One Week Down & LA Bound

Quite a sunny moon last night.

Greetings fellow bloggers and a happy Wednesday. I don't know if any of you took advantage of the full moon last night, but if you didn't, there's what you missed. Fun times with that 64 second shutter.
I just got done with this week's reading, which provided a good review of film terms from the first class as well as introduced me to some new terminology and ideas. For one, I didn't know they referred to 24 fps as "sound speed". On the set for the movie I worked on over the summer, they'd always yell, "Quiet! Rolling! Sound speed!" and now that makes a bit more sense to me. Secondly, being a digital guy, all this talk about dark rooms and actual film is starting to make me jealous that I've never developed my own film before or been in a dark room. Everything I've learned (outside of classes)about f-stops and exposure/shutter speeds has been a result of me experimenting with my digital camera. Not to be mistaken, I still love the digital world, but I don't think getting my hands on some film and a non-digital camera would hurt me.
As for this week's class, I'm going to have to take my one freebie absence as I am headed for Los Angeles at 8am tomorrow. I'm visiting a friend of mine, a production designer in town, whose out there working on a film. I'll be working on set with him Friday so expect a blog(s) with some pictures and perhaps even a vlog...
See you all next week.

First Class Thoughts

Very rarely does one get to experience a lot on the first day of a class other than a syllabus overview. However, this was one of few classes I've had where we jumped into the learning fun on day one (I'm a poet and I don't realize it). Having never dealt with film other than disposable cameras, I was really surprised to actually get my hands on actually film... and then get to scratch, color, and alter it Brakhage-style. My film had what looked like a still picture of a landscape, complete with a few bare trees and a hay barrel. What I didn't realize at the time was that the picture was slowly moving as if the camera was a car traveling down a country road. I also didn't realize how many frames you have to scratch to see a visible change for only a few seconds. After scratching out the same tree for a good 20 frames or so, I thought for sure, there'd be no tree left; however, I was proved wrong when I was able to view it via projection and the tree was only gone for maybe 2 seconds at most. Still a great learning process though that made me appreciate the work of Stan Brakhage even more than I already did. I think if he used some of the improv music like the Scratch Film Junkies, it'd add another level to his work, but its still pretty inspiring to me regardless.