instead we put on our headphones and listen to our music on our iPod. For this assignment, I did not listen to my iPod but begin to listen to the sounds around me, mainly on the subway because that is how I commute to school. I noticed that in the morning, there are not much sounds except the sound of the train moving on its tracks. Most of the people are either reading their newspaper or taking a nap before getting off their stops. This change when it is around the afternoon, the sounds are lively. Kids are off from school and they would yell and scream on the train. There are also musicians playing their instruments or singing on the train to entertain us. Other than musicians, there are always people preaching or asking for money which leads to passengers cursing out at them because they want their peace and quiet. The sound also changes when in different neighborhood. If you get off at Union Square, you immediately hear musicians playing on the street. There will also be a lot of chattering everywhere, talking about the artworks, the food and the movies. If you go to Upper East Side, where Metropolitan Museum is located, it is fairly quiet there. There aren't any musicians playing on the street, all you can hear are the traffics passing by. Sounds are everywhere, but soon enough everything will be drone out if we keep listening to our iPod and not be aware of our surrounding.

Design I Like

This poster is very simple and straightforward. The background is black while all the fonts and the outline of the pictures are white. The font that says, "You are not just burning off calories..." are in bold and in a bigger font compare to other fonts on the poster. The human in the picture looks just like those human figure in bathroom signs or street signs. The human is completely white with three teardrop shaped sweats in the color blue. The human figure looks like he/she is riding a bike but the two wheels are depicted as two globes. This poster is telling the viewer to drive less so that it will help save the Earth. On the bottom of the bike, it says, "you'll save one pound of CO2 for every mile you don't drive." The composition of the picture works well because the words on the top are aligned left and the whole biker figure is aligned right while the bottom phrase centered. This effect allows your eyes to flow from the top, to the pictures then to the phrase at the bottom. As your eyes land on the bottom phrase, it led you to the last phrase in the corner that says, "Do your part. Bike, carpool, ride the bus, or walk to help make a difference in the health of our planet. Everyone is responsible!" This poster is very effective because the white color font just pops out from the background. I hope everyone can get this message across.

Final Blog

The overall of this class was very interesting. I learned a lot during our lectures because Professor Lucas did an excellent job at explaining every aspect of the lectures. He also provided a lot of visual so that he can get his points across. What I like the most about this class are the labs, because I can actually interact with the instruments. I feel like what I learn from the lectures, I can test it out in our labs. This gives me a greater understanding of things. I really like the idea of sharing our work in lab after we are done because I can get feedbacks from the teacher and the students. The one "take way" I will remember is probably our Photoshop lab exercise. I love working with Photoshop, designing the stamps and using different tools. There are so many tools that I have never used before until that day, and I love the magic wand tool. It just takes everything away and leaves the image that I wanted. It is magic! I wish there were more labs so we can do more on Photoshop and designing. I also wish we had more instruments to deal with but overall, this class had been a great experience. I enjoyed it very much.

Museum of Moving Image

This was my first time in the Museum of Moving Image and it was an unusual experience in a good way. For one, this museum is not about paintings or sculptures but it shows the machines and equipments used for filming and making media in general. The second is that we can actually interact with some of the equipments like making still image into moving image or picking different music for different films.

Beginning of the tour, we were introduced to different period of video cameras from the very first to modern day cameras. We also saw different filmstrips for different types of films like 24 fps or IMAX filmstrips. There were different lights and Professor Lucas explained which light was used for. We went into a room where we can choose different music for a chosen film. The film was black and white and there was no spoken word or any sound. Our goal was to pick different songs to see which match the movie. By doing so, I learned that different music could change the meaning of the scene completely and that without music, a movie can be very bland.