To me, the scene I made feels more like an entire piece than a scene from an actual movie. The slow, slow, slow pace of the tilt and the boxy framing combined with the pacing—where we get mostly static air rather than a person on screen—makes me think it succeeds as something sluggish and frustrated, but sort of contained to this particular scene. Like, I don’t know if I’m putting this into the right words, but I feel like this isn’t a scene that actually exists at the beginning of a real movie because it’s too slow and too independent (which isn’t a good thing in this case because it’s supposed to act as a segment of a larger work). Furthermore, the whole elaborate thought process I went through with this piece was cool in theory but possibly kind of a miss in execution. I wanted to play with gender norms and what was literally being said vs what was being shown (and thus interpreted by the audience). The lines in Kaufman’s script are all about being an old, fat, bald man and in the actual movie, an older, overweight, bald male is on screen and doing the voiceover. However, because the character talks about his Body Dysmorphic Disorder, I had the idea to give the script a less literal reading and dive into modern beauty stigmas and female self-esteem disorders, since the vast majority of people suffering from Body Dysmorphic Disorder are young women. Thus, I cast a thin, 22-year-old female to play the part of Kaufman to start a conversation about the exaggerated way women view themselves vs reality. But a funny thing happened where I cast a girl with very short hair and put her in an oversized sweater that sort of tones down the femininity of her body, which possibly overrode my vision and sort of came across as looking like I maybe cast her and meant for the audience to believe she could pass for an old, fat man? I really don’t want this to read as lazy casting because it was super specific and intentional, but I think I maybe should have played up the gender disparity a whole lot more. Dang it.
1) I think an easy way to capture a sense of movement within a still image is to show someone mid-stride. I really wish I'd centered this image down the middle of the aisle just a little bit more. Ugh.
2) I wanted to show the affinity created by the rhythm and repetition of these houses that were all the exact same. I also wanted the line going from bigger to smaller to convey a sense of depth, and the curved line to get a sense of movement even on a street with no activity.
3) I think this photo has zero sense of movement, so that's no good.. But I still like the framing and the sense of isolation of the box of Tampax. The colors came out all washed out and the space is really ambiguous and I'm a fan of all of those things.
This project was weirdly hard for me. I think this project sort of documented some of my recurring problems as a filmmaker -- getting impatient and dancing around too quickly between images, not spending enough time in one place, focus issues, cutting off peoples' heads, spending too much time on minutia like hands and games pieces, occasionally forgetting about making purposeful camera movements, etc. -- and it was frustrating because I couldn't just cut around these issues and hide them with other footage. I'm unhappy with in this video is my lack of movement (actual movement around the table, not camera movement). It's funny, because I have 30 more minutes of footage where I'm marching around the table and experimenting with zoom, but this was the footage I chose to work with and it's pretty dang static. I really, really, really wish I would've swung around to the other side of the table -- just taken four or five steps to the left -- to capture a head-on shot of the Dungeon Master behind his little fortress of charts and plans. That said, I'm happy with some of the framing -- the CU shot on the Dungeon Master's cheek with the rest of the table out of focus worked nicely, I think -- and I'm also happy with the way the "story" worked out. I think one of my biggest motives in choosing this specific moment out of all the footage I got was that I captured the various important layers of the story within these few minutes. For instance, I think you get an idea of the actual game that they're playing -- and there's a little bit of suspense and intrigue based on what the Dungeon Master is saying and how the players are responding -- but we also get a sense of the story of these friends and their close relationship from the jokes they make and the way they work together.
Overall, I'm not completely thrilled with the way this piece turned out, but I think for a one-take it's a nice little vignette about this group of interesting friends playing Dungeons & Dragons and I'm not upset about it.
1) This is the reflection from a stoplight on the wet pavement. I think this serves as a way of showing how using color can make any surface -- even gray concrete -- seem like something new and interesting, simply by turning an ordinary color expectation on its head (i.e. GRAY pavement shouldn't be RED, etc.).
