Category: Uncategorized

Hello everyone, for this blog post I decided to take a look at the starwarswars.com site. This had to have been one of the most bizarre and interesting watching experiences I have ever witnessed. The website name is extremely deceiving, but if you didn’t check it out, the website has a video containing the first 6 Star Wars films — played at the exact same time. It is a very dangerous sensory overload, but I must admit, it is very technically impressive, especially with the effects.

All of the audio overlaps and is balanced surprisingly well. But the most technically impressive part of it is how at any given point, you can make out at least 3 movies, and most of the time more, in the video. What I suspect is going on is at any given point, the editor used a mixture of a color picker and a chroma key to accomplish the end result. Assuming each movie has it’s own layer, I believe that the editor went through each movie, and for each one that was on top of the base layer, created a chroma key with the most prominent color on screen at any given point, which allowed the movie in the lower layer to show through. This was probably repeated for every scene change for one movie. And then from there, they repeated the entire process for 5 more movies.

Traditional cinema was definitely altered by this process. After all, it’s 6 2-hour movies played at the exact same time, all at least audibly present, if not visually present in some way, and all combating for your attention. It creates such a unique experience that becomes really hard to sit through, but it’s worth exploring at least a little bit.

-Jeremy Sauter

Hello class! For this assignment I chose to do a temporal montage showcasing my almost daily routine for traveling to school! Enjoy!

-Jeremy Sauter

Framing: The camera switches between wide shots that capture the entire family and close-ups of individual actions, like passing money or reacting to each other. The wide shots help emphasize the cramped,  space in which the family lives. The close-ups, on the other hand, highlight personal moments, like Fiona taking charge or one of the kids handing over crumpled bills, showing their  roles in the family.

Editing and Continuity: The fast cuts between shots create a paced rhythm, showing the urgency of the situation. Continuity editing makes sure that even with all the chaos, everything flows seamlessly. The actors constantly move around the table, handing things off, eating, or talking, and the editing ties all these together in a way that feels organic. The chaos is intentional but structured, reflecting how the family, despite the dysfunction, operates with a shared understanding.

Visual Anchors: In the midst of this chaos, the milk serves as the central visual anchor. Even as characters move around it, their actions always gravitate back to the milk. The carton that has money bing passed around it, plans are made around it, and breakfast happens, all within seconds.

Shooting a documentary about local nurses during the COVID pandemic, without being allowed to film in a hospital, is a tricky issue. While most of the action is happening in the hospitals, since you can’t get any footage from inside of them I think a better story to focus on would be something like how the nurses are being affected by the pandemic, outside of their work (mentally). With this, visual evidence from inside the hospital is not technically necessary, as that won’t be the main focus of the dialogue. The proof of the chaos inside the hospitals instead comes from the nurses, recounting stories, maybe getting footage of them at home. You could even get time lapse footage from outside of the hospital in order to showcase how busy it is with the cars and people coming and going. To quote the reading,

“In editing, you abstract visual evidence that will serve as an accurate analog of the events that were filmed. And you organize it into a statement that will communicate to your audience—honestly, directly, and forcefully—what you know about the event.” (pg 101)

To create a story you don’t need to see every single detail of it. You create an abstraction of events, give just enough information that the viewer can grasp an understanding of what is going on. To do this, you could get a couple shots of a messy house, piled up laundry or dirty dishes in a sink. Take shots that emphasize how isolated the nurse is, alone at a dinner table, or looking at pictures of their loved ones. This, paired with a heartfelt interview where they recount how the current state of the world and their job has been causing extreme mental stress and loneliness, gives perfect visual evidence to pair with what the interviewee is saying, thus doing a good job at communicating information to the viewer.

Other footage that would work well could be things like, the nurse waking up to a loud alarm clock early in the morning for their shift, getting ready for work in an empty home. Touching on the topic of what the nurse does to help relieve stress, getting footage of them reading, exercising, or maybe even shots of any medications they take. The reading focuses a lot on connecting your dialogue with your visual evidence so the viewer has an easier time understanding and believing what you tell them, so all this footage would depend on the questions you decide to ask and what the nurse decides to talk about.

In ‘Posthuman Cinema’ by Will Luers, Mark Amerika, and Chad Mossholder, the viewer is shown worlds both based in reality and completely generated by computers. The result is jarring and evolving, with a variety of styles produced. The clips vary from resembling old, degraded film to complete CGI animation, moving between a multitude of styles. The environment depicted in ‘Infinity Forest’ is mostly natural with humans as the focus. These environments, in combination with the AI generated visuals, create a fantastical and alien feeling.

While some of the generated animations have ‘incorrect’ and sometimes scary effects, these can add to the narrative or mood of the experience as ‘posthuman’. For example, in ‘Infinity Forest’, there is an ECU of a human(oid) eye. While it may just be an ‘incorrect’ depiction of an older human, the errors evoke feelings of an ape-like creature and can hint to themes of evolution.

Additionally, the use of AI generation and natural imagery, such as mushrooms, further pushes the feeling of evolution and somewhat alien aesthetics. Mushrooms, with their decomposing ability, can be unnerving to many humans. This is aided with the AI generated images, which can also be unnerving in its ‘uncanny valley’ effect.

These techniques, in my opinion, mostly challenge the idea of realism in traditional cinema. Due to the constantly evolving movement of the generated people, trees, and general images, it is hard to complete grasp onto realism in the videos. However, as I suggested earlier, rather than allowing this distance from reality to detract from the work, the creators used it to push the narrative further and create a clear exploration of cinema without clear traditional realism.

Sources (freesound.org):

Door opening with handle. By 1234Thekrebwgus

clean footsteps in shoes on soft surface by busabx

Radio receiver on/off by LukaCafuka

Radio noise and static by LukaCafuka

Gasping by 9voltfan

Running Carpet by LewisEmmott5

cutting keys.wav by modcam

Door Slam – No Reverb.wav by adriann

Hey everyone, here’s my window video experiment. I did my best to reach 30 seconds, but I went over a little bit. Not by much though:

-Jeremy Sauter