what i learned: a sonnet.

in the course of taking a course
there are two ways to learn
the first is to memorize the source
and spit out answers when it's your turn.
the second way, and much preferred
is to welcome into your world, objectively,
the new views, new ideas you've seen and heard
in time adding new sights, new sounds, respectively
so that when arrives the moment to reflect
what a student has learned from a very special subject
it can be hard to capture, summarize and collect
all that's been changed, discovered and its affect.
But if i had to it'd be how to listen before sight,
see beyond hearing, and to create within light.

“I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.” -Thomas Jefferson

I often have trouble finding a good place to start. The beginning of my involvement with Cucalorus can be traced back to my freshman year when I volunteered as a projectionist. Or maybe even further back to my old manager at the Galaxy Cinema-also an alumnus of UNCW’s film studies program-who said to look up Dan Brawley when I got to Wilmington. Or maybe even further back to my decision to work for less pay and fewer hours at the Galaxy Cinema instead of the local Carmike googleplex. Or maybe it can be traced back to fifteen years ago when a bunch of filmmakers showed their films in a bar one night. Or maybe, just like working on Cucalorus, there is no beginning and there is no end.
Working for Cucalorus is an amazing and transformative experience. You really have no idea what you’re doing for the festival if you’ve never attended before (and even if you have it’s a stretch at times). I could very easily fill this paper with all the tasks I’ve had to do at Cucalorus, all the new skills I’ve gathered and polished over the years, but it would only be a very small part of what I’ve learned from that bunion of a film festival. I could tell you all the stories I’ve grown and plucked over the years but that bouquet would be nothing compared to the friendship, inspiration, art and community that blooms at Cucalorus.
I’ve learned all those corny sayings the hard way—that you catch more flies with honey than vinegar; that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; that a bird in the had is worth two in the bush; beer before liquor, never been sicker. But there are three things that stand out more than any saying, that are ingrained in my heart from working at the festival and that will stay with me far longer than the smell of a perpetually cold week in November.

Cucalrorus 15

It's really strange for me to think that 15 years ago there was no such thing as Cucaloru. It's really strange to think that there was a time when this amazing event did not exist- that there wasn't a few days a year where film-lover, and filmmakers alike came together and celebrated mother fucking film.
This year at Cucalorus I don't know if I will actually be able to see anything. Honestly. I'm going to do my best to see Dance-a-lorus. I've been at Cucalorus for 4 years and never seen Dance-a-lorus. We've got two showings of it this year so my changes are pretty good.
Last year's festival I made the mistake of not scheduling time to train our volunteers on our ticketing system so I was pretty much chained to our Information booth last year. I am going to be a lot more mobile this year ...
This year I'll be overseeing our trained box office volunteers (some of which I still need to train), making sure our off-site venues run smoothly, making sure our ushers know what to do, making sure our pass office volunteers show up and know how to distribute passes. I'll be collecting and entering box office reports (the forms for which i still have to make, hello to-do list) for every event we have. I'll be overseeing the Rush Lines and making available to the Rush Lines the right number of tickets, making sure that filmmakers have their tickets and reserved seats.
I hate Cucalorus.
I love Cucalorus.

music video shoot

Our shoot went really well. Fortunately we were able to find one and a half (1&1/2) days where all four of us could shoot. we started out on the beach on our first half day and it was miserable. the wind was blowing, it was freezing but our actors were so nice even though we made them stand out on the windy rainy beach. this first day i followed the camera around with an umbrella to make sure it was dry.
Thankfully our next day was better. it was not as cold out and we had a lot more time to work on it. we finished up some stuff at the beach and then went to this really cool alley way.
i think the alley stuff is going to be my favorite. but the beach "story" was my idea so i kinda really want to see how it comes together. and then there's the woods!
ah the woods.
tomorrow we're going out to shoot some stuff in the morning at the beach. it's going to be really cool. we shot this over a week ago so i'm already anxious about seeing how it turned out. i hate that part of the waiting game. knowing that the next step is just more waiting. i've never shot on super 8 before but always loved the look of it.
so exhausted, i hope i'm able to wake up in time for tomorrow!
the on-set dynamics of our group worked really well. we didn't know exactly what our locations were going to be like so we made our shot list and some storyboards based on our ideas. mostly we flew by the seats of our pants (?) when it came to shot construction. evan got some great shots and really went to new heights for our project. courtney was great and really thought ahead about what props we would need among other things. morgan, too, brought a lot to the table in this project. she got our actors, was our fearless leader and helped bring everything together.
yea for our project!

installation!

