IF Feedback

IF Story

http://philome.la/SitSylvia/test-if-story

I haven’t completely finished, so you will get to a dead end where it just says your current score, so this is what I have so far.

Response: Games

Before you read this: I definitely went down a rabbit hole of thoughts in this response, I’m sorry.

I don’t play a lot of video games, but I do remember playing on my GameBoy when I was 9, playing my Barbie games, trying to beat Charlotte’s Web and Pokemon, but I would always get frustrated when I wasn’t able to get through a level. I would play Smash Bros and Wii Sports on the Wii (the sword game, anyone?). If I remember correctly, I would never really spend that long playing those games. This one reading by Koster explained immersing into games, and how people don’t market it by immersion. Koster says that “Immersion isn’t a mass market activity in that sense, because most people are comfortable being who they are and where they are.”

But can you market anything that way? There are many things that different person can be immersed in. Even if I wasn’t immersed in my GameBoy or the Wii, I would read away for hours. I would bury myself in another world, book after book. Just like books, games have different genres and different stories. You can’t really market it by saying “hey, you’re going to be immersed in this game,” or “This person was so engrossed in this book, so that means you will also love it too.” Some people don’t even like reading or gaming.

I found a website that described some of the psychology behind being able to submerge yourself into a game. The term they use is spatial presence, where things in the media feel real to the player/reader, which basically is immersion. In a player’s mind, they form some kind of their own world of the game. A player would have their own “mental model” of the game world, and that is their point of reference. It’s hard to explain, but it’s really interesting.

As I was reading that, there was one sentence that got me thinking. “[T]he player must decide, either consciously or unconsciously, whether she feels like she’s in that imagined world or in the real one“ reminded me of Ready Player One, which honestly, that kind of scares me. (Little explanation of Ready Player One if you’ve never seen it.) If people can’t tell what’s real or what’s not in a normal video game, imagine that all the video games that existed were virtual reality. People would get sucked in even more. People already hide behind their phones; would they start hiding in a different reality they create? People who don’t like how they look can create their own characters, and people who like how they look can make their character look like them. People can say what they want, give themselves a fake name, and no one will know who’s who. Will our world ever become so immersed in a different reality that it all comes down to having to figure out what’s real and what’s not? Ahhhhhh. That’s weird to think about.

Response: Editing

I read the Vansijil reading and I recognize many of the elements from editing video projects, as well as some that I didn’t know. Some of them I didn’t realize had names, like expanding time through pacing and smash cut. But as I realized that I knew many of these editing skills I wondered about video and movie editing. Is the biggest change from movie editing and video editing the time it takes to edit, or is it incomparable?

Now with this new realm of people who create videos, or “Youtubers”, we have many apps to let us edit videos. Even me, someone who barely knows how to do any sort of editing, created some videos over the winter break using an app called Movavi, so now I kind of know how to edit videos. (It’s also a fairly easy app to use, but it costs money and I used the free one and if you want to save it, the video will have a watermark, so… don’t use it unless you have $80.) But there are still so much different kinds of editing for a movie.

Youtubers are climbing their way up by not just making videos, but editing as well. David Dobrik, for example, makes money by making vlogs (video blogs) of an entire day, and somehow edits them down to 4 minutes. There are other Youtubers who make vlogs and they are about 20 minutes. Vlogs are for people who want to see what these people do in their lives. In vlogs, there isn’t too much planning. In videos, they are more planned out. Some videos will require them to plan with others so they can make videos with other people. Editing styles are so different within different Youtubers and different videos they make. Usually, they place their lights and camera so that they don’t move, and do their video. Occasionally, they have videographers. They can do multiple takes, and they usually don’t have to different angle shots.

Movie planning, on the other hand takes a lot more time. They need more than just one or two people, and there are people who are in charge of lights and multiple cameras.  When editing, especially depending on what kind of movie it is, can take a very long time. I watch too much Youtube to know that many Youtubers take a lot of time as well to edit their videos, but I’m not sure how film editors do their over 100 days of editing. This graph I found from a website shows the post-production, or the editing time of different genres of movies. That is many many days of editing, and it makes sense for fantasy to take the longest because of their many special effects they have to edit in.

