“You are hired to make a short documentary about local nurses during the COVID pandemic. The problem is you are not allowed in a hospital with a camera. What is your story? And what will be your “visual evidence”?”

It would be very difficult to show the care and dedication of the nurses during the pandemic if I couldn’t film inside the hospital… But there are ways around this.

So let’s assume I’m going to do this the legal way and not sneak a camera into the hospital. (Also why are they not allowing cameras in if they know it’s meant to be a positive documentary? Sounds suspicious to me). Not that filming inside a hospital is Illegal but still…

If possible I would first try to capture testimonies from the nurses, doctors, receptionists, and other staff. Just a few short statements about the work they do and how its been impacted by the pandemic.

I personally would utilize most of this footage as voiceovers, showing each person at the beginning of their segment. Just before and after they begin speaking to establish a face for the viewers.

It would be relatively easy to film the outside of the hospital, especially if I used a drone so they can’t catch me. I’d first create an establishing shot of the entire hospital complex in a single shot, soaring overhead and around the out side of the building to show it’s size and complexity. With variations in the time-pacing of the shot. Next I would utilize a few timelapses of the emergency vehicles, patients, and staff coming and going.

This sort of footage would make up about one-third of the documentary.

The remaining two thirds would be comprised of the nurses homes while they’re away at work, or  getting ready for, leaving, and coming home from work. The goal of capturing this footage would be to illustrate and embellish how much they work to take are of people.

I would take shots of empty homes, lonely pets, busy families, all the time making sure to leave space in the frame for the absence of the nurses. To illustrate the lives they would be living if they hadn’t chosen to commit to serving people in their line of work as a way on honoring them.

Considering the story about the Good Mother – Bad Mother, I want to be very intentional on capitalizing on the exemplary discipline of the nurses, but also highlight the humanness that makes them so lovable.

I will need to be mindful about how I edit and shoot the footage. Otherwise it could look like I’m telling a tale of travesty rather than honorable sacrifice.

In the railroad crossing scene, our protagonist is caught between a rock and a hard place (or a truck and a hard place, perhaps). As the driver of the enormous, Goliath-esque vehicle that looms over our David throughout the film pushes its prey ever closer to the train that barrels down the tracks, Spielberg is careful to stay on one side of the action; the right side, to be exact, of the 180-degree rule. Though he occasionally pushes to the extremes of this range, remaining within the “allowed” space lets the audience better absorb the quick cuts and frantic energy of this fast-paced scene, without losing track of the respective locations and arrangement of the vehicles.

Mixed within cuts to and from the two vehicles, pushing in on the protagonists face and cutting to longer, more expansive shots, we even find a POV shot in the mix, as David jams his foot on the brake from inside the vehicle.

In this scene in particular, I’m interested in how the two vehicles are shot as if a conversation were taking place; in particular, there is the unmistakable rhythm of shot-reverse shot in the push and pull between David’s small red car and the hulking truck on his tail.

In summary, Spielberg’s admixture of quick, variegated framing and attention to continuity allows the audience to feel the tension and horror of the events without ever losing track of the space, and treating the vehicles as their own “characters”, so to speak, serves to amplifies the film’s themes.

Here’s the montage project.

Here’s the redo for the second time but for real.

I chose “Lake Como Remix”.

The world’s depicted through this video reminds me a lot of old video games from the 90’s and early to mid 2000’s visually. It uses much earlier builds of the google street view as well as google earth to get these photos. These photos were then used to create a continuous video of us travelling and navigating through Lake Como in Italy.

The way it’s constructed makes an interesting tourist video, because a good chunk of it is supposedly glitched out on purpose, and paired up with the older street view visuals, it does look like a broken glitched video game like I mentioned in the beginning. The added use of a melancholy soundtrack adds a lot to the exploration aspect of this tour, it makes it feel like something is wrong, and it’s weird seeing how empty the place is.

Star Wars, Everything, Everywhere, and All at Once

(An Analysis of Star Wars Wars)

I grew up watching Star Wars, and my family is a huge fan of the original and prequel trilogies. (My dad even owns a film-accurate First Order Stormtrooper suit, and is working on an Imperial Storm Trooper suit as well) So I already have an interest in  Star Wars. I’d also heard a bit about Star Wars Wars (though I forget where I heard of it)

I was not prepared for the onslaught of everything that Star Wars Wars was. I am very impressed with the layering. I can only imagine how much finagling it took to find the best blending mode for each layer.

