Saturday, January 18, 2025

Portrait of a person, place or thing: MINI-DOC EXAMPLES




Pontoon boat from RTD 365. Visual doc of process


Acid Brass- watch this!




Innocente: more traditional documentary

About a thing- the piano


House of Elegance. Produced by students at University of Texas Austin


DJ SPOOKY- that Subliminal Kid
Process of dj'ing



Process integrated with interview: UChicago class


Link to short visual sequence/process and portrait



Super simple approach- for a good storyteller


about beehives




Sugar coated- about subcultures
Katherine L Ross about porcelain and soap
exemplifies interview with B-roll


Student work at SIUC:
Etherton Switch from Tobias Mattner on Vimeo.





student work: El Procedure: Short by U Chicago student Coya Castro

More student work

Welcome to Goreville made by Tyler Sullivan, 2013 RTD 365A



Pastor Holder by Evan Brown 2013 RTD 365A

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Boots Riley: ‘In film, the more personal you get, the more universal you get

Born in Chicago in 1971 and moving to the city of Oakland, California, six years later, Riley was steeped in politics from an early age. His parents were social justice organisers and their son followed suit, joining the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labor party at 15. In 1991, he formed hip-hop collective the Coup and went on to release six politically charged albums, notably 1998’s acclaimed Steal This Album.
Making movies was a long-held aspiration – Riley studied film at San Francisco State university and spent years honing the script for Sorry to Bother You. His persistence paid off: the film was described by the New Yorker as “a scintillating comedic outburst of political imagination and visionary fury”, while AO Scott in the New York Times wrote: “If you’re not bothered – also tickled, irked, mystified and provoked – [by Sorry to Bother You], then you’ve fallen asleep on the job.”

Sunday, September 8, 2024

CIN 400 / RTD 365 FALL 2024

 


CIN 400 / RTD 365 FALL 2024

Class meets: Monday and Wednesday 11-12:50 
COMM 1116 (Soundstage) 
Professor Sarah Lewison slewison@siu.edu 
Office hours Monday & Wed after class and by appt 
Office: Communication 1050E 
Teaching Assistant- the fabulous Ashish Kumar ashish.lnu@siu.edu

Tuesday, April 4, 2023

Drew Yepsen handpainted film experiment

 



While working on my cameraless film I took very simple approaches and tried adding my own complexities and methods. I worked exclusively with one extended piece of film from an old war movie. The scenes I chose, soldier staring and a flag waving, allowed for me to work with scenes that were darker and lighter. This produced several different results. I did two main things which was scratching and the coloring. Scratching was the first step across the entire forty second clip. I used an exacto knife, sand paper, metal scrub and a nail file. All of these methods led to very different looks and I found that the overall scratch quality and depth varied between each one. I found that the nail file was great for clean lines on a smaller area and the metal scrub was great for depth and clear damage. When it comes to colors, I tried all kinds of fun methods. Prior to much of anything I soaked the entire film in sweet tea vodka for a day. This gave it a strange darker tone and made the emulsion very sticky. 


I put it outside to dry where it got covered in all kinds of earth Some of these dirt and grass marks can be seen on the final film. After drying and then cleaning to get, most of, the sticky off I went to work on color. I used acrylic paint which did not show up much outside of a shadow. I found that sharpie markers worked great for clean vibrant colors. I found that dripping a paper towel in water, coloring on it with the sharpie, making it wet again then applying to the film left this amazing water color look. You can see an example of that below in the first screenshot. This weird mix of green and blue came out great. A lot of the red came from dousing it in fake blood. The color is bright and it showed up great! Overall, I found that scratching before applying color, letting it dry and then rescratching is a great method to add depth to the film. Layers of color can be added using this method and it came out great! Two screenshot examples are below!