Pics

I found some of the pics that I took in India. Some are edited - the first and the last two. Hope you like them. Enjoy!!

 The Arabian sea!!

 Almost went to jail for taking this pic!! Its prohibited. But it was worth the risk.

 This was a showpiece at my place. I did this using total back light.

Flashback

Flash-backs:

Another important device for the construction of film narratives is the use of ‘flash-backs’, in the sense that the term is understood nowadays. That is, having a scene in the present followed by a scene in the past, and eventually returning to scenes in the present of the story. In the earliest days of filmmaking, this was only done as a representation of a character dreaming about the past, as in the 1901 Pathe film Histoire d’un crime. The first film in which a character remembers the past while awake was Vitagraph’s Napoleon- Man of Destiny (1909). In this film, Napoleon is in his palace after the battle of Waterloo remembering notable scenes of his past life. A superimposed title appears identifying the event he is thinking about, and then the film cuts straight to this scene, and afterwards back to Napoleon thinking about it. The idea slowly spread over the next few years, and in these, usually the framing action shows a character narrating the story of the past events to people listening to them. This happens in Luigi Maggi’s Nozze d’oro of 1911, and amongst other films in the Edison Company’s The Passer-by of 1912. This film introduces what was to become a standard way of getting into a flash-back. As the person telling the story of their past starts talking, the camera tracks into his face, then there is a dissolve to his younger face and the camera tracks back to reveal the scene in the past. There are many examples of single shot memory flashbacks by 1913, while a memory shown in an extended series of shots is much rarer. There is even an example of a flash-back inside a flashback in Just a Shabby Doll made by the Thanhouser Company in 1913.

They are fun to watch as well!!

Remember this scene from Ratatouille?? 

When we see the flashback scene from Ego’s childhood after he takes his first bite of the ratatouille, the house and kitchen is the same countryside house that rats came from at the beginning of the movie (where Remy was studying the cookbooks and watching cooking shows with the old lady). Remy actually made Ego his own mother’s Recipe.

References:

 Kenny (2004). Teaching Tv Production in a Digital World: Integrating Media Literacy.

Production Shots

Production shots:

There are four types of shots used in video production:

1.       Long shot (LS): A long shot allows your audience to see everything. It shows the big picture.

2.       Medium shot (MS): This shot gets rid of any distractions in the picture and starts the process of zeroing in on the action.

3.       Close-up (CU): This shot cuts out extraneous visual material. Faces should fill up most of the screen.

4.       Extreme close-up (ECU): Use this shot to focus attention on what’s important. It enlarges small objects to show details.

To tie the shots together:

1.       When changing to a different shot within a sequence, you should plan to have things in the same position. For example, when switching from a medium shot to a close-up of someone writing, their hand should be in the same place when the edit is made.

2.       Make sure movement in the frame goes in the same direction.

Wild Track

Wild Track:

When on location, you should always record a ‘wild track’. This should be a few minutes of the ambient noise from your location (the sound of traffic, chirping of birds etc.). In the edit it is very useful (and often absolutely required) to keep a wild track running in the background to smooth over the changes from cut to cut. A wild track is an audio only recording of an actor’s lines while the camera is not rolling. These wild recordings are used to replace a dialogue from a filmed take that may be un-usable for various reasons. Perhaps a plane flew over during the scene. It will be used in part or in whole to replace the on-camera dialogue. It is also used for off- camera lines that need to be recorded on mic. So make sure you don’t forget to record a wild track on set.

Additional tools

Some additional tools:

Other than the programmes that we are learning through the module like Photoshop, premiere pro and after effects, these are a few that can be used too: (Yes, they are all free!!!!)

1.       ArtRage2:  It’s is used for matte painting and creating the movie poster. This is a simple and artistic painting programme. It’s extremely useful. If you need any kind of digital painting with traditional artistic materials, this is your first choice. The free version is a little limited than the full version. But the full version is surprisingly inexpensive.