2) This is a time when I think a lack of color served an image better than if it had used color. By turning off the color we really bump up the richness of the tone in the image and it makes for a more interesting read of this character, I think.
3) I just think the thing that happens when there are a bunch of mirrors pointed at one another is really cool, but the thing that I didn't really capture in this shot was the way the yellow beauty lights made my hair look lemon-yellow and my navy blue shirt black. I wanted to get the crazy colors that I was seeing in real life, but wasn't able to figure out how to do so with my camera.
4)This image was just meant to serve as theonly image sans color in this post (even though I ended up with another in black and white after I edited). This is the only picture that is black and white without putting on a black and white filter in post. I wanted to show how a lack of color still can read as a variety of shades even just with the eraser marks and chalk on this blackboard.
1) Hey, look at the orange/blue complementary color contrast! The smudge of grayish cloud in the bottom right is sort of excruciating, sigh sigh sigh.
2) I framed this photo just slightly crookedly and it made all the difference. Instead of having a cool symmetrical image that spoke of balance and structure and sturdiness because of its stout horizontal lines and hard rectangular shapes, I've got something that doesn't really do much of anything. This is just a crappy photo taken from the wrong angle. Boo.
3) This image turned out fairly well, I think. The dark, cool tones of Sariah's clothing makes the bright, warm colors of the comic book pop out and seem even more lively and vibrant. Moreover, they pair nicely with the warmer tone of Sariah's face which I think is a really nice touch, as it connects the radiance of the book with a radiant "character."
4) This image sort turned into a jumble. I wanted the people all to stand out from the shelves in the background, but I think because the lines and colors aren't quiet different/distinct enough, we lose the foreground in the background and the image reads as super flat, but not in a very interesting way.
5) An arrow on the road. Sure. Basically the only thing that I was thinking about when I shot this was the (obvious) contrast between the black of the asphalt and the white of the paint.
* The alternate version of this video (with the other song) is on its way. It failed to upload to Vimeo yesterday and it's taking forever to upload to Youtube right now. All in good time, etc. Here are the things I feel like I got right: There's definitely a palpable tone of female frustration about the nuisance of casual male power systems, and I'm happy that I found a way to make it readable to a general audience through direction (the irritating taunting of the male actor and the rage-y fist clenches/stomping of the the female actor), costuming (the high heels!), and writing (the bloody ending). I'm super happy with the way all the fish-eye footage felt and worked on screen (all thanks to James being a superstar DP, honestly), and how it distorted both the sense of the woman's fury and the man's derision. I
think we got the weird "security camera" look due to the combined
fluorescent brightness of the inside and the darkness of the outside,
and even though it wasn't an effect that I really planned for, I
still think it's interesting in the scope of the story (even though it
sure doesn't match the quality of the Scooby-Doo hallway footage; oops). Here are the things that I'm still winching about a little bit: The ending! Blergh! Like, I love the composition of the final two shots and I love the blood splatter, but it would've been 10000% more effective if I'd directed my actress, Emily, to make the *tiniest* movement a nanosecond before the blood sprayed (as if she were really doing a throat-stab). I think there are some obvious points where the editing could've been tighter. For instance, I meant to speed up the insert of the numbers changing as the elevator goes from floor 1 to floor 4 and then just didn't, so it's too long. Moreover, the actor looks straight at the camera as he's punching the elevator button and at first I thought it wasn't too noticeable, but the more I watch it the more painful it is that I didn't cut around it. Lighting was -- excuse me -- a bitch on those fish-eye hallway shots because the lights we set up wouldn't reach one end of the hall so it was kind of choppy, inconsistent light throughout. I was trying to push those shots to be faster because I was already taking way too long to get everything (one of my biggest failures as a director is taking one million years on every shoot; sorry James), so I overlooked our lighting needs in favor of timeliness. As for lighting problems in the big open cavern of a room right after the hallway stuff, I honestly have no idea what could've been done, even if we had, like, five Lowell kits instead of the one. It was just so big and already full of this tinny fluorescent light and we were shooting on the 8mm which captures everything, so I don't know where we couldn't hid lights even if they were powerful enough to fill the space. Maybe we could've talked about skipping that location. I don't know. I've been thinking a lot about our class discussion about my movie, about how there was some discomfort/frustration from the boys and more understanding/validation from the girls. I'll definitely stick to what I said in class about not wanting to make anything that felt like a declaration about hating men. That said, I've been feeling pretty discontented about the response to a piece that -- after looking at it again and again -- reads in a way that is definitely confrontational about the way men are societally trained to take without asking and even condemning of this behavior, but doesn't damn men as a whole. The thing I tried to make a movie about is problematic behavior and I'm upset about it as a woman; it was a really valid and appropriate thing for me to make a movie about. There are certainly things that I did wrong in the film, but honestly I'm so uninterested in hearing a bunch of men tell me and the other women in the class why our experience isn't convenient for them. If this made some guys uncomfortable: good. I'm uncomfortable, too.