Response: HC Visualization

After reading the first page of the reading, I realized that it answered my question from my last post. You could write out what kind of shot it should be, or you could mark them after writing the scene. It makes it easier because they would shoot a number of shots that required the camera/camera angle.

I thought it was really interesting that writers draw out an entire diagram of where they would shoot to figure out where each camera needed to be. This reading mention this guy, George Racz who looks at the place they need to shoot at least 10 times to figure out where each shot is, because they only had an hour to shoot what he needed. This led me to wonder: how do filmmakers and directors do things when they have limited time? How much crazy planning do they have to go through?

I found this website where these filmmakers apparently shot a feature film in one night. That’s crazy. For this film, they had no script or shot list, but they had an idea of what they wanted. They created schedules and outlines. They made sure each actor knew their characters inside and out so that they could improv based on the character. They also made sure their crew knew exactly what to do. Basically, they planned so much beforehand that they were able to shoot in one night.

Then, I searched up how long it even takes to film a movie. The website mentions that depending on what kind of movie genre and kind of production it is, it could be up to 100 days and maybe more. This website also taught me a lot about Hollywood’s timelines of movies, which is quite interesting. So basically, filmmakers and directors plan a hell ton.

Response: Motion

After this reading, I realized that there is such a big importance in camera motion. We can’t simply put a camera in one spot and then shoot a video. Well, we could, but it would be quite boring. The way a camera shoots a scene can tell the audience more by the way it’s moving. In the reading, they mention a couple that I remember is used for some movies or tv shows I’ve seen. The handheld shot is used in POV shots and sometimes show that someone is holding a camera and moving it around a lot. In Parks and Rec and The Office, handheld is used.

But I also noticed that after each explanation, the reading includes a scene’s script that has dialogue, stage directions, and even what kind of camera movement is needed to get the shot. This led me to be more interested in how much goes into writing a script for a movie. Even though these readings did not have much about scripts, my question is that how detailed are movie scripts and do they always write out camera movements?

I found this website that explained some rules on what is needed in movie scripts. When writing one, they’re pretty detailed. Scriptwriters have to write out lighting, location, time, as well as the dialogue. In another website, this author actually tells us that we do not need to write out camera directions. He tells us that when a script is written to write it specifically to where it will be obvious what kind of camera direction it will be.

I realize that I hardly ever notice camera movement, but after these readings, I will probably notice them more in films and shows.

Response: Visual Storytelling

I’m sure all of us at some point has taken an English class where we learned how to write a story: the beginning, rising action, climax, falling action, and ending. Each movie has a outline as well, and a movie is a story. Unless you took a creative writing course, I don’t think I learned how to write a good story in English. I took creative writing in high school and some things I learned, just like Pixar’s rules, is that you also have to know your character/s inside out, why you’re telling this story, and the importance of the theme of the story. Pixar’s rules includes much more, but these were a couple of rules I thought were very important. From this, I started to think about the difference of written stories versus films. Is writing a story harder than writing a script? In a script, it is only the dialogue and stage directions and doesn’t show everything that happens in a story you read.

Written stories are different that films in many ways. We are always asked to “show, not tell” in written stories, but showing in films can be completely different. Both have different ways of how you want to show something. In this website, they explain that visuals are so much different than words and words can go deeper than visuals. I agree with them, but when a film has music or when the actors have good lines, I think it can make the audience understand a deeper meaning. A script still follows some kind of story. Some films don’t even have dialogue, but there is still a story with visuals, sound, and music.

In a “short” by WongFu Productions (a Youtube channel) called In Between, we meet our character, but we don’t see our character.  We see shots of settings, possibly where he went to high school. While we have to infer some things, we can still understand what’s happening. We see things happening when he narrates his thoughts in a voice-over, as well as being able to see his thoughts through his acting. His interaction with other actors helps us see what the theme is about. The story-line is easy to follow, and the audience can understand why this story was written. I was able to relate to this story, and others can as well even if they are not Asian. Even though this story was not written as something to be read, it is very well written in the dialogue and acting.