2.       DAZ Studio and Bryce 5.5: These are great if you want a basic 3D animation.

3.       GIMP: It’s a paint programme very similar to Adobe Photoshop. It’s great but not to the level of Photoshop. So if you do not have Adobe Photoshop 4 or later, this programme can be a useful tool.

4.       Audacity: This is useful for working with audio and converting audio to OGG files. It’s a bit clumsy but does the job.

Editing

Editing:

Stanley Kubrick noted that the editing process is the one phase of production that is truly unique to motion pictures. Every other aspect of filmmaking originated in a different medium than film (photography, art direction, writing, sound recording etc.), but editing is the one process that is unique to film. In Alexander Walker’s Stanley Kubrick Directs, Kubrick was quoted as saying,” I love editing. I think I like it more than any other phase of filmmaking. If I wanted to be frivolous, I might say that everything that precedes editing is merely a way of producing film to edit.”

In his book, On Film Editing, Edward Dmytryk stipulates ‘seven rules of cutting’ that a good editor should follow:

1.       Never make a cut without a positive reason.

2.       When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short.

3.       Whenever possible, cut ‘in movement’.

4.       The ‘fresh’ is preferable to ‘stale’.

5.       All scenes should begin and end with continuing action.

6.       Cut for proper values rather than proper matches.

7.       Substance first- then form.

According to Walter Murch, when it comes to film editing, there are six main criteria for evaluating a cut or deciding where to cut. They are (in order of importance):

1.       Emotion: Does the cut reflect what the editor believes the audience should be feeling at that moment?

2.       Story: Does the cut advance the story?

3.       Rhythm: Does the cut occur ‘at a moment that is rhythmically interesting and right?’

4.       Eye-trace: Does the cut pay respect to ‘the location and movement of the audience’s focus of interest within the frame?’

5.       Two dimensional place of the screen: Does the cut respect the 180 degree rule?

6.       Three dimensional space of action: Is the cut true to the physical/ spatial relationships within the diegeis?

Camera Controls

The most used controls in a camera:

1.       Iris: The ring closest to the camera body controls the amount of light passing through the lens to the light- sensitive surface of the pickup tube or chip. It is called the iris, aperture or f-stop control and is marked off in f-numbers. The lowest f-stop lets in the most light and the highest f-stop lets in the least. Some lenses even have a ‘C’ setting after the highest f-stop which means the lens is completely closed, letting no light through at all. The standard f- numbers are 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22 and 32 where 1 allows the most amount of light and 32 allows the least amount of light to pass through the lens.

2.       Zoom: The centre ring on most lenses is the zoom control. This allows you to change the focal length of the lens through a range from wide angle (short focal length) to telephoto (long focal length). It is common for inexpensive zoom lenses to have a range of about six to one. This means that the longest focal length is about six times the shortest. The main use of the lens is in controlling the field of view of the camera when it is inconvenient or impossible to change the distance from the subject to the camera.

3.       Focus: The focus is used to control the depth of field. Depth of field is the range of distances in front of the lens in which objects appear to be in acceptable focus. It is longer for short lenses and it increases as you use higher f-stops. It is preferable to use a higher f-stop when lighting conditions permit, if you expect the distance between the camera and the subject to change often while you are taping, since you will have less trouble keeping the subject sharply focused with greater depth of field.

4.       White Balance: If you use outdoor film with normal indoor lighting (no flash) everything comes out orange. In professional cameras, it may be necessary with each change in location or lighting to make the camera interpret a particular colour. This is done by showing the camera a white platform ( sheets, walls, desks etc.) which represents the total absence of colour. Controls on the camera are then used to minimize the colour output of the camera.

