Category: Uncategorized

In developing a concept for a film one comes to an idea. I suppose for me I have strayed from this notion of a solid idea a way to interpret and get what I am doing in making anything. I don’t really feel that it is my concern to have a serious idea and to be concerned with taking that idea seriously. This is not nuclear negotiations or anything of legitimate consequence it is the making of a product that will at best evoke some sort of cathartic experience on the part of the audience or at the very least inspire some entertaining or amusing questions about the quirks of life, nature, humanity and all those other vague and irrelevant subjects. I enjoy making movies and playing with imagery to create meanings and such not because I believe I have “something to say” rather I find the act of creating the product to be one that at best is a sublime distraction.

That is not to say that my ideas aren’t something I have a degree of sincere consideration and confidence in promoting, rather I play with these ideas instead of dictating them at best having fun with the images and the ideas that the audience can come up with. I do not work in such an esoteric fashion to create product so desperately abstract to evoke only the forced awe of art house patrons and frankly I do not see the point in that except as it perpetuates an elite class that all classes of intellect is based on rather illusionary pretenses. I can use big words [with the help of a thesaurus and spell checker of course] to write about the most vulgar of works such that it can sound truly profound. This form of deconstructive criticism and attempt to assign importance to “serious” ideas is retroactive at best and ultimately a game for those who prefer to concern themselves with ascribing objective value to something that is only as tangible as the collective references [the shoulders of giants] that can be universally understood. In this case that which is serious is that which is generic and most accessible in a piece of artwork everything else is a clever attempt to reduce the uniqueness of the piece into those parts that can be reassigned to previously understood movements of thought and art in human history. Without inventing new words our human minds will ultimately resolve metaphor into these basic concepts and find a way to arrive at the familiar. For me the point is not in trying to mask this familiarity behind some pretense of a serious commitment to originality or this lofty notion of the filmmakers idea, rather it is to find novel and interesting ways to create meaning from the familiar through references and combinations creating novel images that create unexpected and yet totally familiar and strangely intuitive emotional responses and intellectual pondering satisfying the human desire for catharsis and neurological stimulation.

I found myself engaged in a mildly tedious task of drawing a rudimentary floor plan of the apartment room where I live. I am supposed to note the number of outlets and then figurethe Wattage or something like that. I got out the old physics book and spent 20 minutes trying to find how Wattage related to Amperes and Voltage. Finally, I broke down and checked a table in the American Heritage Dictionary and low and behold V = W/A and that was that. It frustrates a lazy fool like myself how often the simplest questions require hours of research and are usually best found in the most general of reference books. I often think that all I really needed to make it through college was a good set of encyclopedias an internet connection and a good thesaurus and dictionary. I could have saved quite a bit of money on books.

Maybe it is my rushed sensibility towards education. I see no point in endlessly distracting and confusing a simple point through the laborious process of discovery when the answer is not something of subjective quality but a simple fact. In art this does not apply of course. I found myself shooting my ukelelle for my 8mm object assignment. I put it in the sun and shot it with mostly macro-zoom lens shots. I think it looked good but it didn’t take much deliberation or forethought the whole process probably too less than an hour to familiarize myself with the camera [reading instructions just like a textbook nothing simple there] and to set it up and shoot the footage. I wonder if this quick approach is a sign that I have no appreciation for the artistic skill and patience that I have observed fellow students to demonstrate? Is my impatience and desire to just get the assignment job causing me to produce work of low quality? I think it is but I don’t know what the difference would be a shot is a shot and if it takes me 15 minutes to shoot what I think is good footage then maybe that’s just something that I am good at. I’ve always figured that people who can accomplish a task and do it with intelligence, thoughtful consideration and produce quality work without taking a long time are “good” at that task. To me it seems that is the real goal in life to find what you can do well such that you can excel at that since the consistent thing about all of us is that we have a limited amount of time. Though there is a learning curve and there are limits in terms of talent and intelligence but if one does not test them then one cannot know how “good” he or she can be.

My next project in the Super 8 mm class is supposed to be an object study. I will explore an object from different angles and lighting and positions and such. I don’t know what sort of object to study but I think it should be something with texture, something that can become abstract lose depth and flatten (dimesionally dynamic). There is a lacking of light now as the stormy dark weather has began. I will need to start getting used to using lights and doing lighting designs so I can acheive the professional exposures with rich depth of field and vibrant colors that distinguish my work from the amateur stuff I’ve done in the past.

Things went well I was happy to finally have enough light to really stop down and open up my depth of field. I think this whole project will come together once I’m looking at all the footage in the editing room. Eisenstein did have a point with his montage theory.

I have to shoot my brother painting either today or tomorrow. I stayed up late last night watching cartoons (anime) and now I’m a bit worn out since I had such a productive Friday. That is the down side to productivity if it’s towards a goal you don’t really care about or feel good about then I guess it’s just lost energy. I should have just hit the sack last night I guess I’m becoming an old man rather quickly though I think it’s easier now than it has been in the past 500 years or so.

