Author: lwagner24

Hello everyone, for my final project, I’m planning on making a documentary-style video. It’s actually something between a documentary and a video essay. It’s about myself and a project I’ve been working on for the past couple of years. The project is called Happy Hills and it’s based on a universe my brothers and I came up with when we were kids. The story of the video essay centers around the motivations behind my interest in Happy Hills, which are all rooted in my childhood. I’ll be including footage of the making of Happy Hills as well as found footage from my childhood (which I have plenty of), and I’ll be narrating some parts of it. It will also include an interview with my brothers which is conveniently relevant to what we’ve been learning in class. I want this video to have a sentimental tone, as this is less of a story about the making of Happy Hills and more a story about why it’s being made!

-Luca Wagner

Cut a minute out, added subtitles, and rearranged some more action into the beginning!

Hello class, for this post I chose to talk about the scene where Velda shows us her wedding dress, my favorite scene from the movie. While the title of this clip was “Metephor not evidence”, I still think there are some very subtle but deliberate and effective visual ques that make this scene so visceral. First, I want to dissect what she is talking about. She begins by showing us her wedding dress; talking about how she left the church a few weeks before the wedding. She then rationalizes her boyfriend’s decision to stay saying, “He personally struggles with the loss of friendships that he would have had to deal with if he left with me”. In my opinion, this is also a reflection of her own sentiments toward her own leaving of the church. She then puts on the dress, indulges in a little reminiscence, and then says this very important line “Now that I have it on, I don’t see it that way anymore. I think I just see it as something that covers up the girl I really want to be”. This line to me tells me that her Amish past still haunts her presently, making it difficult to adapt to English culture. She still does not feel comfortable in her own skin. As far as answering the central question goes (Amish or English) this scene offers a third answer: Neither. This scene is about Velda’s physiological liminal space, it is about loneliness. Having said all that, by refraining from using any cutaways (as well as additional speakers and music), as any visual or auditory interjections of any kind would only serve to taint the visceral loneliness of the moment and break the flow of the scene, this scene effectively paints a visual picture of isolation. Thus she exists in a mental and physical state of isolation, with nothing but her own reflection to keep her company.

-Luca Wagner

Hello class, I have not yet shot the interview and B-roll but have been working on the preproduction process. I’ll be interviewing a friend who works in the Vancouver mall. I’ve had many conversations with him and a central reoccurring theme – in his work and life – seems to be loneliness. The mall he works at is almost completely inactive and so I think a good piece of visual evidence would be to long static shots of empty mall concourse as the subject speaks. In speaking to my friend, I’ve discovered that he is dissatisfied with his job but is hesitant to say it explicitly. After asking him how long he’d been there, he paused for a moment and then said “Too long man… too long”. I think this would be a good line to overdub on the visual evidence of an empty mall.

-Luca Wagner

Here is a montage from a doc project I’ve been working on about a larger project I’ve been invested in. The beginning may be a little out of context but (even more to the point of this assignment) the montage will still serve its purpose.

Hello class,
This prompt is tricky – how to tell the story of a nurse during Covid without the visual representation of her workplace. I suppose the first thing that needs to be done is finding a story. Because film is a visual medium we need to rely on visual evidence to express our story. Of course, the straightforward version of the story would be: As COVID patients flood through the doors of the hospital, a nurse (or nurses) struggles to maintain her health and mental sanity amidst an abundance of dying patients and a chaotic workplace. However, in this story, one of the major characters becomes the hospital itself and without that location, the story doesn’t work. So we must adapt the story.
I lean towards telling a more personal story, in which the nurse’s personal life is a major feature. Her personal life is manifest on screen by her interactions with her husband, and children. And it takes place in the home. We perhaps begin with life before the pandemic. Showing a happy, bright home that is full of life: children running around, good food cooking in the chicken, close contact between the family members, and maybe a movie night. Of course, all of this is with the nurse as our subject (relative to her point of view). This visual evidence sets up the audience’s expectations for a happy domestic lifestyle.
But now we need conflict. Hampe gives us a good example of how to do this in his essay. He tells us to imagine how to visually show a smart boy crossing the street in one shot. His conclusion is, “You can’t. You need to scenes in sequence”. Using an adapted version of this principle we can introduce conflict by breaking down the expectations we set up earlier by juxtaposing the previous sequence with one that depicts a sad and neglected domestic situation. Lingering shots of silent rooms, the kids lounging rather than running around, the family wearing masks and distancing from each other (in case their mother brings back the virus), on the stove is a pot of ramen which one of the children stirs unenthusiastically,  the mother is there only briefly before she rushes through the door to go to work.

That’s my take on the story and how to show it visually.

-Luca Wagner

Hi class, today I chose to analyze POOF- AI Short Film.

I enjoyed watching this film but couldn’t shake the suspicion that it was 100% AI-generated. Turns out I was right. I watched the behind-the-scenes video and it turns out the creator used a substantial amount of traditional digital effects to stitch together the AI footage. Fun watch, linked here:

Anyway, the film is about these monsters that work in an office space but they’re all bored out of their minds and end up spontaneously combusting. It’s clear that these clips are AI-generated. you can spot it from a mile away. The animation of the character is odd and the background tends to morph. Having said that, it’s still pretty dam good for AI.

In the case of POOF, the creator mimics a real-life aesthetic and interestingly tries to recreate the special effect of traditional puppetry with the special effect of AI. In this way, the creator is replacing old special effect techniques rather than altering or enhancing them.

It’s hard to say what AI is going to do for the world of cinema. Will it simply replace existing special effects techniques, or create new ones? How will it interact with the world of traditional cinema? Will it add/aid it, or replace it entirely? In my opinion, AI is just another tool, like all the other procedural forms of digital enhancement. Of course, the underlying tech is completely different, however, my point is only that it will afford us the same opportunities to shift the production of cinema to a more digital and individual base environment – one that inherently prioritizes quantity or quality. (If you watch the breakdown video, which I highly recommend you do, you’ll notice he repeats something along the lines of “This isn’t perfect but it works for my purposes”… quantity over quality).

If we track the rise in digital technology in the cinematic field (digital cameras, digital video processing/editing, 3D digital rendering) it’s clear that with it comes an increased rate of content production and at a decreased cost. The creator of POOF was able to cheaply and by himself make something that 10 years ago would have cost at least tens of thousands and required a substantial crew with specialized skills. We also see a shift in the content itself to a more sustainable form of media that can handle a high rate of production (short-form internet content). Will AI take over traditional film production? Maybe for a short time but not in the long run. What’s more likely is that it will harbor a style of media production that is entirely different from the fundamentals of traditional cinema. Long-form narrative content will slowly die out and with it, cinema will go too. Makes me sad to say.