1) I mean, here's an example of deep space, as in: the opposite of the flat space that we talked about this week. But I felt like the converging line and the height of these tubes(?) was doing a couple of the more interesting things from our deep space discussion.
2) I think this picture is doing the thing that Jeff talked about where the sky can flatten rather than deepen a space by blanking out any real depth cues. Even the clouds don't really help to give the image more range.
3) This image is flat-ish because the warm colors of the flowers and the sunset in the painting sort of place a thing that is in the foreground (flowers) on the same visual plane as a thing that is in the background (painting).
4) This photo is flat because (a) it doesn't have any variation in "normal" size for comparison and (b) though there is sort of textural diffusion, the various textures don't really refer to one another or compete.
5) This photo turned out a lot deeper than what I was going for. I thought that the large swath of sky and smoggy haze would equal a flat space, but instead the line of street lights that gradually get smaller on the horizon -- and the cars doing the same thing -- creates a feeling of distance and width.
One of my most consuming childhood frustrations was being aware of my own childishness when I was maybe seven- or eight-years-old. My parents, other adults, older kids: they all knew things and could do things that I wasn’t able to—read books with long words, stay up late, get a job, etc.—and it annoyed me hugely and incessantly. In SPAGHETTIFLOWER, the camera is constantly moving—and the actress, Reese, is constantly trudging forward—until the very, very end when she comes up to a strange light and, surprised and maybe enraptured, she drops the load of spaghetti that she was so diligently carrying all this way. I hoped that the plodding dolly would convey a sense of routine and boredom, even as Reese continues diligently with the senseless task of carrying a pile of spaghetti down the street. The shots we cut between are repetitive and numbing after a while; I was interested in reproducing the feeling of childhood habits and monotony.Finally, I started the film mid-trudge, hoping to communicate a sense of endlessness to the kid’s journey: her frustrations but also her industriousness.
Moreover, another part of childhood that I tried to capture was the seemingly huge importance of trivial and trite events and responsibilities to my younger self. When I was little, there wasn’t technically anything really pressing about my life at all—going to elementary school, playing with my friends, making my bed, learning multiplication—but my thoughts and feelings about all these little, commonplace duties and occasions were still adult-sized. Everything felt extremely crucial, even though so much of what I cared about was silly and insignificant when I look back now. In my film, the two most vital elements of the scene that I needed to cut back and forth from were the spaghetti—which is something completely inconsequential that feels important to this little girl—and her trudging feet—which indicate the endlessness of her quest.
1) On one hand, I think this is a fairly strong photo. It's recognizable but feels a little bit seedy; the colors of the neon wash out the background and it's lazy and urban. But I think the biggest failing of this photo is that I literally didn't do anything new with it. This exact same shot has been replicated over and over with the exact same framing and colors and context; I just basically knew that I liked "that" photo and recaptured it.
2) I'm happy that this photo looks sort of extraterrestrial and bulbous and otherworldly, but it really isn't the photo that I thought I was going to take. I'm fairly new to using cameras, so I'm still looking at things with my physical human eye and saying 'That looks cool' and being disappointed or frustrated when a camera lens doesn't see the exact same thing that I do. My lack of experience with cameras means that I don't always know all of the limitations of what they can and can't do and thus don't know how to address or remedy these limitations and problems in my own work.
