"Idea" preproduction plan

The documentary will focus on Dr. Kathy Jamison, our family’s vet.  I will research the veterinary industry in order to better understand the general topic.  Even though Dr. Jamison will be the focus of the documentary, I want to know more about animal health care, and show how much she strays from the “traditional” idea of a vet.

Main interview subjects will include Dr. Jamison, our neighbor who is a friend and owner of a “patient,” and perhaps other volunteer interviewees who are at the office while I am shooting.  If there are no volunteers, there should be no problem.  I could interview my mother, as she has gone to the vet plenty of times as well and is familiar with Dr. Jamison.

Most of the footage will be on-location at the office.  I have spent a lot of time in the waiting room, and I know for a fact that I could easily shoot hours upon hours of b-roll (dogs, cats, birds, fish, talking birds; the sound alone is very entertaining), since so much is always going on.  For interviews, the office may suffice as well, except for the friend/neighbor, who can be interviewed in her own house.  I will schedule at least two days of filming at the office, most likely on weekends.  I can interview the friend/owner anytime she is free within next two weeks.  Interviews with Dr. Jamison will be filmed on location during the two shooting days. 

This will be an expository documentary, considering the inclusion of interviews and extensive editing.  I will avoid participating in anything other than interviews.  The structure will focus on the words of the owners who bring their pets to Dr. Jamison, and then her own words and opinions on her job.  If a major topic of interest happens to pop up while I am there, I may follow it throughout the piece as something to give the final project a more linear structure.  There will be no narration.  In my head I see a final product that somewhat mimics a history channel or TLC documentary.  I will not, however, try to manipulate situations.

It would be ideal to have a crew of one to two other people.  I already know one of my friends who would be happy to help me.  He was part of the “mobile costume support unit” while filming Custodian, and he also had a cameo in Things In My Basement That Spin.  The only factor in question is his reliability, which has not been a problem in the past.  If worse comes to worse, I am able to do everything on my own.

Possible questions for Dr. Jamison:

What has your day been like?

What are your opinions on animals (more specifically those you work with)?

Why did you become a veterinarian?

What are some of your opinions concerning the veterinary industry?

Do you have monkeys, and if so, may we meet them?

Possible questions for Neighbor and other interviewees:

Where did you hear of Dr. Jamison?

Why do you choose her services over other vets?

Why do you think that Dr. Jamison is unique/special/awesome?

What past experiences with Dr. Jamison stand out in your memory?

What do you know about the monkeys?

HOLD UP GUYS- I have an idea

As some may know, my family has cats.  too many cats.  four cats live in the house, and every year we find and adopt out an average of two stray cats.  With all of these animals, we end up going to the vet regularly.  We do not go to a "normal" vet clinic (one that looks and feels like a hospital); we go to a local, privately owned veterinary clinic, which looks like an old house that could use a cleaning and may or may not have a colony of more than two dozen monkeys living on the third floor. For my IDEA documentary, I am going to see if I can follow the doctor who runs the clinic for a few days.


Let me just say, there is so much material about this place, Animal Planet could do a whole series about it.  The vet has around 8 dogs of her own, I think, and every morning they jump out of her car like one of those clown cars.  They are not small dogs, either.  There are at least two full size greyhounds.  It is never, EVER boring in the waiting room.  There is always something to keep your mind busy, whether its an escaped puppy running up and down the hallway, or a cat in a carrier howling bloody mary.  And then there's this parrot in the room opposite the examining room, and he hears everything that goes on.  the door to that room is always open, and it sounds like there is a dog, cat, soap opera, and laugh track in that room at any point in time, all thanks to the talented parrot.


One other thing is that apparently the vet takes care of more than thirty monkeys.  I do not know this for sure, and I have never asked her.  The closest thing to concrete evidence I have is that a family friend said she asked the vet about the monkeys, and got a positive response.  Again, I'm not sure, but that would certainly be interesting for a documentary (at least I think so).


We are on very good terms with the vet herself, and she appreciates our efforts in finding homes for stray cats.  She lets students do volunteer work at her clinic, so I have a feeling that she will not mind my doing this project.  I will try to be as minimally invasive as possible, but that may not be possible.  I would need to get a film crew, but I have a feeling my friends would not want to help for more than one day.  






P.S. 
 I think that maybe a certain photo class taught by a certain Mrs. Woodruff should get extra credit for volunteering as film crew.

maya DErEn

Jacob Wetzel

Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon”

When boiled down to its simplest form, Maya Deren’s “Meshes of the Afternoon” is an interpretation on dream structure.  Seeing as all dreams are very specific to the dreamer, the concept of turning a dream into a film that viewers can interpret and enjoy is not easy to pull off.  In “Meshes,” Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid achieve the effect of dream through utilizing experimental techniques in framing, sound, composition, and movement.

At the beginning of the film, we are not yet in the “dream world.”  We know this because all of the shots are taken from a point of view similar to Deren’s, and we do not see her face in any shots.  Maya Deren finds a flower in the road, and picks it up.  She then walks to the front door, drops her key, picks it up, enters the house, observes odd placement of the bread knife, the phone, and the record player, and falls asleep in a chair.  It is important to note the objects that the camera focuses on in the “real world” sequences, as they all play significant roles throughout the film.  The flower, key, knife, phone, and record player are all recurring symbols throughout the “dream world.”  Much like how in a dream, the mind pulls together random images from the day before and relates them to eachother.  As Maya falls asleep, we enter her “dream world” with her. 