(before i do the actual blog assignment, i'm going to indulge in the blogginess of this blog. i hate talking in front of people i don't know. and i stumbled and stuttered and misspoke my way through my presentation this morning but i was really excited to have learned so much about mekas. he. rocks.)

I'm really excited about the installation. Honestly, I was hoping to work on Free steak but that's more because i thought too much about free steak. i like to think about it as a film statement (although this interpretation applies in theory more than practice). the animals would be frozen in plastic frames and have images over them. like film frames themselves, they're just moments of life preserved and frozen in plastic. played over and over again.

but i'm excited about ours, too! i was impressed by abz's idea of having people walk through a tunnel with bizarre objects around. he said he wasn't really committed to every single part of it so i'm pretty stoked to be able to add my two cents to the installation.

I was thinking about his tunnel idea and about a curtain i made for the Cucalorus office. (next time you're there, check it out, it's in the front office window) it's made from a 35mm print that dan told me to get rid of. i kept it and made the curtain out of it. it hung on my bedroom wall for a while but it works better over a big light source. anywho, i was thinking that it would be kind of cool to make the tunnel or at least parts of the tunnel like that. it could be very dark or be full of colors, depending on the lighting and what film we use.

as for the fire and water, i have to admit i don't entirely understand the set up. probably because i was philosophizing about plastic-covered animals while he was presenting. but i know one thing, i hope i don't entirely understand it ever.

I'll give mohammad and his mountain a call

I have worked at three, count 'em, three movie theaters in my life: 1. Galaxy Cinema, Cary NC's premier and only art house and independently owned theater. 2. Jengo's Playhouse Microcinema and the heart of Jengo's playhouse. 3. the evil impersonal conglomerate known as Regal Mayfaire 16.

So it's not just my normal know-it-all personality speaking when I say when it comes to film exhibition, I know what I'm talking about. I'm very passionate but even more disheartened with the concept of bringing art and art film to the proverbial masses

Several points were brought up in the article "From Art House to Microcinema" that I found striking. . The first being the apparent need for an alternative to the alternative across the U.S. Jengo's Playhouse, I like to think, used to serve this purpose well. From stories dipped in sepia tone told around Cucalorus the weekly screenings at Jengos used to be packed with people. The only times I've ever seen it packed are for the festival and a few screenings and events across the years. Then weekly screenings at Jengo's were cancelled for this year. 2008 and 2007 were notable weekend nights because I would sit in the cantina at Jengos waiting for maybe 5 people to come see our weekly screening. 5 people was a big crowd. It was not uncommon to have no people. In spite of this obvious problem I still tried to fight for our weekly screenings. It didn't work out in my favor.

I was always believed that we were doing a valuable service to the community until I realized that the community didn't value the service. If they had, they would have showed up.

This was not my first encounter with the possibility of shutting down an operation.

Galaxy Cinema is a place that you do not notice unless you've been there before-a huge problem for the theater's marketing. I worked there for years and couldn't count the number of times a patron would say "I've lived here for years and had no idea you were here." Galaxy Cinema faced similar problems that Jengo's did- their screenings were sparsley attended. While the galaxy and Jengos are not quite established establishments, they were by no means new when I came onboard.

Galaxy usually features independent, foreign, and documentary films that the Carmike and Regal in town won’t screen. Great idea for a well-off community with too much spare time on its hands, right?
Maybe not so right.
Galaxy Cinema struggled, and as far as I’ve heard still struggles with attendance. So much so that they’ve recently shown blockbusters. I was shocked to read the weekly newsletter that said Galaxy was having a midnight screening of Harry Potter. And then soon after it was showing Star Trek. Both by no means independent or underscreened films. I guess Harry Potter could be a foreign film but it’s kind of a stretch.

The first thing that popped into my mind was “WHAT?” It was not the happily-caught-off-guard “what?” that normally accompanies my viewings of the latest episode of LOST but an angry “what?” that was similar to the reaction when I opened my first credit-card bill.

