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The scenes that stuck out to me the most in terms of visual evidence are the baseball scenes. Since this movie talks about Rumspringa it is great to show a contrast between
This screenshot is of a shot from the scenes I am talking about. The contrast of the pickup truck and the line of women dressed in 16th century outfits.
The next scene has a convertible with a different line of women dressed in the same manner.
After that scene we have this:

no pickups or cars but the Amish standard of buggies.
All of the contrast between the “English” and the Amish is on full display in this game of baseball.

In The Carnival of the Ages, a beautiful, dreamlike world unfolds, blending 1950s styling, carnival aesthetics, and space-age futurism to create a mesmerizing vision of retrofuturism. The visual style is a nearly realistic amalgam of these elements, but it retains an otherworldly, alien-like quality that adds to the film’s allure. The detailed world-building is enhanced by the audio, which perfectly complements the surreal yet nostalgic visuals. Every frame is meticulously crafted, creating an immersive experience that feels both familiar and strange.

What impresses me most is the attention to detail. Each scene offers rich visual layers that feel almost tangible, as though this retro futuristic world could truly exist. The short film’s aesthetics are so captivating that I would love to see them expanded into a feature-length film.

I believe Artificial Intelligence can play a significant role in creating worlds like this. AI has the potential to unlock new levels of creativity and detail in cinema, allowing filmmakers to bring fantastical visions to life in ways previously unimaginable. I see no problem with its usage, as it could help create breathtaking, imaginative worlds that push the boundaries of what we currently know in filmmaking. I am also a huge fan of retro-futurism so this was bound to be compelling for me from the start. 

I chose to write about the Amish Montage scene where they describe the outside world and the Amish world which would be in the category of Amish, not English. They believe that things that entertain us in the world are not good, so they just do labor and other chores at the Amish church. The visual evidence here is the person digging dirt putting it in a machine and someone else feeding cows which is good visual evidence for showing how reality is for the Amish people. What makes this visual evidence useful is that the audience could see what the Amish people do in their everyday life. 

Some of these scenes might not be staged because the people who made this movie wanted truthful details since they are making a documentary about the Amish tradition. What I mean by truthful details is that they might have gone to an actual Amish church to interview everyone there. If they go to an actual Amish church, they can get a video of what people actually do instead of creating an environment with props. If they created an environment with props, that means they did not go to an actual place to record the traditions of everyone and just lie to us. 

Other scenes that stand out were showing the clips of McDonalds and other places that existed out of the boundaries of the Amish community. The visual evidence showing places outside of the Amish community is good visual evidence for showing what the Amish people avoid which would be the English community. 

Visual evidence can be in conflict if it is not confirmed to be legit or if people do not trust it. For example, the video at the Amish church may not be an actual church but maybe, a setting to create a documentary video about the tradition of Amish people. It may be hard to prove the interviewers are at the actual area for the interview and convince people it is not a place that is set up or created. 

3:30-6:10 minutes of the video

Rachel Maclean’s Again and Again and Again creates an artificial world through the heavy use of digital effects such as green Screens, vibrant color manipulations, and layered tracks create effects that capture real bodies and spaces by portraying them as exaggerated characters and environments. The film plays with reality, demonstrating how easily media can distort it.

Generative AI goes even further by building entire scenes and characters without the use of cameras. These effects make cinema more imaginative, but they also blur the line between what is real and what is artificially created.

While some of what AI is capable of producing is impressive, there are times when it can feel excessive. In my opinion, videos like this are fascinating to watch because of the work put into them, but I often find them overwhelming. The imagery is eye-catching, yet I feel like there is too much going on. If there is a deeper meaning behind the video or what is being communicated, I feel like I missed it due to the overwhelming amount of visual information on the screen.​

In Light Is Waiting, the very first thing we notice is how dated the footage looks — this is accomplished with digital effects (presumably). On cathode ray televisions, the picture was formed by an electron gun that traced lines across the television screen faster than the human eye can see. This causes small lines to appear on the screen when there is a lot of motion, which can be approximated with a digital raster effect (this is what we see here.)

A more extreme version of this, with a flickering effect, is then scene when the TV is dropped in the next scene.

From here, we see a quick succession of extreme digital effects applied to give the impression of a dreamlike, hallucinatory sequence. A man jumping from the top of a waterfall is shown in a mirror effect, with the screen reflected across the center.

Two scenes, one with the opacity lowered, are superimposed on one another, giving the impression of ghostly trees hovering out of view.

