STILL
CAMERA OBSCURA
My camera obscura project was a long shot. I thought, early in the assignment process, that it would be interesting to attempt turning my car into a camera obscura. If the project was successful, I imagined driving around the Michigan countryside with my DSLR, pulling up to billboard car advertisements and insurance buildings and other sights that would cast images on the interior of my vehicle and comment on the nature of a car and the time we spend in it. As can be seen in the image, however, I did not take into account the angle which the light would cast through and the fact that the light would have to come from near-directly above my car. I wish that the day I had been able to venture out for this project had been sunnier, as my image may have been a bit brighter, but overall the failure was beneficial for my understanding of light and camera lens angles. Plus, with this experience, I believe I now have the ability to assemble a better working mobile, car-based camera obscura in the future if I wanted to.
​
Equipment: 2008 Saturn Vue, countless LaCroix cardboard boxes, my Canon t5i DSLR, Canon 40mm f/2.8, a Calumet tripod and the light that dashed off the trees of Alma, MI.
WALKABOUT
Like with most things in a busy student's life, my walkabout assignment started hours later than I intended it to start. By the time I got to the end of my process, I was walking around the park by the Pine River, it was nearing 9:00pm and the luminescence from lights at the park was beginning to not be enough for to capture the images I desired. My experience with Darkroom Photography and 35mm film should have taught me to get out during the daylight when you have more freedom in your camera settings, but the film photography experience I have did come in handy with regard to my restrictions on how many exposures I had at each location. Having lived on campus at Alma College for three years and, more or less, becoming pretty used to the sights, one of the main focuses of my Walkabout project was to ensure that my photos did not center around well-known landmarks of the campus or surrounding area. Gregory Crewdson said that he liked to visit and revisit the same east coast towns to have them speak to him in different ways. I hadn't heard that quote and was unaware of Crewdson's work and process at the time of my Walkabout. But, in my exploration of Alma for this project, I did try to hear an old place speak to me in new ways.
​
Equipment: my Canon t5i DSLR, Canon 40mm f/2.8 and the area in and around Alma College.
SELFIE TETRALOGY
As I review my progress this semester, a common theme is lost time. During my Selfie Tetralogy, among other projects over this first half of the semester, I got started on my project late in the day. It seems, most of the time, that there are not enough hours in the day. My first idea for this project was for two of the photos to be at this warehouse in town during the day, and the second two photos at the same place during the night. I ran out of time and had to make due with just night photos, losing the majority of my background in the process. As a result of a lack of viable light sources, the two photos on the left side employed the brake lights from​ my car in the exposure to assist in lighting my face. The top left photo was the only one I used a hair light for, as I thought it slightly unnatural in such dark surroundings. The bottom left photo also made use of lights from my car, but it was the headlights which were shorter than I thought they would be in planning my tetralogy. Of the four exposures, my favorite is the bottom right. It also features a version of myself that looks the most comfortable in his own skin.
​
Equipment: 2008 Saturn Vue, lightsaber, little LED, Calumet tripod, my Canon t5i DSLR, Sigma 35 mm f/1.4, Canon 24-105mm f/4, an open field and an old warehouse in Alma, MI.
STAGED STILL
In this image, we see a gas station open at night in a small town. The altar of capitalism, the only thing that can unite all people through their need for gasoline. This gas station is the last thing open in the middle of the night and three products of this system, a woman, a businessman and a homeless man, have wandered into this sanctuary of global commerce looking for meaning. The woman is lost; though she has done everything she can, bought everything in her budget, to look pretty: she still isn’t good enough. A homeless man, desperate for any sort of meaning in a life unfulfilled and empty, looks to the gas station for opportunity; he is the largest person in the frame as he is the greatest drag on this system. The business man, the only one under the cover of the awning and dressed as though he is coming home from work, is here not to commiserate with the two ‘failures’ in the man and the woman; he needs gasoline and is preoccupied with work on his cell phone, hardly noticing the casualties of his system of success around him. He is the smallest in the frame because he will be forgotten, a simple cog in the machine.
