13th screen Yonkers

These are my notes on our first multicamera exercise, from here many things have happened.
Attached is a non sequential nice pict. of my students preparing cameras to work with dancers.


2/28 – plan for yonkers 4 camera shoot. This is what we know – there’s a house with some people.
Discussions about plan/ no plan – Ideas: what do we learn about these people, can we go through their trash, can I have sex in their bed? We’ll meet and ask them questions, about how to proceed. decision: let’s go there and see, less rules.

made groups of 3 and 4 same as their car. Meet 7:15 7:30 on the porch.
Hmwk. Make up a character. Write a dialog and a short sketch the story comes through the dialog. Your character makes a cameo.

3/6--- meeting in the house. Questions asked, rules placed – don’t open drawers, touch much, pick up the rabbits. Questions, can the groups split up? Restate hand over lens, whistles are thron out, but not too excited about them.
On direction: find the story.

Wandering ensues. Groups disperse, cameras remain in the hands of few. People loook lost, but keep going. I prod a few times.
45:00 in we reconvene and J.M.calls a game of hide and seek. It has a rough start. Then starts. The counter sits on the couch, some people remain in their hide-outs. Aborted.
Scene ends in the basement drum room. Cameras shut down characters walk out the back door and around the front as students we sit around the kitchen table and talk about it.

feedback: What were the stories you found. Snippet, how does this connect to what you find next?
C. and D. found a murder and trailed it. How did your character help or hinder your experience? Some helped them engage and some ie:downer characters hurt their activation. Some felt the energy was chaotic, weird and high.

My critiques, more direction, but does it have to come from me? Handing over of camera. Figure out motivation and intention. Remember the cameras are part of this. Wish I had opened the floor to ask the house questions in the closing forum.

Assignment given – come up with a direction for the class to produce. Work with x. make a packet that we can use with you there or not. I said it could be 1 cam or multi. I feel like changing that.

Read r. altman interview
Create a direction for the class of 15 (16 w/ Carrie) for either a 13th screen synchronized camera hand editing scenario with 4, 9 or 16 cameras Or another camera situation, with awareness to editing and how post production can or will be accomplished. Everyone in class must have a job. And the video must have a beginning middle and end..
The project you propose must be written (typed with or without story boards/graphs/drawings. You must present/sell it to the class.
(question – do we proceed with these scenarios, and keep short assignments, or a final?

Updates from Macedonia

Dear all,

“Progressing” is the name of the project on which I’ve been working in the past few weeks. I’ve been thinking of where is the whole tendency of making life better and easier taking us, if we are making our way of living better at all!

I think most of the people are not really aware of the situation in which our planet is at the moment and that maybe this progression is leading us to destruction. 

I’m posting here stills from the “Progressing” video. 

ICA Update

Hello all,
Things are moving along for each of our grant recipients! All five Fast Forward students have been in touch with their mentors about their progress and are posting updates to their blogs (here's one example). A week ago we had a screening of the students' rough cuts in the ICA theater, providing them with the chance to critique each other's work in the space where their final pieces will be shown at our public screening on May 30. Most of the students are still in the editing phase and getting feedback from their mentors to help move them along. More to come in the next few weeks!

Here are a couple of stills:
From Annalise's film, "Aquafinito," a documentary that looks at the debate surrounding bottled water.




From Cory's narrative film, "Daydreamers."

freeDimensional/CIAC Time Capsule Project Update

The project is running along smoothly this month. The students have chosen growth as their subject matter. They want to show how much they have learned and achieved since starting school in the United States.

We've gotten the fantastic photographer Matilde Damele to work with the students. They're working to showcase their life including, family, friends, neighborhood and of course school. The photos will be set for the time capsule along with a audio interview done with a Podcast Workshop run by Tianna Kennedy of free103point9.org.

I look forward to next month when I will be able to put in some photos and maybe some audio on this blog.

Arthur

Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose

After weeks of exploring the surrounding community of Downtown San Jose with digital SLRs, our 7 - 9th grade students have begun putting their photographs together on a timeline in Adobe Premier in order to create a multimedia slide show display of their work. The project will include pictures that they find the most representative of their community and pay the most attention to the stylistic properties of photography, as well as music, text, and vocal narration explaining why it is that they took these pictures and how it demonstrates the San Jose community in order to present a digital youth perspective on the Silicon Valley.