BRIGHT IDEAS for the light project

These stick people costumes were made with el wire, which is basically a light in wire form.  it is pretty bright in the dark, and it can be bent into shapes like these stick people.  It is pretty popular as costume lighting, since it is cheap (about $1.00 per foot), effective, battery powered, and easily manipulated.  To shorten el wire, you just cut it like a thread.  It would be pretty easy to make a complete scene with el wire in a dark environment.  A similar effect could be achieved with glow in the dark elements or blacklights, but el wire is much brighter.  People do amazing things with el wire, like this guy, who recreated the el wire "encore" suits worn by the band Daft Punk at their live performances.  We probably could not do something quite this complicated, but it just shows the capabilities of this material.  WE SHOULD GO FOR IT.

"Grassassin"

My film will be a study on the anthropomorphization of blades of grass.  I will film multiple blades of grass, using "close ups" of individual blades, and shots of groups of blades as well.  The blades of grass will experience various calamities, which are rather common events, but on the scale of the grass are terrible disasters.  Examples include: a hand plucking individual blades; someone stepping on grass; and a weedwacker.  The film will feature dialogue, from the perspective of the grass.  The lines spoken by the grass will be recorded in post production, and will be an interpretation of how I would react to the various events if I happened to be a blade of grass.
The goal of this movie is to make the viewer mourn the deaths of the blades of grass who are dying so violently in the film.  I am attempting to make inhuman objects evoke a human reaction by making them seem human while killing them in an inhumane fashion.

THIS is why I wasn't doing my homework :/

So I don't quite have my priorities straight and I was kinda spending too much time on my most recent costume project.  I started in May, then stopped, then started again at the perfect time: the beginning of school!! yay! But it is going pretty good now and i'm no longer scared that I won't finish it :D  Hopefully Now I can spend more time on working!

2001: A Space Odyssey "Star Gate" sequence

I am not quite sure if this is officially "Avant Garde," but I think it qualifies.  It is very experimental in the way it is shot, with almost gratuitous amounts of distortion and saturation.  There is also a great deal of repetition, seeing how each shot is seen in at least four difrent colors throughout the video.  Lastly, I consider this Avant Garde because the first time I saw it I had no idea what the heck was going on.  The movie is relatively linear up until this point, when physical contact was made with the Monolith.  Everything seemed straight forward, and all of a sudden... BAM! its like a rave party on steroids.  to say that I was lost is a tremendous understatement.  Of course, the director was probably trying to recreate something that defies explanation, like enlightenment or something.  So... I guess he did a good job?  To make a film of something you can't describe or fully understand, just make the video the same way! its that simple!  But I actually do like this video.  There is something extremely eerie and unsettling about it, especially when put together with the music.  The fact that in alot of the shots there is nothing that is recognizable, not even stars, makes this sequence almost scary for me.  The unnatural colors and the drone that is the "music" enhance the unnaturalness of this movie.  Too bad for Dave. He had to go through it for real.

AAAAAARRRRRTT

I don't think I am an artsy person.  I understand what art can mean to people, and I never disregard a piece that doesn't seem like "art" to me.  I don't really know what art is to me, and I certainly don't know what it is to other people.  When I look at the exhibitions in this little magazinette, I see art and sculptures and a good deal of creativity.  Some people who see these sculptures may just see a bunch of trash just mashed together, but I understand that whoever made that "pile of junk" sees a whole lot more.  I mean, its in a gallery for some reason.  What separates the artists from the "non-believers" in cases like these is experience and background, in my opinion.  The art means more to the artist just like how "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2" is much more significant to a Harry Potter fan, as opposed to one who is not familiar with the series.
I did like the video art section, though.  The different exhibits described all seemed much more creative than I had imagined a Video Art Gallery.  The Description of "Submerged" was particularly interesting, with its interactive faces projected on those ceramic rock things.  The work of Nam Jun Paik was also quite innovative.  I did not expect video art to be so sculptural, as this article portrays it.  I think that incorporating video with sculpture could be the beginning of my transition to the wild world of ARTSY.   D:

Assignment 1 (a.k.a. friggin' awesome dancing car)

This is why I make stop-motion animations.  Not that what I have done is in any way comparable to this video, but one might say I aspire to greatness such as this.  The creator of this video, Patrick Boivin, is obviously a professional, and he has directed commercials in stop motion and other forms of animation (I'm not sure about live action).  When I first saw his transformers stop motion videos, I was in awe of the smooth, complex ways in which he made these toys move.  I can hardly get a lego person with 7 points of articulation to walk right, while this guy can get a transformer with like, 30 ball joints to breakdance so effortlessly, it looks like motion capture cgi.  Patrick Boivin certainly does have much more experience and better resources than I do, but still I doubt that I will ever be his equal.  I would say that Patrick Boivin is my filmmaking role model.  He does a little bit of everything, makes money by making commercials, and makes mind-blowing animations just for fun.

interpreting how Mr. Boivin made this is kind of cheating for me, since I have seen how he has made some of his other videos, but I will "analyze" it anyway.  First off, he probably made this film primarily with Dragon Stop-motion, since that is what he used for his other videos, and it is a widely used professional grade stop-motion filming application.  It is also likely that he filmed the figure in front of a green screen and filmed the background separately, since animating takes a lot of time and if he took the frames "on location," the natural lighting might have changed.  I would not doubt that he used photoshop to minimize the "cracks" on the transformer toy in the beginning frames to make it more realistic.  On another note, the toy it the video is almost entirely custom.  From experience, I know that Transformers toys are not nearly as limber or poseable as this toy.  In shots from the video, one well trained in the lego arts can identify that Mr. Boivin has replaced many of BumbleBee's joints with Lego Bionicle pieces, allowing the toy to bend its legs and waste more realistically, and to give it better proportions.

Thanks To Monsieur Boivin's mad animation and toy modification skillz, this little yellow car can throw down with our very own Sean Whang in a b-boy dance off.  Patrick Boivin's totally amazing and kick-butt videos can be found on his youtube channel right--here.