It was a “what?” that questioned the very integrity of Galaxy, of their mission and goal.

I’ve seen Mayfaire, on the other decrepit and sinister hand (sinister in the evil way, not the left handed way . . . well I guess it could be the left hand). Not so much struggle with staying open but with how much money they could wrangle from people. They raised ticket prices, cut down on staff privileges, and installed a 3-D theater to be able to charge more money for tickets.

It’s a stomach churning realization that comes. It’s a heart-breaking truth that arrives. It’s a terrible result of over-commercialization and impersonalization that all of these theaters’ bottom lines were financial survival.

The need isn’t in North Carolina, maybe, for a cutting edge cinema. The thirst for art is not as strong as in other cities across the states.

If you can’t bring the people to the art, how can you bring the art to the people?

Jonas Mekas

Been doing some research today on my filmmaker for our presentations and I'm really glad I got Jonas Mekas.

plan stan x 2

I like being producer- I like seeing other people's creativity work and I like facilitating it.

I did kind of add on an idea I had from a previous brainstorm to our music video planning. Unfortunately all of our schedules together stink. Mine's no exception, though.

My role in this production is part creative part organizational. And that's exactly how I want it. I think we'll all sort of go in and out of our respective roles to share others, offer strengths to the project, and put the project before ego or designated roles.

I'm excited to see how ours turns out. I think we've got a really interesting aesthetic concept and I hope it translates well to our finished film.

self portrait

Film has the beautiful ability to take 1 single still collection of light and make the viewer believe that they're seeing part of a story.
so, too, does time create the illusion that our lives are a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.
illusion.
i believe that is not you- you are not the events you've experienced, but how you've experienced them; not the people you know but how you relate to them; not the hardships you've endured or overcome but the strengths or weaknesses discovered in the process.
The events in your life happen to unearth and unwrap who you are.

now putting that on film
i've been toying with the idea of doing a double exposure in post of two different things. the first being four simultaneous perspectives of one action. the second what is taken from those actions. and what those actions are will be a reflection of what i do- and what is "taken" or expressed or discovered personally in those actions.
or something like that.

i plan on sitting down this wednesday after class and planning what i want from this project. ( i hope i get some feedback on my other projects . . . i'm starting to feel that neurotic twitch of "o shit what if my shit is shit")

Plan Stan

Honestly, I was bummed when I was the only person in our class who didn't get to work with an entirely new 3 minutes of sound and a new title and meaning to accompany it. How come everybody else would breathe new life into their projects and i would be stuck with the same one.

But after starting to work on it, it was kind of cool to be able to say, " well we were thinking that this would mean this and that that was supposed to be that," as well as create visuals to convey those original ideas.

Morgan and I are each working on components of the visual accompaniment to the soundscape of i can see dancers in there. I've sketched out a few more ideas I want to add to the stuff I've done but want to be able to put real time into it. I'm blocking out this weekend to really add polish and quality to the finished portion of my parts.

Painting with Sound

Things learned from this project include the fact that hard drives have to be formatted for the right kind of computer. After making 99% of our project, we realized it had been saved on a hd formatted for a pc and couldn't open our project. So we had to recreate the project all over again.

but besides new technical knowledge, certainly more was gleaned from the project. learned new technical skills and gained more experience with fcp. I also learned that certain sounds, like certain images, next to each other can give them a new meaning. and altering them, like elongating a toilet flush can make it sound pretty and mysterious and not obvious and gross.

truth, beauty and stars

The Idea of truth





















The look of truth

"striking" light observations

1
I’ve always heard and known that fluorescent lights are tinted green and will show up as green when you film them. But it wasn’t until this weekend when we were filming a project that I really noticed. We were in Bear Hall shooting some scenes in the hallway. We left the fluorescent lights on but added other lights and gelled them to bring out other tones. But when we got the shots we wanted and turned those other lights off I was standing there and saw the hallway and everyone in it turn from a warm yellow to a cold gross green. And that’s when I saw what everyone had been talking about.

2
I have a really bad habit of leaving my bedroom lamp on when I leave the house. But while I’m wasting precious energy, I’m also able to observe the shadows, the light and the contrast that the lamp makes on the blinds in the window. The curve of the lampshade is dark but as soon as the light gets to either the small opening in the top or the large one in the bottom it shoots out and lightens the dark. It’s kind of hard to explain but from the outside, if you didn’t know what it was you might think there was a solar eclipse going on in that room.