Red, blue, and green (these are the component colors of a CRT television’s picture) tints are applied to some scenes, flipping back and forth rapidly.

In total, the digital effects used here serve the overarching feel of the short, summoning the nostalgia inherent to the VHS/CRT era and infusing it with a psychedelic, unsettling undertone.

In the assigned scene, we watch the Gallagher family discuss plans around the breakfast table, while learning about their socioeconomic standing and unique family dynamics.

Mylod, the director for this sequence, shifts between tracking his subjects with pans and cutting between them. Throughout, we maintain a clear sense of space. For example, at the start of the scene, we track motion from the bedrooms to the kitchen in a single cut; however, we maintain focus on the same character.

Following that, we track the gallon of milk, which moves from the refrigerator to the table, to connect the two locations. Given the chaotic nature of the scene, it’s important that Mylod gives us a clear sense of space that allows us to focus on the dynamics of the family (arguably the most important part of the scene).

The digital effects of this work are heavily based on greenscreen, with greenscreen and the backgrounds edited in through that taking up the bulk of the video, creating fake backgrounds and false screen projections, among other things. It seems to go for a more vaguely surrealist approach with visuals that are somewhat strange and repetitive. The typical realism of cinema seems to be subverted in this work, rather than strictly followed for that reason, although it does still try to follow some logic, having hand motions interact with the text sometimes as an example.

I picked ‘Light is Waiting’ for my analysis.

There is a lot of layering done in Light is Waiting by Michael Robinson. Light is Waiting uses this trick and even layers audio with video that doesn’t really match but the effect is still clear. I enjoyed that it started like an old show with an audience off screen in order to have said audience laughing in the background after someone does something stupid.

The voice editing with the ‘broken record’ like sound is very interesting in a way where you can still tell what the person is saying but the extra noise is almost distracting in such a way in which you could miss the words but that may not be the point. In the start the world feels very normal, two kids sitting down to do homework and wanting to have fun at the same time but unlike current times they couldn’t just put some videos on their phones and have that going while they watch the news.

They were working with the limitations of the time the world was set in but after the crash of the TV that reality shattered into something coherent and yet far away. The scene changes from siblings doing something foolish to landscapes and then to mirrored scenes and then to overlaid video that is set so that each frame is a few frames apart giving the appearance that there is a kind of blurred state of being going on.

The mirrored videos are back along with having the blur of overlapping frames and all this is interrupted by the error screen that shows up when signal is down or a screen breaks and has the rainbow lines to indicate so. The ‘error’ is accompanied by the classic sound that goes with it, the ear splitting screech of an incessant beeping that refuses to stop no matter what.

Looking at things like this just makes me realize that the people who do this kind of stuff for a living are really talented in what they do because I don’t think I have the raw talent for things like this but I can give it my best shot and learn where I’m supposed to be.

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

For a documentary about local nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, I want to focus on their emotional and physical struggles while keeping it real. Since I can’t film inside a hospital, I’ll rely on interviews, personal footage, news clips, and photos as “visual evidence” to share their stories. Instead of capturing them in a clinical setting, I’ll show nurses at home after long shifts or connecting with family remotely, which really highlights the isolation they faced.

As noted in the reading, “behavior is visual evidence,” and “making documentaries… means filming the behavior of people.” I’ll get into how these nurses coped with their experiences and the toll the pandemic took on them. Their personal narratives will drive the film, giving a genuine look at their challenges and triumphs.

I also plan to incorporate symbolic visuals like empty streets and discarded protective gear to further illustrate the pandemic’s impact. By showcasing the human side of this crisis, I hope to convey the resilience and dedication of nurses during such an unprecedented time.

Visual evidence is tricky to acquire without access to the actual thing your documentary is about. As the reading itself says: “Making a documentary with visual evidence requires the filmmaker to go out and find something happening in front of the camera that that tells the story to the audience far better than any interview with an expert.” That said, it’s hardly an impossible obstacle to overcome. If I were in the position of having to do so for a documentary about COVID Nurses, I’d probably try to include a variety of approaches for the sake of minimize the need to reuse clips and ensure there’s enough visual variety as to not distract the viewers. I’d include not only actors to re-enact certain scenarios being described in the documentary, but also things such as b-roll footage of various tasks being performed or panning over locations. Perhaps footage could even be taken in other locations where vaguely similar things to the nurse duties and covid infection could be taking place. It would all have to be incidental, and I’d have to react quickly to them, but if it could capture those moments I’m looking for, then that would go a long way to helping out the documentary.