POV shots

Point of View shots:

These shots are used to convey the idea of what someone in the film was seeing through e.g. a telescope and this was indicated by having a black circular mask or vignette within the frame. The POV shot, in which someone looking at something is followed by a cut to a shot taken from their position without any mask, took longer to appear. In 1910, in Vitagraph’s Back to Nature we see a long shot of people looking down over the rail of a ship taken from below, followed by a shot of the lifeboat they are looking at taken from their position. A true POV shot is introduced by an explanatory intertitle, “what they saw in the house across the court” in Larry Trimble’s Jean and the Waif, made at the end of 1910. But a few months later, Trimble made Jean Rescues, another of the popular series which has POV shots introduced at an appropriate point without explanation. After this, un-vignette POV shots began to appear fairly frequently in Vitagraph films, and also occasionally in films from other American companies.

An example of an explicit POV shot from the public domain horror fim The Driller Killer putting the audience into the perspective of the protagonist playing pinball with the top shot coming five seconds before the below shot.

Reference:

Mascelli, Joseph, V. (1965). The Five C's of Cinematography: Motion Picture Filming Techniques Simplified.

Animation

Animation

Animation is a technique in which each frame of a film is produced individually. It can be generated as a computer graphic or by photographing a drawn image. When the frames are strung together and the resulting film is viewed at a speed of 16 or more frames per second, there is an illusion of a continuous movement. File formats like GIF, QuickTime, Shockwave and Flash allow animation to be viewed on a computer. Although most animation studios are now using digital technologies in their productions, there is a type of animation that depends on film. Cameraless animation, made famous by filmmakers like Norman McLaren, Len Lye and Stan Brakhage, is painted and drawn directly onto pieces of film and then run through a projector.

This is Norman McLaren drawing on a film.

The first feature length computer animated film is Toy Story (1995) which was produced by Pixar Animation Studios and released by Disney. After the success of Toy Story, Disney returned to traditional animation and made three more popular films: The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996, Hercules in 1997 and Mulan in 1998.

In 1999, Disney released Tarzan, which employed the use of CGI rendering technique called Deep Canvas. Today, technology has become much more advanced and we have 3D animation. This is done with programmes such as Maya, LightWave and 3D Studio Max. The one major difference in 2D and 3D animation is that for 3D animation, each shot is rendered just like a motion picture shot on film with live actors. These shots are then edited together. This is very different from 2D animation where each frame is carefully planned out and no extra frames are created.

Check this out:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9wpMoh5r58

Kinetoscope

The Beginning Of Film with Kinetoscope:

The earliest surviving motion picture is the two second experimental film, Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed by Louis Le Prince on October 1888 in Leeds, Yorkshire. This is noted by Guinness Book of Records. William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, Chief Engineer with the Edison Laboratories is credited with the invention of a celluloid strip containing a sequence of images. This formed the basis of photographing and projecting moving images. Celluloid blocks were thinly sliced and then removed with heated pressure plates. After this, they were coated with a photosensitive gelatine emulsion. This technique led to the invention of the Kinetograph and then the Kinetoscope.

In 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair, Edison introduced them to the public. The Kinetoscope was a cabinet in which a continuous loop of Dickson’s celluloid film (powered by an electric motor) was lit by an incandescent lamp and seen through a magnifying lens.

Kinetoscope parlours were supplied with fifty-foot film snippets photographed by Dickson, in Edison’s Black Maria studio.

 These sequences recorded mundane events as well as entertainment acts like acrobats, music hall performers and boxing demonstrations. Kinetoscope parlours soon spread successfully to Europe. A film could be under a minute long and would usually present a single scene of everyday life, a public event, sports or slapstick.

References:

·         Appelbaum, Stanley (1980). The Chicago World's Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record. New York: Dover. 

·          Baldwin, Neil (2001 [1995]). Edison: Inventing the Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

·         Dickson W.K.L. (1907). "Edison's Kinematograph Experiments," in A History of Early Film, vol. 1 (2000), ed. Stephen Herbert. London and New York: Routledge.

·         Edison, Thomas A. (1891a). "Kinetographic Camera" in Mannoni et al., Light and Movement, n.p.

·         Edison, Thomas A. (1891b). "Apparatus for Exhibiting Photographs of Moving Objects" in Mannoni et al., Light and Movement, n.p.

This is how the Kinetoscope parlours looked like.