​
This image is inspired by the process and visual language of Gregory Crewdson along with the theoretical headspace of David LaChappelle in his Gas Station series. Like Crewdson, we used a very slow (1s) shutter speed to get deep focus and enough light at such a late hour of the day. Each person in the photo had their own exposure, with a light technician holding a lightsaber to ensure they were lit correctly. Like LaChappelle, a key controlling idea of our image is the idea that in late capitalist societies, and even across the world, the gas station is the church of the people, the one thing that everyone, regardless of income or social class, has in common. Life as we know it wouldn't be possible without it, and we think the photo reflects these realities.
​
Equipment: Sony Alpha a7, Sony 16-35mm f/4, Calumet tripod, lightsaber and a great little gas station by the Pine River.
MOTION
MAKE IT MOVE
My Make it Move video was a productive failure. On one hand, the product was an only semi-coherent half-baked stop motion film without a massive controlling idea. On the other hand, it was an experience in necessity. I needed to shoot all of my photos at a certain time and did not have time to reshoot once I was done; I also planned very poorly for this exercise: as one can see by the amount of items on my list, I went in with a massive amount of footage to photograph. During the shoot, I made the decision to cut out most of the items to save time and I thought that everything would be fine. Once I got into Premiere and started importing the photos, however, I realized that I did not have nearly enough frames for a viewer to be able to read every item on my list. I learned that stop-motion takes way more frames than you can ever imagine it would. I am very fond of Robot Chicken and Wallace & Grommit so I am sure I will dabble in stop motion again at some point in the future, but this experience taught me that it is not a form that allows you to cut corners.
Equipment: my Canon t5i DSLR, Canon 40mm f/2.8, Calumet tripod, my dorm room, clothes, a pen and a notebook.
BLINDSPOTS
For this Blindspots exercise, I wanted to focus on Kracaur’s musings on film theory and a single component of an element of film called, like this exercise, ‘Blindspots.’ To Kracaur, the power of the camera lies in its ability to capture the unseen circumstances of daily existence that are urgent and necessary to understand the whole of the human condition. He gives an example of a director who, after countless screenings of his film, notices, upon an audience member’s suggestion, a chicken that only appears for a fleeting moment in the corner of the screen and vanishes. This is the power of cinema for Kracaur. That moment, that small slice of being a part of this earth captured with a camera, is truth. To me, Kracaur’s element of Blindspots that he calls ‘refuse’ was the most interesting of his cinematic components.
As with all my other projects, save the Make it Move, I wanted my Blindspots clip to feel as though it was not in Alma, MI. The refuse, of Kracaur’s conditions for Blindspot truth, is one of the most congruent across all areas of the globe. Every place on Earth has trash that people don’t look at. Be it last week’s newspaper in a gutter, a lawnmower-chewed tennis ball in the bushes of a side-yard, or a reflective puddle in a dank alleyway.
As there were not many people out and about while I was shooting, after a few takes of just wind blowing ripples through the puddle and the power lines it reflected, I decided to cheat a bit and stomp through the puddle myself. It took almost ten takes for my shoe to land directly on the T of the power lines, with framing that made the most of the ‘rule of thirds’ as possible. I was ecstatic with the result. In post, I color graded for a cool look, pulling shadows and highlights toward blue on the color wheel. I took a small risk with pulling the midtone color wheel toward red, resulting in an almost pink hue over my off-white shoes that almost gives the impression of a red light, somewhere in the vicinity, that is lighting up, however slightly, the shoe that stomps through the puddle. I changed my aspect ration in this video to give the clip a more cinematic quality.
​
Equipment: my Canon t5i DSLR, Canon 40mm f/2.8, Calumet tripod and the alleyways of Alma, MI.
CAMERA MOVES
Since my time at Alma began, I have played a minor and key roles in the production of six short films. Last year, my sophomore year, I directed and acted in a film called Fun Box that was my brainchild, pride and joy. I wrote it with my roommate, enlisted support from talented NMS students, and worked on it with every chance I had outside of class and work. It took almost the whole year and it was one of the best experiences of my life. This year, unfortunately, I have not felt strongly enough about any of my concepts for short films to pursue their creation; plus, with NMS and English major requirements kicking into second gear as I work into my last quarter of college, there just is not enough time in the day to plan a film out, feel passionate about it, get out and shoot.
That is why, for my Camera Moves project, I decided to make the most of the assignment that was given and try to take it as far in the direction of narrative as possible. While a man getting in a car and stopping to send a text message, followed by a man in the backseat killing him and then turning himself into the police is not exactly Oscar bait, getting out and planning a plot on the fly was exhilarating, rewarding and reminded me just what it was that I had so much fun with on student sets in my first years at Alma.
