Field Report #3 - The Finale

Hello?

I loved Christian Marclay's Telephones. It was the one piece from the Haggerty that inspired me to have more fun with my own work. The work uses clips from many Hollywood movies and makes a conversation with piecing various clips together. I thought it was a genius way of having fun with editing. I wanted to find it on the internet so I could watch it again but was unsuccessful. I was reminded of the original iPhone commercial though, that mimicked this piece. Comparing to Glenn's lecture, it really doesn't apply. The sound was not recorded by Marclay and was already part of the found footage. The use of editing though was seamless and rhythmic which were techniques Glenn did talk about. The visuals did not make this piece logical, it was the sound all the way. The sound made the piece. The visuals helped us familiarize where the sound was from. 

Deeparture was the complete opposite. Dead silence. The visuals made the piece. Mircea Cantor's piece was super disturbing to me.

Wild --  adjective --  (of animal or plant) living or growing in the natural environment; not domesticated of cultivated. 

I saw the sound as the reflection of how tranquil the "wild " can be. This is conflicted the the two animals are in a white empty room. Are they wild or domesticated? Either way, the silence made us focus on the stunning visuals and behaviors of the animals. 

These pieces together shows that sound influences film at most times, much more than the visuals. The sound controls the piece. It is the rhythm and the beat. It orchestrates the film.

Journal Report #2

Wow. There is my report. After watching Killer Entertainments, I don't know what more to say. After seeing the first person view of the fight in the War on Terror its hard to write much more But, unfortunately I know that won't cut it. 

 

So here it goes.

The Journal entry done by Jennifer Terry, was done to show the danger of these uncensored videos of combat. Danger in this case has a few different meanings. First, is the intelligence issue from the government. Intelligence agencies do you want this footage on the Internet and the trouble is trying to track where it came from. Second, is the toll it may take on emotion. There is an extreme lack of censorship on the internet compared to all other forms of media. 

The entry was much more visual than written. While watching the videos, which were jaw dropping, the video would pause periodically and words would pop up. These words resembled quotes, and what I found most interesting, cinema terms. For instance, the words "money shot" popped up when a 500 pound bomb fell on a building and video suddenly paused in midst of the explosion. The definition was revealed after moving the mouse across it. 

To me, the videos were intense enough. The pop ups just added to it. As mentioned in my previous blogs, I play many video games. A level in a bestselling video game of last year was a mimic of the video of the recorded attack from onboard an Apache helicopter. The video shows a person running from a truck and leaving an RPG in field. The gunner then opens fire on the militants. This stirred the most emotion in me because I knew I wasn't watching a video game, movie, or television show. It was real. 

That was the last video I watched after immediately writing this.  The words "money shot" then got to me. Those were people dying. The movies and video games I've watched and played have been taken for granted. It was reality. Unlike the movies and video games, there was no escape from reality. I was stuck in it.