TV Viewing

Digital media - TV

We refer digital media to applications of microelectronics, computers and telecommunications that either offer new services (e.g. mobile phones) or enhancement of older ones (high definition TV). But more than technological innovations, we are concerned with how individuals or organizations change their patterns for communication by using digital media. My most favourite form of digital media is the TV. I was doing some research on it and I found that vastly used communication systems like TV and computers are actually fragmenting the “mass” audience into narrower user groups. Zillmann and Bryant(1985)^1. examined relationships between reasons for television  viewing and specific program choices. They found that distressed individuals were most likely to watch soothing television programs lacking any wide emotional content. Television viewing has two specific styles. They are ritualized and instrumental. Rubin^2. distinguished between them and he positioned ritualized viewing as habitual and frequent television use in search of companionship or a way to pass time, whereas instrumental viewing is highly selective and purposeful. But I think this cannot be applied in all areas of television viewing. For eg. Let’s consider news. The men in my family are really into watching news and keeping themselves updated (and sometimes because they have nothing else to do). They keep shuffling the news channels every couple of hours. This comes under both ritualized and instrumental. Ritualized because it is habitual and frequent and instrumental because it is purposeful. Agree?

References:

1.  Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1985). Affect, mood, and emotion as determinants of selective exposure. In D. Zillmann & J. Bryant (Eds.), Selective exposure to communication (pp. 157–190). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

2. Rubin, Alan M. (1984). Ritualized and instrumental television viewing, Journal of Communication, Vol 34(3), 1984, 67-77.

History of Communications

Communications:

The study of human communications has a long and distinguished history. We can say that since humankind first acquired the ability to communicate through verbal and nonverbal symbols, people have ‘studied’ communication. In order to understand how communication is studied today, it is important to appreciate how we got to where we are now. The oldest essay ever discovered, written about 3000 B.C., consists on advice on how to speak effectively. This chapter was inscribed on a fragment addressed to Kagemni^1., the eldest son of the Pharaoh Huni. Surprisingly, the oldest book called as the 'Papyrus Prisse' is a treatise on effective communication. 

Papyrus Prisse I & II : The Instructions to Kagemni

These works are important because they prove that the study of human communication is older than any other area of current academic interest. But its actual contribution to current communication theory was minimal. The study of human communication today can be divided into two major classifications- rhetorical and relational. The rhetorical communication approach focuses primarily on the study of influence. The function of rhetorical communication is to get others to do what you want or need them to do and/or think the way you want them to- to persuade them. The relational approach examines communication from a transactional perspective. That is, two or more people coordinate their communication to reach a shared perspective satisfactory to all. These two represent the dominant orientations of western (rhetorical) and eastern (relational) cultures. The western orientation would sacrifice relationships to accomplish influence and the eastern orientation would do just the opposite. Rather, they represent differences in emphasis. But both are interested in accomplishing objectives and maintaining good relationships through communication.

References:

1. D, Steve. & McMahan, D.(2014). Communication in Everyday Life: A Survey of Communication,SAGE Publications.

Project Proposal

NOVEMBER 10, 2014.

                                                            DIGITAL MEDIA FOUNDATIONS

                                            PROPOSAL FOR THE GROUP PROJECT (2014 - 2015).

1.       Concept – It’s a Stop motion video.  The main subject is- safety for women. I was inspired by Vogue group’s campaign on safety for girls on road. My target audience is everyone excluding very small kids. It’s for everyone around the world irrespective of gender, race or country. I want to highlight that if everyone takes responsibility and start caring about it, safety for women won’t be an impossible thing.

2.    Project Requirements – The estimated resources required to complete the project include: equipment like computers and cameras. I’ll add graphics and audio so I’ll need software like After Effects, Premiere Pro and Photoshop as well. I’ll need actors and an appropriate location to shoot.

3. Project Timeline – It will take approximately eight weeks to complete the project.                                                     

Week 1: Explaining the concept to the actors and handing over the script.

Week 2: Finalizing a location.

