Comics and transition

In every comic we read, there are transitions between certain moments of any story. In Scott McCloud's book Understanding Comics, he talks about six different transitions. They are; moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, scene to scene, aspect to aspect, and non-sequitur. Here are some examples:

Moment to moment-  eyes open, eyes close
Action to action- baseball flying towards player, bats hit baseball
Subject to subject- runner gets to finish line, time watch stopped
Scene to scene- the beach, the city
Aspect to aspect- cigarettes and beer on a table, couple that is holding beer and cigarettes
Non-seuitur- two different frames that have no common area

Now the ones that are used more often in comics are action, subject, and scene. In Art Spiegelman graphic novel Maus, I've found three different transitions described by McCloud. One is on page 36, where the father and son are having a conversation, and the way the frames are set out it could either a moment to moment or action to action. On page 20, the girl is grabbing the man's foot as she doesn't want him to go. Then the next frame is him shutting the door, subject to subject. On page 22, is a moment to moment where the woman is changing her face expression in every frame. A scene to scene transition can be found on page 38, where one frame is showing people leaving the city and the other frame is soldiers going to war. Art seems to be using a lot of action, moment, and subjects to me. Which is common among most comics that are produced.

Learning about these transitions will help me decide which ones I can use for my comics. Definitely something I will look in a different way when reading comics.......

Classic

Capstone week three

Every week brings a new challenge to face and a solution that needs to be solved. The one problem I'm facing this week is a conflict of schedules among the members in the film. Some people are good on Thursday and some on Friday. So I'll have to find a happy medium with everybody helping out. I have finished the script and I have been revising it a lot in the last couple of days. I want to start filming this week if I feel its strong enough for it. I'll have to run it by my teacher and see if I need anything else done with the script. Some objectives I want to do this week; finalize script, actors/actresses, shot selections within scenes, and begin filming. My research has come along a lot faster this week.

Robin Hood

When people think of parodies, it’s sometimes viewed not as a serious film; when in fact it should be appreciated.  Most genres go through four stages in their life span; experimental, classic, refinement and finally baroque. The baroque stage is where the style of parody comes in. It’s almost a rebirth of whatever genre is being explored. Either the genre is; horror, science fiction, westerns, action-adventure, and etc. The genre I will explore is the detective movies with a splash of adventure.  This is what I’ll implicate in my film. One of the books I read, Film Parody by Dan Harris, described different techniques for parody films. The first one is called reiteration, where you establish the connection for a certain genre. Examples would be using horses for a western or a held hand camera for a documentary. The second is inversion, where the use of irony is used to flip situations on its head. The third is misdirection, where an example from "Scary Movie" the man talks about how his wife can't get pregnant and neither can he. The fourth is literalization, where they actually mean what they say. The example they use is from "Robin Hood Men in Tights" when Robin yells out to the crowd "lend me you ears" then they throw their ears to him. The fifth is extraneous inclusion, where adding doorbells on a teepee or pink slippers on a gangster. The last one is exaggeration, where a situation can be taken to the extreme. An extreme bomb from a toy box or a car that rolls and rolls still it stops and explodes. I plan to use a little of every technique in the film and make the film better.

As the weeks go by, I can't wait to see this come all together and see the end product. Another week of the film to be......................................

Capstone week 2

As I continue my progress with my short film, I will begin with my research on the genre of parody. Hopefully the library will have the books I ordered so I can get more into depth of it. Once I get my books, I'll incorporate some of the ideas I'd gained from my research and exploit them in my film. That's the plan for this week, also I already started writing the script for the film and plan to be done with it this week.

Pink Panther

I plan to watch other films that use parody in their films, as well as detective films to see what I can use for mine. One film that comes in mind is the Pink Panther with Peter Sellers. I found this film to very funny and I could easily incorporate some ideas into my film. I find myself watching a lot films and just a lot planning of what I want to in-vision. SO A LOT OF PRE-PRODUCTION IN OTHER WORDS.

I also been able to already get some actors  and crew members to help me out. I just need to find some female actresses, some said they would be interested but I need to confirm. I'm really trying to find people that fits the characters I see in my film. Sometimes I notice how they act and think, "hey they would be perfect." It's a work in progress, but it'll be worth it in the end I believe..........

Comic World

As I read more and more of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud, it was interesting to see how some comics are made different to others. One fact that Scott wanted to emphasize was the idea of seeing a face. Our minds is such a great tool, that when we see two dots and a line the first thing we see is a face.I find that crazy that we can think of that so fast, but Scott refers to this as a way that we are a self-centered race. We see ourselves in so many inanimate objects and sometimes we don't even know about it. One example he uses is when we drive our cars, if somebody hits a car we would say "he hit me." Not that "his car hit my car," we take the role of the car being an extended part of our own body. Even the design of the car is a face, two headlights and a bumper. This is just one example of how we see faces in everything in our life.