It’s very interesting to watch different parts of each episode through the shapes and shadows of another. There’s an interesting sense of temporality, seeing everything happens at once.

It brings to mind the phrase with which they begin every episode, “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” All these Star Wars stories take place “a long time ago” by the time we’re seeing them, we’re already far outside their time. All these event have already taken place, and we’re just watching them play out. Over and over and over again. Just as the layers of the films are placed over and over and over, the top of each other.

The effect becomes dreamlike, and really embraces the narrative of us as the viewers being completely separate from the Star Wars Universe.

Blog: Discuss the digital effects of one or two works listed above. What kind of spaces are depicted in these various videos? Digital effects work on the data layer of the digital image, by the manipulation of pixels. Effects, such as green screen, manipulate the color and ordering of pixels. Compositing is the layering of multiple images or tracks into a whole. Glitch effects come from the damage of code in media files. How is the realism of traditional cinema (its truthfulness in capturing images of bodies in a three-dimensional world) altered, enhanced or challenged by these techniques?  How might you use digital effects in your montage assignment?

Digital effects play a key role in shaping the spaces and realism of videos, allowing creators to go beyond what traditional filmmaking can achieve. Green screens, for example, replace real backgrounds with digital ones, transporting actors to places that don’t exist. This challenges the realism of traditional cinema, which usually captures real-world settings, by introducing a controlled, artificial world.

Compositing layers multiple images or video tracks, blending live-action footage with digital elements to create environments that feel real but are constructed. This blurs the line between what’s real and what’s fabricated, altering our perception of cinematic truth. Glitch effects, caused by damaged digital files, disrupt the image and can symbolize breaks in reality or emotional tension.

For my montage assignment, I would most likely use digital effects like color correction to adjust the tone of the scene or dim the lighting for mood. I might also use effects to make certain items pop, drawing the viewer’s attention to key elements. Additionally, incorporating a green screen layer could help place characters or objects in a unique background, adding depth to the overall visual experience. These subtle changes would enhance the visual impact without taking away from the realism of the scene.

For this, I chose to talk about the video that combined all 6 Star Wars movies into one. It is one of the more unique works that I have seen in a while, as it combines 6 different films from the same series to some success. I would say its use of effects is unique as it has all the special effects that make Star Wars but has every film layered over each other, running in time with each other. This also applies to sound. Traditional cinema was altered by the layering of several movies considered traditional sci-fi.

When I initially watched this video I was unsure about what the video was or what is was going to be about. I was caught off guard by shift and tone when the screen was dropped and the flashing started. I found that the imagery and the use of audio effects give a tone and instigate a feeling into the viewer. I was interested in how the use of mirroring effect was able to fill and still make an image feel surreal tied with the use of chopped up audio. I think that it has helped me think more about how effects can give tone to montage and how I could use it in my future work.

I believe that these effects were used effectively in the ability to enhance traditional cinema to take it farther then it could have gone into with more traditional tools.

The work I chose for this blog post was “Lake Como Remix”. This work comes from early versions of Google Earth and Google Street View, which were then glitched to create an otherworldly experience of the tunnels in the Lake Como District of Italy.
These glitches cause extreme distortion of your surroundings. You can go through the images presented as the world, allowing you to see beyond it, revealing dark atmospheres and strange shapes and textures. The landscape around you occasionally moves as you do, in a strange manner reminiscent of early AI videos. It gravitates in one direction, which feels incredibly strange to see considering that when you are in Google Earth the only thing “moving” should be you.
These effects challenge your views of the “world” in which these Google applications offer you. It breaks the illusion of a physical space, revealing the artificial nature of it, which at least for me proved to be a little unsettling. I assume that is at least part of the goal for this work, considering the music track that is layered over the video enhances this feeling.

I skimmed over each of the videos, and I also wanted to mention the video “Poof”. I was so surprised when I saw that it was made by AI. It looks so real, I had never seen any AI video like this. Even the different shots showcase continuity in the short film. Before seeing this, I thought AI still had a long way to go before being truly usable in professional cinema. It opened my eyes to how current AI can be seamlessly used as a tool in filmmaking, and it likely already is.

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.