Hyper Haiku

My Hyper Haiku.
All images are taken by me ~ even the ones on the banner.

http://fmundergrad.hunter.cuny.edu/~prithur/index.html

Introducing ~ Christina Yu

Blog Assignment # 3.5: An Evening with John Canemaker

On April 3rd, we had the opportunity to watch 2 great animations by John Canemaker. I specifically liked The Moon and The Sun. His style of animation is rather different from what the mainstream media is all about today. His animations are hand drawn and doesn't involve any CGI or any computer graphics. His animations are filled with blasts of colors and sound that make them feel more than hand drawn animation. Everything just mixes so well together, it's amazing. I saw a lot of the things we learned at class applied exactly to the animation. Including the shots chosen for the whole animation. It's amazing to see how John Canemaker's animations show so much emotion with colors and even the borders of each subject. For example when the father's hand smashes the table, the father's hand has a much darker and thicker line, unlike the kid, who was drawn with much thinner line. Same with the Mafias. They appear very strong, but when the police are after them, their appearance fades away. Watching his animation definitely helped me out, because for my project I'm doing Stop-Motion animation, so I enjoyed every moment of it.

Blog Assignment # 3 - A Look Back

This semester I had the opportunity to be in a class with a wonderful teacher and my wonderful classmates of Section 001. From day one it was clear that this semester would be filled with a rush of different things. Starting from the first day of class till now, we've done many different things. We had blog assignments & documentary work, from learning about sound recording techniques to filming a better documentary, each of which was better and more improved from FILMP 150. Teachers and classmates play a huge part in a student's class time, and I can happily say that this semester I had them both. Which is what made this semester even better. Prof. Sam, gave wonderful tips on editing and organizing our work, and I'll definitely be using her teachings for all my future works. I have learnt a lot from this class, but, with things going in a bit of a rush, I think some people might have had trouble keeping up with everything. Like we only had a week before we started recording our subjects, and that can be a bit hard for people who tend to be more closed and somewhat shy. But then again, this was the perfect hands-on experience, because we might not even know our subject till the day of the meeting, so this was both helpful plus a bit startling. The rush was a great experience nevertheless, because this is how it's going to be in the real world. This course so far has given us a better look at how it's like to go out and make a real documentary, and I've learnt a lot that I will apply to my future projects.

Introducing ~ Christina Yu

Transitions & Sound

For this assignment I picked a foreign movie titled, Wushu. The whole film is about 5 friends who meet at a martial arts school and grow up together. The scenes that I have selected from the movie are from their first adventure together, where they find their “headquarters”, and scenes from towards the ending, where they prepare for the final show down.

In the first scene, where they find their headquarters, we immediately cut into scenes of the friends imagining themselves in high places in the future. Thus beginning their training to achieve their dreams. The movie deals with a lot of memories, and to help accomplish the feeling of ‘bits and pieces’ of memories, they divided the frame in to two/three parts. While one side rolled a memory, the other part acted as a transition to the next memory. And with this effect they were able to make smooth transitions to a number of memories, of them training, playing and growing up together.

Throughout the memories the sound changed to match each transition smoothly, going from soothing music when they were training, to fast paced music when they were faced with opponents or danger.

The editing and transitions in the movie along with the music works perfectly together, for example the scene where they grow up, the music starts off slow, and as the kids jump forward, the music grows louder. As we see the kids growing up to be adults, the increase in the sound makes it feel like the music grew with them side by side.

What I hear..

Sound walk around Church Ave.

Every ordinary day, I attempt to ignore the noise while rushing to and back from the same food stand. But a short sound walk drew a new portrait of my old neighborhood that I missed all these days. So while I was standing in queue for my lunch, I closed my eyes and opened my ears…

I immediately faced a collection of sounds. As I started listening I could sense the rhythm of the food cart vendor chopping the meat, it had an amazing tune of its own. (Made even better by my hunger.)

The sound of chopping meat matched the sounds of the footsteps of the busy people around me, rushing to their destination. A cop car zoomed past me, with its sirens bursting my attention. As the sound of the cop car faded away, I was able to concentrate on the environment again.

New York City never fails to remind of the cultural diversity that it holds. I heard at least five different languages, if not more, just standing in my queue. I could hear voices of children from the school beside me growing louder and louder. They were laughing, telling stories. It must’ve been time to go home. I could hear the faint sounds of the subways underground. As every subway passed by, the conversations around me increased, as more kids got out from the stations. A few stores behind me, I could hear the sound of Bengali music, playing in the background.

I got my lunch and started back to my small neighborhood office.