Cool cover

Another part Scott talked about is the simplistic drawing of characters compared to the background. The example I will use is from Maus by Art Spiegelman. Most of the characters are mouses and very simple with two dots for eyes, a distinguish nose and we can fill out the rest the face. The background is still very simple but has more detail in them compared to the characters. I did like one use of framing in the story, when two of the characters were going to two different places, it was very well designed. They had two frames that showed the action going in two different directions by putting the dialogue at opposite ends of each frames. These are just a few examples I found in this story.

After reading the comic from Scott McCloud, I definitely will look at comics in a different way. Most likely I will read more comics just to get a better idea of what I want to do for my comic that I'll make So let's see what happens.....   

Project Topic

As this being my last semester in school, I definitely wanted to do something fun for my capstone. I've been back and forth about if I wanted a short film or a graphic novel. I finally decided that I'm going to do a short film about this young guy who acts like he's a spy/detective. The film is going to be a comedy/spoof kind of deal. This main character always acts like this spy/detective on the weekends and his friend is always in the middle of it. The main character's name is Jimmy and somehow always takes situations to the max. In this film, he gets news that one of his friends has been missing. He believes that his friend is in great danger, but his best friend, Joe, tells him its probably not that serious. It starts from there and Jimmy's spy/detective mode turns on for the weekend. I'm still in the early stages of the film, but I have a good feeling that I can make it work.

Man in Suit

Some things I'm going to research is other detective/spy movies and see what I can use for my movie. What norms are used in most of these movies and what are realistic for me to use? This will be an important question for me pushing forward. Pretty much a lot of movie watching and reading articles on this topic. I've seen some consistent actions in these movies, I'll put a little twist on my film to make a change.

This will be an interesting semester for me. I have a lot of things to plan out and people to help me out with this film. I know that I have a few people that can help me out already, so the only thing I need to do is keep creating the story. Let the fun begin........................

Quiz 3 Program 1

In our studio production class, our group did the program 1 about conservations and how the guests viewed them.  The program itself flowed very smoothly from one person speaking to the next guest speaking. All three guests seemed to connect with each other about the topic and could respond very easy to each question asked.  There were a few things that I noticed that were great during the shoot and some that weren’t.

Talk show

A few examples of what I thought were excellent during the program. The first were the guests we had for the topic of the day. We had two park rangers and the last guest had great experience in this field of work. This to me was great because everybody had their own view of it, but felt the same about conservations in general. It wasn’t a monotone program, where everybody said the same thing with a twist on it. Everybody contributed their input and made the program great. Another thing I enjoyed was the extra use of a camera. We had our two main cameras, but also another camera for close-ups on each guest. This was a great tool in our arsenal for editing, if we want the picture focused on the guest who is speaking. The last thing that went well was our group in general.  We planned out everything that needed to be done before the day of shooting. Who the guests were? Who is doing what role in the studio? Who the host will be? and so on. The program itself was great and the end project should be a very professional looking program.

Also there are the things that I didn’t like from the program itself, not many though. The main thing that bugged me was that the chairs were on wheels so the guests would be rocking back and forth a good portion of the time. I knew that this would happen because; people will get uncomfortable so they find anyway to feel more at home in this situation. That is something that I will remember for future references either in the studio or when making short films. The topic itself wasn’t something I’m familiar with, so it would be nice to do a program, which I’m more familiar with. I know that in the future this will happen so I will have to make the best of it.  Other than that not much things I didn’t enjoy from doing this program.

This program was a very fun and different from topics that I’m familiar with. I did enjoy doing camera work and also some editing for practice that I will gladly accept anytime I get a chance. This studio production class has been great this semester and I will take all the knowledge from this class for my future career.

Conservation Show (Group A)

With our final production, our group decided on the topic of conservations. We had five people in our group, with one of us playing the role as the host, three of us on cameras, and last one as the technical director. My part in the production was to operate one of the cameras. Before we started shooting, we set up the cameras to give us the best shots possible. Some of the things included, white balance, focal length, and the fixation in the background. (so our talent does not look like they are floating into space) When we finish those steps, I would test some the shots to see how they look and get an idea of what to expect. Examples would be, a two shot right, or three shot right, and even an establishing shot that shows all four people. Once we finished with that, then our director decided on which shot she wanted to use first. The first shot would be an establishing shot on my camera. As the show begins, I did find myself to get better with the camera.

As the show proceeded, for the most part all the directions from the technical director were straight forward and made my job a little easier. Only a few times where I had to get the shot more quickly because the camera that was being recorded had no one speaking. I did enjoy the environment though, the feeling to be alert and ready when my camera needed a different shot. On set we had one host and three guests, so most of my shots were two shots and three shots. Not as many closeups I thought I would be needed for. Otherwise I felt more confident as the show progress and got different types of shots. Mainly this was my job while we produced the show.

In the post production stage, we will be editing our footage from the studio as well as footage from a third and fourth camera from our group. We decided to put all the footage on my external hard drive so it will be easy to edit everything at once. All next week we will be doing this so we will be done by finals week. This production group worked really well with each other and made the environment relaxed. This class has been a great learning experience for being the guinea pigs of the studio. I'm still learning about the studio world but I feel that I'm on the right track.