Home is where the heart lives...

I think home movies are really interesting to study. It's sort of like an unexplained watered down documentary. Home movies have had a pretty big impact on my life now that I think about it. The first camera I got my hands on was my family's Panasonic VHS Tape Recorder, where I did some of my first video making. I think I or my parents still have all that footage around, and I have gone back and watched some of it. One instance I love, is a tape in Florida for Christmas when I was around 6 or 7 maybe, my mom was filming...i think...and after awhile of pointing the camera at me and my dad and brother, the camera is set down, but the camera is still running. For those minutes, you can hear life as it was in that moment, yet watching the balcony of the condo, without any sort of playing towards the camera. I've always had the desire to sort of dig into my past as well as my family and make some sort of narrative of those home movies, or to see if there is a hidden story like in The Future is Behind You. In doing so I may manipulate how I see my own past, which could be good or bad, but probably have an indifferent outcome. I think the experience could be very personal, educational, and interesting. Anyway, that's my thoughts on that matter. I probably won't do my three shot edit until Monday or Tuesday, but I will put some effort into it in any case.

Car Wash

So last class we were given a piece of film to alter however we saw fit. Well my strip like others had clips of cars. So I thought to myself 'what do we do with cars?' and answered 'we wash them.' So I decided to give the cars trapped in the film that was fading and deteriorating slowly a nice car wash. And that is what I did. I placed my filmstrip in my dishwasher with the dishes and washed the film. Afterwords I took out the strip and decided to dry the wet emulsion in the clothes dryer by itself. The film looks pretty interesting now, so I'm looking forward to what it is going to look like.

Montage General Thoughts

Montage is a really important, interesting, and unique aspect of filmmaking. The juxtaposition of images can really speak a lot to what you are trying to say with your film, whether it's simple (insert russian name here) things about representing hunger, or anger, or something more complex like the fetishization of violence or sex. Bruce Conner showed how montage could really enhance your experience of a certain time and space, by repeating the moment several times back to back in Report. I got sucked into the rhythm of images of the car passing in the motorcade, and Jackie Kennedy going to open the door, but finding it locked. Though I had not experienced the moments leading up to the assassination first hand, I felt the images were somehow more present and haunting, as if I was seeing them repeated over and over on the TV. The power of montage was also very apparent in Connor's A Movie. Where he was able to create little massages and big themes in his film by only juxtaposing different and unrelated images.

I am very excited to see what gems I can find in the recycled images locker, and really excited to be working on the Steinbeck, sp?, again. I really want to play with altering the image in subtle as well as drastic ways as well. That's all for me.