Digital Film

I made a short documentary about building a digital camera. This documentary was obviously shot with another digital camera, but was edited to look like a film camera. The film was meant to be a commentary on the value of both the old and new way to make film. People may think film is old and outdated, but I disagree. Its usefulness is clear in its depiction of the new method in my film. Using film still holds value because it still accomplishes the ultimate objective of movies in the first place, to tell stories. Film, no matter how old the method, exists to tell stories and make worlds.

There may be new toys and tricks, but principals are the same. I can use a camera that makes a faded and scratched image, but it can tell the same story. I filmed myself building a new camera to show the harmony between the old and new. It is never about which is better, it is about which one is needed to say what the artist wants to say. In this case, I used “film” to say that film can tell a story just as well as digital. Using this method of filmmaking in a specific way is used to say something specific. It isn’t just being used to say it looks like film, this element is being used specifically to enhance my point.

            I feel like Quinten Tarantino was a big inspiration for why I made this film. Tarantino is someone who uses film for the sake of using it. He refuses to use digital because he feels it is not actually a form of filmmaking. My film showed both the old and the new methods working in harmony to make something that shows the value of both digital and film. Every form has value and it is important to explore everything. Refusing a medium or method of creation only limits the artist. Limiting yourself in this way is dangerous because it may prevent said artist from making the statement they want to make.

            The readings were a bit of an inspiration for this project as well. The comic book reading defended the idea that comic books were a form of valuable literature. I took the idea of defending a medium or method and used it to defend the idea that any type of filmmaking is good filmmaking. It doesn’t have to be on film to be a film. At the same time, it doesn’t have to be a digital image to look beautiful.

Family is Family.

          Our script focused on one of the most famous murders of the late 1800s. In the year 1892 Lizzie was accused for murdering her father and stepmother with an axe. Not a lot is known about the murder, but Lizzie was eventually acquitted and spent the rest of her life in the same town. Grace proposed that we make a story around Lizzie’s sister, Emma. It is thought that Emma may have had something to do with hiding evidence from authorities, so we played off of that theory. We even decided to use their maid, Bridget, in our story as well.

          Biography.com suggests that the relationship between Lizzie Borden and her stepmother was strained. Both Lizzie and her sister thought the stepmother had only married their father to obtain his immense wealth. We used this hatred of the stepmother to further our story. Their relationship was further pushed to a breaking point by the fact that Lizzie and Emma remained unmarried into adulthood. For this time, this was a great shame for the Borden family, and their father would often remark on their finding a husband. We used this detail to further explain why Lizzie murdered her father and stepmother, and why Emma was so willing and even eager to help in any way.

          “The Trial of Lizzie Borden” is an article by Doug Linder found online. The article goes through various pieces of evidence and why they are important. We decided to use these evidence pieces. Emma goes through each of them, and disposes of them in an eerily elegant way. We wanted to incorporate the lady like culture of the time, with the strong, independent woman culture that the world was trying to move towards. We believe this correlation between the two stories works perfectly to give this story just the right amount of impact. Emma is scary in the story, but she is also strong and determined.

          The story itself is small, and of little grand historical significance, but we believe these small pieces of history can be the most fascinating. This one was especially intriguing because it shows the possibility of rebellion in a culture so focused on the “perfect lady-like housewife.” It was also interesting to look into a culture so different from ours, and try to figure out what someone from that time would do. We believe this venturing into another culture and then creating a unique perspective is what makes historical stories so interesting.

Grace Taylor 

Jase Van Meeteren

Thoughts Are Dangerous

https://soundcloud.com/jase-hal-van-meeteren/audio-process-thoughts

          For our project, we decided to use the form of an autobiographical documentary to express a complex process. The process of our project was that of social anxiety. It was inspired by thoughts or actions that we, or more specifically, Jase, has experienced in his life. We wanted to capture a real life situation and translate it into an audio form. Because of the nature of this process, it being almost entirely in the thoughts of another person, we had to recreate the situation with a simulated performance. There aren’t many ways to document human thought other than voice over; so we staged the vocalized thoughts of the subject by recording them in a controlled setting. In this manner, performance further developed our project into something more than a simple autobiography.  We felt that the he personal content of the process and the complexity of the idea could be conveyed most simply through a staged yet genuine reenactment of actual anxious thoughts.

            A major focus of our project was the genuine intimation of anxious feelings. The film Inception proved to be a great source of inspiration concerning the reflection of character anxiety in sound. In a critical scene in the film, Cobb tries to persuade Robert Fisher to trust him.  While the two are talking at the hotel bar, the background noise is faint and slowly gets louder throughout the scene.  During the conversation, when the people talking in the background are the loudest, a champagne glass shatters and distracts Cobb with memories of his past.  This is the moment when the conversations in the background are completely silenced, causing a heightened sense of anxiety.  It is this stark contrast that creates an emotional reaction in the audience.  In our audio process, we recreated this technique with a crescendo of sound by increasing the layers of voice audio, amplifying the amount of anxiety felt.  When the noise silences and the tension is released the listener is jolted by the by the abrupt change. As our anxious subject finds renewed peace in his isolation, the audience is treated to the comfortable quiet of his liberated mind.

            Since our process had to be fabricated to properly relate the idea of the piece, we had to construct our own version of the beginning, middle, and end to social anxiety. In the case of our process, we chose to document a choice of isolation and detachment. The process begins with the subject’s self-conscious thoughts and develops as he is admitted into a social gathering that further stresses his anxious mind. As he spends more time in the awkward situation; the craze of his worried mind quickly escalates until the subject is overwhelmed. Opting to leave the gathering than suffer more anxiety, the subject completes his trial by alienating himself from others. Like Borup’s My Mom the Taxidermist, not every attempt ends in success. Sometimes the beauty of the piece lies in the process rather than the product.