With our older students, grades 10 - 12, we have spent time refreshing everyones mind on the technical aspects of photography and have begun spreading out into our neighborhood. Children's Discovery Museum is located in an interesting and unique place in the city: to the Northeast lies the financial district, made up of many of Silicon Valley's high tech companies as well as restaurants and entertainment; to the south and west are low economic inner-city neighborhoods; and in every direction is the city's homeless population. Over the years, this combination has inspired many students in our program to investigate these idiosyncrasies of poverty amidst affluence, and for Zer01 our youth are doing the same thing with an artistic lens.

So far...

Hello everyone, here's some news from Skopje.

As I mentioned before, we are pass the formal workshop, and in a period of creating works, discussing ideas, progress, changing directions. Here is a short description of what we have been doing in the past period.

The process was split into official and non-official meetings, and so far we have finished the official (educative) ones, now we are only catching up with the participants and the works they are creating.

The first official meeting was held on March 6, where we went through the idea of the project, we discussed the situation in our city, the way young artists are working, how they are (under) represented, the process of creation and how it is influenced either by social conditions or some programming software. We discussed about the way of work we will choose, and we agreed to have a couple of educative sessions, where the participants will go through the basics of the programming language Processing*and consider doing their final works as generative artworks.

Nevertheless, we met again before the workshop in order to go through some major points in the digital arts history. We found this to be informative, as well as inspiring for the participants, since some of them haven’t had the chance to earn that kind of education. We discussed the way digital arts were developing, the role of the artist and the technology, the equipment, software, hardware, the mediation and influences…

In order to better understand the function of Processing, we discussed the physical environment, and how most of the design/animation/flash/graphic editing programs tend to reproduce the same conditions and parameters from the nature, and how Processing is different in that matter. The discussion was about better understanding of the application as a mediator in the process of creating a work of art.

Finally, one of the past weekends was dedicated to work in classroom

We went through some basics in contemporary art, especially works that have been created as an environment, as a result of some interaction…

Participants were taught the basics of Processing, and shown how to manipulate the environment it offers and creates. They were also shown how they can use different materials as resources in their work with this tool (internet data, images, sounds). These two days of work were a period when they were able to assess if Processing is the right language for them to use in their work, and some of them decided they will do so, others decided they will use other applications and tools with keeping in mind what they have learned from the principles of Processing and Generative art.

So far, we are meeting separately with whoever needs discussion, exchange of opinions on what they are doing at the moment. We have arranged to meet up all together again this week, and check out on the progress. By now, everyone should have an idea they are working on and developing. I should also have some drafts soon, and will post them here for you. They will probably be in various formats, but I will look to have the basic motifs and ideas represented. In the meantime, we are also discussing all questions and ideas on our blog, and first results are to come in a couple of days.

Also, I have to say that all of your projects look great and looks like you’re all having a good time working. We are all learning from you a lot!

Until we read again, greetings from Macedonia,

Ivana
and the LINE Initiative and Movement team.

---

* Processing is a programming language and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts and visual design communities", which aims to teach the basics of computer programming in a visual context, and to serve as the foundation for electronic sketchbooks

Digital Photo and Music at the Guggenheim

Hi—it’s Rachel from the Guggenheim.

The first half of our project is done! Which means that the real challenge begins now.

Last week, photographers and musicians put the finishing touches on their work, and handed over their pieces to their partners from the other class. This week, everyone listened to or looked at their partner's work, and started to plan their responses. Since the final products will be audio slide shows, the musicians must now create pieces that complement the photographs of their partners, while the photographers will interpret sound with their cameras (and maybe some Photoshop manipulation).

To make this even more complicated, the two classes come to the museum on different days, and therefore the partners have not yet met in person. They are communicating via letters (just like Kandinsky and Schoenberg did 100 years ago). The advantage to this arrangement is that it gives the artists a chance to reflect on their processes, and explain their ideas in writing to their peers.

We’ve put up an in-progress class website with all work done to date, so that the participants can revisit their partners’ work whenever they want. Have a look! (Files are large, so they might take a moment to download!)

-Rachel