3) This rusty truck felt like an important thing to photograph because I'm interested in this bilaterality between function and deterioration. It feels significant to talk about the decomposition and degeneration of serviceable/practical institutions or resources (i.e. a vehicle/transportation) and this is my attempt to talk about this concept through a visual outlet rather than a verbal one.
4) Here's some general mud. The lines in the soft, wet mud and the hard, craggy gravel kind of argue with one another in a way that's sort of satisfying and crunchy. I don't know how intentional the framing or the composition of this picture is -- I mostly just tried to find an interesting tire track and snap that -- but I think that's fine because it looks okay.
5) This is obviously my lamest shot; it's some kind of glass (?) or something. Big sigh. I liked the texture and wanted to get a shot where you could feel it. I don't think I really got that, BUT I still like three-tone lights coming from different angles of the frame and how it's dark and bright at the same time which feels moody and stormy.
Jenny Holzer is an American, feminist Neo-conceptualist artist that uses text to comment on social flaws and political inconsistencies. She's kind of angry and vicious and I want to marry her. She wrote 15 "Inflammatory Essays" that tear apart everything. She rages about revolution and gender roles and conformity and societal institutions. She's so bored of being polite. Mainly, I see a lot of value in her attacks via language and information systems; she doesn't just want to make noise, she wants to communicate. Ugh, Jenny Holzer is so cool.
2) Chad VanGaalen
Chad VanGaalen is this Canadian musician with a weird, creaky voice that also draws and animates his own music videos with gooey, crawly, fluorescent dead things and monsters and flowers and cars; he is so, so, so cool. He makes me feel really excited and gross in the same way that a good horror movie with a lot of gore makes me feel. I want to listen to the album Soft Airplane forever until I die.
3) Vampire Movies, All
In July I watched a different vampire movie every single day. And then I kept watching more after July was over because I am into vampires. I like that everyone is trying to come up with new ways to reinvent old vampire lore. I like the blood and sex and theatrics. Whether it's an undead motorcycle gang or an ancient vamp that plays a 1974 Les Paul or an angsty teen in the Pacific Northwest whose skin glitters in the sun (!!) or a slick half-breed that kills off vampires in a leather trench coat: IT'S A LOT OF FUN.
4) Larry, or: Teenage Fangirls Everywhere
Larry is the couple name for Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, (beloved) members of the band One Direction who are speculated to be in love with one another. The thing that I'm so interested in is the power and ambition of teenage girls when it comes to fangirling. There's a really important episode of the podcast Reply All where Harry and Louis's relationship is put under the microscope and teenage girls from various Larry conspiracy Facebook pages and Youtube channels are interviewed about proof they've found that supports the Larry theory. The thing that's so critical about this podcast is that the hosts treat these young girls with nothing but confidence and appreciation. More than the Larry conspiracy, I totally dig teenage girls and the sheer size of their devotion, intensity, and ambition. I'm so into young girls liking stuff and believing in stuff and talking about it all in this big, global, positive way.
5) Weetzie Bat
Weetzie Bat is this sunny, sprawling, absurdist 1989 novel by Francesca Lia Block and I feel like it's this top secret bible for my entire life. I've told a lot of people that if they want to understand me -- Avery Jalaine Taylor -- they should just read Weetzie Bat and its sequel Witch Baby (which I'm even more obsessed with than the first book). The universe of Weetzie Bat is all cheerful and colorful and noisy, but also lonely and longing and restless, and full of real life issues like sexuality, substance abuse, heartbreak, death, disease, and divorce. I've read it four million times since I discovered it as this weird, furious, anxious, little 13-year-old who needed the kind of brutality and sugar that's inside this book. I think it's like 50% responsible for me becoming a film student.