Overall, I think that stories are hard to write, even if it’s just dialogue. You can’t just go out and video something when no one knows what to do or say.

Response: Interviews

https://archives.cjr.org/realtalk/the_art_of_the_interview.php http://www.mediahelpingmedia.org/training-resources/journalism-basics/475-20-interviewing-tips-for-journalists

I don’t normally listen to or watch many interviews, but I occasionally watch them when there’s a movie star or a musician who I really like being interviewed. I think it’s easier to get people interested in an interview when the interview is of someone famous. Most people will be interested in that one movie star or that one musician and not worry about what questions that are being asked. In these couple of articles, they mention that questions are actually very important. What you ask and how you ask them are very important.

I feel like now, with Youtube and Youtubers, many of them do interviews. Most people just say that they are simply answering questions, but answering questions in depth about their opinion is basically an interview. Instead, they do some kind of challenge while also answering questions, or they do a “Q and A”, where they answer fans’ questions. But these are just videos. Is there a big difference between a radio interview and a TV interview? Is either one easier, and what about a written interview?

In this website that I found, it doesn’t exactly answer my question, but it talks about how an interview should be more like a conversation than just answering questions, and for TV interviews, it would be really awkward and obvious that either the interviewer or interviewee is not actually carrying out a conversation. When people watch it, you can see the awkwardness. In a radio show, it wouldn’t be as noticeable, but I feel like you would still be able to sense some of it. In a written interview, people will only get to see the questions and the answers, and nothing in between. So, I would have to guess that a TV interview is probably the hardest, with the audience being able to see everything that’s happening, versus a written one, where all you see are the questions and the answers.

Response: Foley

As I was watching this video on the Foley artist, I thought it was super fascinating. The video is Gary Hecker showing us how he makes the sounds, but not too much about what Foley really is. How much sound do the mics really pick up? Does it not pick up a lot of outside noises, to where they need to add sounds to the movies? I looked up the term Foley, and came across this website.

The microphone usually only picks up the voices, which is what the audience mainly wants to hear, and if the microphone does get other sounds, the sound recordist has to edit it to where it is mainly dialogue. After that, the film is mainly just dialogue and not a lot of the other noises. This is where the Foley artists come in, and create sounds for the movie.

I started to think about cartoons and animated movies where they need to have a lot of sounds because they are only animated, and they do not have any outside noise. Do they use Foley sounds?

According to this website, some of the animated movies, especially the big ones, contain Foley sounds. If you read it, they mention that in Toy Story, one Foley artist had a cow lick peanut butter off his face for a scene. That is so weird, but very creative. From these many videos and websites, I have learned that sound, other than dialogue, is extremely important for films and videos.

Lighting Response

In the lighting tutorial video, the man describes types of lighting: key, fill, and back lighting. I thought it was very interesting because I never knew there were different parts of lighting and that they all serve a different purpose. Something he mentioned was the “Inverse Square Law of Light”, which is “a law stating the intensity of an effect such as illumination changes in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from the source.” This sounds more like something in physics, and I was not the best at physics in high school. I was slightly confused by that definition, so I tried to find some more about this. He did demonstrate this, but I was still confused. He moves towards the light, keeping the exposure the same, and the whole point of this law is that the background light starts to fade.

I tried to find some more about this law of light. How did it work, and why is it so important in photography/cinematography? Is there a difference in lighting between photography and cinematography? Apparently in physics, it’s very complicated, so I found a website that talked more about the photography part of it. It starts off talks about aperture stops/f – stops. The aperture apparently reduces the amount of light that goes into the lens. The law is basically that “The energy (in our case: light intensity) at location A (subject area) decreases inversely proportional to the square of A’s distance to the energy source (for example, our flash head).” The website is here and explains it pretty well, if you want to learn about it more.

In the original video, the man talks about these lighting for cinematography, but these work just as well for photography, but that’s usually for lighted photography. There is also natural light photography, which I feel like most people do natural light more than lighted photography now, but that’s just what I think. There are many websites to help with “beginner photography” which is usually just natural lighting, which I thought this one explains and helps a lot, and talks about the different natural lighting.