This has been a productive day a real non-stop one for me. Up by 8:30 AM off to school for a music midterm. Then a few hours in the audio room working out a project and finishing it. Leaving school by 3:15 PM, it’s raining I like this on a Friday. Off to get gas some libations and then home exercise finish whatever homework I have for the weekend and now I’m making some chicken legs for dinner. It’s an odd recipe boil the legs for awhile then fry them in olive oil with some diced red onion and fresh garlic saute for awhile then add tomato slices. The combination makes the oil into a sauce (sort of) and serve with some cranberry juice or something and a few bagels. Good times. Tomorrow I shoot my brother (cause I also checked out a camera today) painting and finish up the production work for my second project in my 16 mm class. All in all good times. When you plan ahead and work well you can pull off wonders and get much more done on a lousy Friday. The only reason to do that is so that I can enjoy Friday night worry free (reasonably).

I don’t know what to say about my memories except that they are mine and they are flawed by time and nostalgia and my ever evolving perspective on life and such. Tarkovsky did a movie called The Mirror it was about his memories and his feelings for people important to him. The film was odd non-linear and difficult almost tedious in its pacing. However I do think it was a success for what it attempted to do by relating the subjective experience of how his memories were appreciated by him and then contriving some sort of narrative around those aloof memories and emotional fragments.

I hate to talk about Art. I find it almost impossible to not slip into pretensions convolutions and esoteric deconstruction. I find those thing that I enjoy are things that at once surprise me but do not feel forced or weird for the sake of themselves. My memories give me feelings and these are something that I can apply to a scene in terms of the cinematography and some of the literal content but I don’t find anything deep within them. That they convey something general to others gives me the sense that they are unremarkable. The combination and intentional collaboration of these feelings, these accumulated experiences intellectually digested and processed combined with others, the fusion of memory fragments and emotional notions seems to be the best way to construct something artistic.

Joseph Campbell was talking to Bill Moyers on this program I watched last night (it was old and sort of strange). He said that it is in the artists that make our new myths and rituals as the culture is continually changing and evolving, as worlds collide I think this makes some sense. Only the living can apply their understanding to create something intelligible I wonder what Aristotle would do with this 2004 AD?

I was paired up with a fellow film student today. He’s a pretty cool guy that seems to have good ideas and has made some fun stuff. We are told to describe our current film projects about exploring something. This doesn’t take us very long since neither one of us is the sort to overemphasis or wax pretentious (I curb myself as best as I can and never do so in a serious fashion). So we chat about our lives and shit like that. I tell him about how I spent some time down in Riverside while I was an undergraduate. He tells me that he’s from Bakersfield then mentions that he didn’t like Southern California or LA that much. I concur and tell him I only went there for a few concerts. I tell him about seeing The Kids in the Hall when they did their reunion tour back in 2001. Funny enough turns out he was there too. So it’s just another one of those odd ways that people experience things as they live and cross paths maybe countless times never realizing it. It just amused me.

Today has been a rainy windy Tuesday (not as much fun as those Sundays). It started at Midnight with a rerun of Cheers on FOX, it was part one of the two-parter where Sam’s brother comes to town and Sam feels inadequate. Class was fine but I’ve just had this lingering anxiety about midterms. They aren’t too bad but I fear that whole stupid mistake aspect has followed me from the Undergraduate years. I circled the wrong answer to an easy 50:50 type question about light on my Cinema 1 midterm. Just like my brain didn’t understand that it was wrong like telling someone with absolute certainty that something is right when it is left. I do this from time to time and it truly upsets me because I do look things over and I do scrutinize but these thing get past me enough to make me uncertain and discouraged. The great flaw with being human isn’t that we make mistakes, that is inevitable. Rather it is that we (and by this I mean me) make the same mistakes. We are limited by our own biases and flaws and ineptitude. Obviously some more than others or maybe that is just luck of the draw? Still when I think about how successful people often have a haphazard story about how they achieved their ‘fortune and glory” I find it very difficult to attempt to go about living a thoughtful life since intention and expectation is usually the best way to maximize disappointment. I have not reconciled an appropriate method for negotiating this chaotic aspect of life and I doubt I ever will but that doesn’t change much and I suppose that I will continue along the same path no matter how many stupid mistakes I seem determined to make.

Don’t get me wrong I have a pretty sweet DVD player with the 5.1 channel surround sound and I use the hell out of it, I just wish that the stupid format wasn’t so delicate. I take care of my stuff. I’m no materialist but I do enjoy my DVD collection the art is what brings me pleasure not the object. Nonetheless, I’ve found that most other people don’t take very good care of DVD’s and or that they can be easily damaged. Case in point: about 60-70% of the time I rent a DVD (which is rather rare for me since not much new stuff has come out that’s been worth renting or seeing at the cinema) I cannot finish it because the dirt and scratches on the surface of the disc are too severe. It sucks. Once more I’ve found occasions where a DVD I purchased was skipping without these scratches. It occurred on a copy of Goonies and also on a anime called Gungrave. The skip for Gungrave occurred about 5 minutes into the 4th episode on the first volume. This infuriated me I was more interested in viewing that 4th episode than in squabbling with Amazon about a defunct product, so I bought another one cheaper (it was used). CUT TO me fixing to watch this 4th episode all ready to go and low and behold the damn thing starts to skip at the exact same place. Now this is a freakin’ conspiracy! So I’m apt to uncover this and get my money back and a working copy of the 1st volume since episode 4 seemed to be where the show was really gonna pick up. Anyway that’s my world hates me complaint for now.