Though I have experience with a camera, screenwriting, directing and acting in student film, however amateur all of those skills are, I have never really dedicated any time to the rhetorical power, and practical implementation, of tried-and-true camera movements. So, this was my introduction: we are unsure of the story of the man in the first shot. The push in from a wide establishing shot to a medium shot of the man through the window of his car as he pulls away gives the audience a sense of closure at his departure from this house. The second shot, a medium close up on the driver as he pulls over to check a text message, first, tilts down with the driver and sees him grab his cell phone. Next, on the tilt back up to the driver’s face, the camera arcs out to the right ever so slightly to reveal a second man in the backseat of the car. That moment, just before the backseat man strangles the driver, is my favorite group of frames in the sequence: a simultaneous close-up on the driver and medium shot on the backseat passenger. After the driver is killed and the man in the backseat flustered, he exits the vehicle in a medium long shot. The camera pushes in quickly, however, panning with the man as he pauses for a moment and then walks by the camera. This move, a pivot on character, acts also as a background reveal to show the police station that man will turn himself into as well as rhetorically suggests this is a life-changing experience because of the larger world he heads into alone.
This is one of the two videos I revised this semester. This second version of 'Shit' features tighter cuts in the car-to-police-station sequence, non-location sound and an added snippet of dialogue. I thought the subtitle, necessary when the film was silent, still had a place here to act both toward comedic relief and as a title card of sorts. I changed the aspect ratio in this film for the cinematic quality, as well as to (mostly) cut out my shadow and reflection in the first shot. This was my favorite project of the Motion half of the semester.
Equipment: Canon C100, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8, a 2008 Saturn Vue, a house and two great friends.
MONTAGE
While I was hanging up posters for the Pine River Student Film Festival around Downtown Alma, I stopped in the Superior Street Barbershop to ask if I could advertise for our campus event in their window. It was around 4 o’clock on a Wednesday and there weren’t any patrons in the business, but despite the lack of business, the two employees there were very pleasant; they jokingly ribbed me about hanging posters up so that they aren’t crooked and said they would do their best to come to the festival that weekend. I remembered this interaction, some time later, when our class was assigned a montage for homework. I quickly messaged the establishment on Facebook, set up a time to come and shoot, and was well on my way to having all my footage before the end of the period when we learned about the assignment.
I planned to go to the barbershop at 9am on the morning of the Friday before the Monday when the assignment was due, giving me ample time to sort through the footage and assemble a cut before the next class. That Friday morning I was a bit anxious; I hadn’t gotten enough sleep and knew that it was going to be a long day before the weekend started, plus, I was very nervous that there was not going to be any customers in the barbershop and an awkward tour of the building/walk through of the employees activities when there were customers would follow. My worries were all for naught, however, when I arrived at the barbershop in full swing.
Looking back at the shoot, I wished I had planned out the shots I wanted to get a little bit better. I ended up with not enough footage to cut together a montage that had an exorbitant amount of cuts, I had favored one of the two employees in coverage and I had focused, really, on just people’s hair being cut, with very little in terms of inserts or footage of the inner workings aside from the expected cutting of hair. But, the cheerful mood of the barbershop seemed to infect my footage; classroom response was in favor of the people of the barbershop, without the inner workings, and a critique of my editing style pushed me outside the methods I am used to for the second cut. I focused just on the barbers and their interactions with their art form as well as with each other and the customers and I could not have been happier with the cut.
I revised the montage only slightly in additional color grading, ensuring my blacks were as deep as they could go, and I added a slightly warm adjustment layer that brought out the red of the walls and the color in everyone’s faces. I also changed the last clip in my montage: instead of fade out just before I shake the camera and stop recording, I left that last little wobble in. I feel as though it breaks the fourth wall in a way. Throughout the rest of the montage, the camera does not draw attention to itself. But this addition gives a slight insight into the process of shooting and assembling a montage, as well as combines the Eisenstien-ian and Kracaur-ean theories of assembly for importance and capture for importance, respectively.
Equipment: Canon c100, Canon 16-35mm f/2.8, a fantastic barbershop and the great citizens of Alma, MI.