6) Brandon Graham
Brandon Graham is my favorite cartoonist out of 10,000,000,000 cartoonists that I love. This guy is sexy. Everything he draws is soft and curvy and pinkish and full of girls and guns and monsters. He wrote/drew King City and Multiple Warheads and drew Prophet, all of which are so beautiful and bizarre that they make me feel like fainting. I'm obsessed with how simultaneously cute and CUTE and NASTY he can be. Just the basic aesthetic of his comics are so completely part of my brand, but then he also writes these silly and startling stories that are all sad and romantic and brave, and I love him.
7) Lester Bangs
Lester Bangs was a music journalist who died in 1982. (He was portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Cameron Crowe's 2000 Almost Famous, which is very good). I've been reading a lot of Bangs' work recently and not entirely because I always want to know his take on Iggy Pop or Captain Beefheart or whoever. Mostly, I'm obsessed with how fearless Bangs was and I kind of consult his old articles and essays like a weird, voodoo textbook to being brave in the 21st century. I mean, okay, he was kind of mean. He wasn't super forgiving and he was persnickety and fussy and sort of ruthless. But he was also bold and honest and gutsy and reasonable and tenacious: all things that I want to be, especially in the art that I make. He was this furious hurricane of a writer -- in the same Rolling Stone article he called Lou Reed "a prick and a jerkoff" but also said, "Lou, as you were courageous enough to be our mirror, so in turn we'll be your family." He had something to say about everything. The thing that I've written in literally every single journal that I've ever owned is: "Just for the record, I would like it known by anybody who cares that I don't think life is a perpetual dive...I suspect almost every day that I'm living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don't like myself. What's more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we've got and, simplistic as it may seem, it's a person's duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We're all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. ...I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes." Are you kidding me.
I've been systematically devouring the collected works of poet/essayist Anne Carson for the past year. She writes about being hungry and filthy and unbearable; sometimes reading her work feels like being flayed alive or lit on fire or being in church or reading my own diary. I showed her stuff to one of my friends who said she was "noxious" and "unreadable." So maybe the altar of Anne Carson isn't a popular place to worship, but I think I'm so attracted to the vinegar of her because it speaks to the vinegar of me. Her collection Red Doc is so outstanding -- so impossibly and unfeasibly visceral and savage and smart -- that I sometimes can't even read it because it's too good.
10) Howl's Moving Castle
I don't even think I need to explain this at all. It's just so sweet and beautiful and gentle and smart and pure-hearted that every time I watch it my stupid dumb heart grows a million sizes like the Grinch's and I write big weepy journal entires about how freaky and mushy I feel about it.
10.5) Literally Everybody and Everything
I'm such a complete and total sucker. I kind of went crazy tearing through this humongous roulette of everything that I love, trying to figure out whether to choose Neil Gaiman or opera music or fishnet tights or Malcom Liepke or Velvet Goldmine or Belle & Sebastian or Louie or videos of raccoons or The New Yorker or Margaret Atwood or The Talking Heads or John Kacere or Dorm Life or vegetarianism or America's Next Top Model or Mint Juleps lipscrub from Lush or flash-fiction or Thomas Pynchon or dogs or David Bowie or fleece-lined leggings or the Faroe Islands or the gurlesque movement or Andy Warhol or the collected works of Arthur Rimbaud or Kim Deal or new school supplies or Lagoon or The Social Network or #FreeTheNipple or Phillip Larkin or good hair days or Mark Rothko or The Virgin Suicides or Kurt Vonnegut to talk about in this blog post, because I'm basically dying to talk about everything to everyone all the time. Everything is so cool. Music is cool, literature is cool, cartoons are cool, animals are cool, TV is cool, etc., etc., etc. But I feel like the coolest thing ever is when someone I love comes over and talks to me about, like, what crappy YA novel that I just read or whether they've seen this new movie and if they think it sucked or not. Everybody is so, so good. Everybody is so interesting, and funny, and smart, and fun to eat ice cream with, and wonderful to take Sunday naps with. I'm such a giant sap, but I love everything so much that sometimes it feels like I'm going to explode just because of how big and terrible and consuming my love for everything and everyone is.