Week 3: Shooting.

Week 4: Shooting.

Week 5: Editing.

Week 6: Editing.

Week 7: Editing.

      Week 8: Complete.

4.    Product Description – As mentioned earlier, it highlights how simply caring and taking responsibility can make a big difference when it comes to safety for women. I am hoping it to be a thought provoking video. It’ll show how a simple gesture can save or change someone’s life. The internet is going to be a big tool when it comes to promoting the project. The best way of making it reach is posting it on YouTube and sharing it on social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc.).

5.       Storyboard –  The story will have four main scenes:

Scene 1: A girl is walking on the street alone. Two guys see her and start walking towards her. She gets scared.

Scene 2: A man watches this so he pretends that he knows the girl and calls her in the house. She is in a vulnerable position so she chooses to go in. She is as scared as she was before.

Scene 3: The man comforts her.

Scene 4: He makes sure that she reaches home safely.

Immersion and Simulation

Immersion and simulation

This refers to the lecture we had on Immersion and Simulation. Immersion is also called as virtual reality. This means that you are not a part of the ‘real’ world. One gets immersed into something that may not exist in reality. The best example could be gaming. There can be many reasons as to why people like to be a part of it. One of the reasons could be that it gives a false sense of achievement. This could be self-destructive. And not to forget, it is also highly addictive.

There is a saying that the average man who does not know what to do with his life, wants another one which will last forever. TRUE. Internet is a great contributor to immersion. According to Ernest W. Adams, there are three types of immersions:

Tactical immersion

Tactical immersion is experienced when performing tactile operations that involve skill. Players feel "in the zone" while perfecting actions that result in success.

Strategic immersion

Strategic immersion is associated with mental challenge. Chess players experience strategic immersion when choosing a correct solution among a broad array of possibilities.

Narrative immersion

Narrative immersion occurs when players become invested in a story, and is similar to what is experienced while reading a book or watching a movie.

Today we have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and many other forms of social media where one can portray oneself as someone else. Who really has five hundreds friends in real life? But in the virtual world you do. There is a thin line between reality and virtual reality. And it is scaring how quickly it can fade away.  Getting more likes, friends or followers has become a competition not only on the internet but also in real life. This comes in the category of simulation as well. Simulation is used to create alternate solutions to reality. Consider the astronaut training. Outer space conditions are created on earth using various aspects of physics for the astronauts. This is one just one form of simulation. Immersion and simulation both are used in many areas like computers, engineering, mechanics, finance etc. , healthcare and also in entertainment like films, theme parks etc.

One of the most important people to contribute in this field is Maurice Benayoun. This is some of his work.

                                                             Le Diable est-il courbe? (Is the devil curved?), 1995

Cosmopolis (2005), Maurice Benayoun's Giant Virtual Reality Interactive Installation

                                              World Skin (1997), Maurice Benayoun's Virtual Reality Interactive Installation

Semiotics

Semiotics:

This refers to the lecture we had on semiotics. Semiotics in simple terms is considered to be the study of signs. The study of signs began in Latin with the 1632 ‘Tractatus de Signis’ of John Poinsot. Signs are used to communicate. They can be in the form of texts, visuals, shapes, colors etc. They can have a direct or a hidden meaning (connotation).

              

They can be codes or signals. Semiotics can be divided into three types:

Semantics: Is the relation between signs and the things to which they refer; its meaning. Semanitics focuses on the denotation of words, phrases which basically means texts or narratives.

Syntactics: Is the relation among signs in formal structures. It involves the study of natural languages which includes speech and writing.

Pragmatics: Is the relation between signs and sign-using agents. This involves studying the structure of the language (e.g. grammar) and also the linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener.

   

Advertising is the one area where you see a combination of different forms of signs. I couldn't think of a better example to justify its use. Semiotics is used very wisely in advertising. It is after all, the art of persuasion. We see signs everywhere. Traffic signs and many other signs that are used to denote restaurants, hospitals etc. It is practically impossible to ignore these signs.