Mike McAlpin Final Project – “A Clouded Memory”

For my final project in NMA 3010, I would like to create a short film that documents a man recalling and reflecting on memories that he has of his past. This will be started by him looking over past home movies on a projector, which will be done either by playing videos on a real projector that I own or by adding in regular footage in with after effects. The footage that the man is watching will serve as a physical representation of his recollections of his positive memories, and will depict those events as they felt to him at the time they happened. As he sits observing the memories, he will begin to reflect on them outside of his memories from the projector and realize that things had not really played out as he once thought, or that he may have blocked out certain aspects of his memories that may have been painful.

One example of this that I will likely include is a set of memories the man recalls about the time he spent living in an apartment with his brother before the two were left separated for reasons that are not thoroughly explained. The footage that will play on the projector will be all of the positive memories that he had, or footage of some situation that played out. This will then be contrasted with stylistically different footage (grayscale, blurring in and out, etc.) that depict the more painful times or a slightly different version of the same footage that ends in a more negative outcome than was first depicted. Some of the clips will contrast activities that the man may have done with his brother but is now doing alone.

The idea for using a projector to represent memories was inspired by the movie Inside Out which I have seen several times and watched again recently. The general tone of my video will also be similar to that of Inside Out in that it will be intermittently melancholy and humorous as it cuts back and forth between the man’s memories and his more morose reflections on them and what they meant and continue to mean to him.

 

Inside Out Inspiration

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Blog 1

The piece by Peter Campus named “Three Transitions” tries to mess with your perception o space. He projects the video of himself going through the projection screen and it creates this weird feeling of disorientation while watching it. You can clearly tell that he’s moving through the screen and it’s a video on the paper, but it makes you feel uneasy. The second transition keeps messing with your perception of space when he spreads, what I can only assume is green paint, all over his face revealing a video of his own face with the paint. The black background really helps with illusion of all the transitions. Although the editing makes you feel uneasy it’s satisfying by the end of the transition. With the first one he satisfies the audience when he tapes the projector screen back together. With the second one he does the same by covering almost the entirety of his face. The third one the paper burns until you can’t see his face anymore relieving the stress that that transition was causing.

Peter Weibel’s “Endless Sandwich” was also pretty interesting. He set up the television to play the same video over and over again. The timing was different for most of them though which lead to some interesting shots. You can see when the first T.V. turns off and the domino effect begins. The transition between him standing up in the first television and the second one felt kind of strange. The image is so small that you can barely tell what is going on at first. All you see the screen turn dark and him standing. This lead to a slow realization of what is actually happening and it came to be pretty interesting. Weibel’s reasoning for this video can’t be explained without a little background information or some context. It might be a commentary on the rise of television and its hold on Americans.

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Response to Omer Fast Exhibition at James Cohan Gallery

Even though I have seen many exhibitions lately with multiple-screen video installations, Omer Fast has a knack at putting them to good use. I thoroughly enjoyed his exhibition at the James Cohan Gallery. I sat for some time in each of the three separate rooms to watch 5,000 Feet is the Best, Continuity, and Spring. However, I was only able to watch Fast’s latest video installation Spring all the way through before the gallery closed. Fast integrates different perspectives on the same event and shows them together instead of showing different scenes on each of the screens. It’s a functional and cool narrative tool which makes his videos more engaging. What stood out to me is that by utilizing multiple screens and therefore multiple perspectives, Fast shows how there is not just one point of view of an event and thus there cannot be only one reality. In his video installation Spring, Fast captures the separate yet interwoven narratives of a teenager, a male prostitute, and a couple all coming together in the suburbs, which ultimately ends in violence. Spring reminded me of one of my favorite films, Crash (which won the Oscar for Best Picture). Similar to Spring, the film Crash tells the story of people with separate narratives colliding in interweaving stories of race, loss, and redemption. However, I believe if Crash was presented in the multiple-screen installation style of Fast, it would make the film even more captivating and powerful.

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Omer Fast Exhibit – James Cohan Gallery

I found Omer Fast’s short film 5,000 Feet Is Best, one of the three films featured in the James Cohan exhibit to be the most fascinating of the three that were featured. I found it to be a very intriguing and intense film that keep me captivated throughout even though it would probably be considered to be fairly slow-paced. There are large chunks of the film where the drone pilot is seen reflecting on his own whilst smoking cigarettes, scenes which feature extended close-quarters shots that create a very intense tone.

What I found most intriguing about the film is the way in which it seemed to blur the lines between reality and recreation created by the segues between the real interview footage and the reenacted footage. The footage is also interrupted by short vignettes where the pilot tells the interviewer stories that contrast the other scenes with their more fast-paced and colorful footage.

The constant back and forth between fiction and falsehood reminded me a lot of the novel The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, another work profiling a soldier’s memories and experiences with warfare.

The entire book told the purportedly true story of a man who served in Vietnam and profiled the horrible things he had witnessed until late in the novel when the author yanks back to curtain to reveal that while most of what the story was based upon was true, many of the characters and the specific events were, in fact, made-up. I remember when I read that book in high school that I was highly impacted by that moment, and I felt a similar feeling while watching 5,000 Feet Is Best, and I think that I set out to watch some of his other works in full because of how well done this piece was done from start to finish.

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Project 3

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Live Stream

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The Virus: Ashika and James

https://vimeo.com/165370046

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The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality

https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160421-the-evolutionary-argument-against-reality/

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A Moment in Film

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(Untitled)

VIDEO 1 FINAL PROJECT

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