1A Response : esnopseR A1

First of all, every time I read the name of this assignment (do you hear what I hear) I hear the refrain of the Christmas song of the same title in my head.
This week I learned (or maybe relearned) how much fun it is to bang random objects together. Our first sound assignment and then the next class when we compared sound design to framing shots really made me think about what we hear in films. It's very true that we do take sound for granted sometimes. Most of the time while watching a film the sound tries to blend in, to bring dialogue to life or to highlight certain moments with a musical soundtrack. More often than not sound tries to mimic your ears by honing in on what sounds you would follow to understand the story.
So to think of sound as its own form (different from music and different from an auditory complement to a visual track) is kind of new for me. That's not to say that sound in narratives or documentaries isn't important. Now thinking back to different films I've seen, I guess that they've used sound to their advantage but never really drawn attention to it like certain visual edits do. Like making the ching-chang of a gun louder if it's more threatening, or making a creepy creaky floarboard in a ghost movie just loud enough so you lean in further to hear it.
While these techniques utilize the qualities of sound, they don't necessarily celebrate or focus on them, they merely serve to elevate the visual.
Maybe sound in experimental films can serve just like the visuals do, to make the viewer, or rather listener, experience things they hear all the time as something new.

Maybe sound is like this fish dude here, a great big beast whose mobility and freedom is being trapped by it's surroundings: the visual.

Other things I learned this week included how to set scratch disks and how to break and then fix a key on my keyboard. (the shift key)

sounds sounds all arounds

I sat in the library tonight a short distance outside the limits of Java City Proper. While trying to read one of my textbooks (and not making much progress) a certain noise caught my ear. There the buzz of conversations was overtaken by the powerful arresting sound of
the
B.B.B.B.BL.LLLL.EEEE.nder.
The sound of the blender is a whole eleven seconds long. First the ice and other ingredients battle: smashing and crunching against each other. Then they join forces in a thick slow resistance against the blender blades. Finally the blades win and celebrate for four seconds of motorized hum. That hum has been there for the entire time but is only noticeable now that the other sounds have subsided. The hum reaches a higher pitch for five seconds then it falls immediately asleep like coming out of hyperdrive.

On the other side of me in the library there was a book reading. I didn't realize when I sat down but my temporary nesting place was diagonally behind a podium and sound system where an organization had set up to have an author read from her book. It wasn't too distracting at first but then I noticed she had a certain way of pronouncing her
SHs into the microphone
Even though the author talked about a soldier fighting in the chaos of the war in Iraq, her SHs are very calm and soothing. I hear her SH sound in worlds likeMichigan, She, Machine guns very softly alive. SH. Her voice echoes distinctly in the microphone with every other spoken syllable but her SHs are extra drawn out. SH. They sound like a swish. SH. Like a swish of soft fabric. SH. Like bing underwater and feeling the water swish aways as you kick. SH.

When she finishes reading the applause sounds like rain and I go back to reading my book.

Nearby another student studying stands up and walks towards and then past me. The odd clapping of her steps draw me from my homework and back into the odd world of sound by
flipFLOPS

When she walked, she knew what she was doing and where she was going- her pace was fast. Her shoes sounded like their name. flip FLOP. The flip is when the shoe hits the bottom of her foot. It is a muffled fleshy pop. The FLOP thuds as her shoe hits the short stubby carpet.
The rythm is lopsided; the soft flips against the rough FLOP. I don't imagine her walking straight, but waddling from side (flip) to side (FLOP) creating the unbalanced sounds.

So much for getting some reading done.

Scott MacDonald: To Lumiére

It's interesting to think about how commonplace film and motion picture media has become over time. An audience nowadays goes into a theater or views a youtube video with certain unconscious expectations. Image quality, length, subject matter- these are the things our eyes see without even thinking that it's only shadows on a screen. We've been so conditioned to just accept that we're watching something we forget how amazing it is in concept. I wonder what it would be like to see a movie for the first time, or to watch a tv show for the first time. What is the novelty we look for now beyond the novelty of film itself?
Is it a burden to filmmakers to have an audience be able to realize the 4.5 second close up of the red envelope from the opening means that envelope holds the long lost will of the old rich coot that everyone's looking for? Maybe this does restrict some filmmakers from being original, or from telling their story in a fresh way because they need to cling to that structure with all its patented visual cues.
Or maybe it give the filmmaker free range to play with those expectations. Once you know what's expected, you can play into those expectations or just take a rocket ship in the other direction.

Hans Richter: "At such golden times, film entertainment and film art might become identical."

"This institution has to avoid moving away from the traditional forms of story-telling to which the maximum number of people are conditioned: the theater, with the supremacy of the actor, and the novel or the play, with the writer."

Amalgamate is one of my favorite words. and that's what film does, it amalgamates: "it mixes or merges so as to make a combination; blend; unite; combine." while there are things in the film world that can only belong there, a great deal of it is simply the natural evolution of storytelling. if theater and photography are the parents of film, literature and painting are the grandparents of film, and cave drawings or tribal dances and ancient epic tales that were told around hearths ages ago are the great great grandparents of film. And all are just ways of mankind trying to bestow meaning on existence. (But that's a whole other question)

Back to amalgamate. Richter is right in the sense that film has a tendency to take from other forms. It does however have its own unique qualities. Film's greatest techniques are being able to reproduce the illusion of motion and to montage and cut to another image. The perspective of being able to capture or view motion from more than one angle (as opposed to theater which is only one angle) creates a genuine intimacy that is unique to film. The contrast that is then implemented through editing is unique to film. Where photography and art had previously presented one image or object for consideration, film is able to present more than one image in conjunction with another and subsequently create another meaning through that contrast.

Experimental film has tested the boundaries of these techniques and strayed from those that the other forms of art have. It strays from a central narrative and protagonist. It presents images and motion that have no specific role or part. It explores the primary techniques of film outside of the context of story. Perhaps understanding is overrated and bewilderment is underrated.

festos

i love explaining things almost as much as i love hearing others explain things.

Here's a itty bitty bio:1. birth. pittsburgh, pa. lil bro, lil sis. good times. read lots and lots of books. acted several out with help of bro and sis. 2. high school. moved to cary, nc. began working in independent theater, Galaxy Cinema. was awarded jedi trophy for employee of the month.3. college. uncw. got sucked into the wacky world of cucalorus where i have remained for the past three years. 4. future. afraid, very afraid.

Manifest, manifest, manifest-o. cheery, cheery, cheery-o.

I've often told people that I want to be a filmmaker because I love stories. This is a lie. I want to be a filmmaker because I love people's reactions to stories. Whether it's a magazine article or a billboard or song on the radio or tv show or film, the best part of any media is the reaction each person has to it. When you can experience a new perspective or vision or story your mind's eye is opened a little more, your understanding of the world is a little bit more complete.
Unfortunately a lot of media is one-sided, you can't respond directly to it. If the content so provokes them a person could write a letter to the editor or the company or sing along or share and rewatch. But the best response is the unconscious connections made between what we are made to experience and what we choose to experience.
When you're watching a film and you're completely drawn in, fascinated and unable to be torn from the screen for whatever reason-that is the moment I want. The moment of complete connection with a moving image. That almost impossible bond when the screen and audience, viewed and viewer, specactle and spectator interact and one is changed because of it.

A while ago I forgot why I wanted to do this. Film studies can seem like a completely self indulgent study, what does it really do to help anyone? Change anything? Contribute more than a few forgettable scenes when compared to the enormity of the rest of life? I was in a hostel in Ireland travelling when I met a woman who was in the same room as me. As she packed up from her one-night stay I shared my trouble with her. She told me she was a nurse. She saw patient after patient every day of the week, who knows how many different people she met in a year, how many people she took care of. People from all over, from all different walks of life, different careers, families, lifestyles. But the one thing that seemed to connect all of them was the films they saw and shows they watched. Through that they could relate to the nurses that tended to them, the doctors that diagnosed them, the other patients they met. Film and tv was the medium through which strangers could find a common ground.
Later that night, while sipping on the best beer in the world, I met a Kiwi and the first thing I said to her was how I loved her country because of Lord of the Rings. Soon our conversation was joined by several others and it seemed that the nurse knew what she was talking about.