A Trip to MoMI

Last week, I took a trip the Museum of the Moving Image with my friend and fellow film student, Trine Fjordholm. After taking our time and gawking at the beautiful array of antique film cameras the museum has exhibited, we finally made our way to the demonstrations on Foley, ADR, stop-motion, and flip-books. We had a field day with these and spent a bit too much time at the stop-motion table.

I had a few epiphanies at the ADR demo. Of course, dubbing my voice over Eddie Murphy's during a scene from Coming to America is going to be ridiculous in any given situation. As the scene images played on the screen in front of me, I listened and  clumsily read aloud the pieces of dialogue that were to replace the original. In this experience, I truly realized the amount of precision and attention to nuance necessary on both the actor's part and the sound editor's part. What primarily seemed like a straightforward task was really quite involved and time-consuming.

It is hoped that the use of ADR goes unnoticed by viewers because its job is to perfectly sync the sound with the images. In the digital age, sound has become one of the main criterium to determining what makes a good film. With the use of Foley, ADR, and sound effects, the sound design of a film carries much more weight than it did in early sound films. Nowadays, the viewer is immersed not only in the images and the narrative, but the sounds that surround them.

We ain't pretendin'.

Codes and Modes Summary

On November 8th, I attended a panel entitled "Building Documentary Cultures With Urban Youth and Their Communities in Neoliberal Times" at the Codes and Modes conference. The panel featured three speakers: Steve Goodman of the Educational Video Center,  Prof. Lora Taub-Pervizpour, and Prof. Nitin Sawhney. Over the course of the panel, each speaker discussed the creative resilience of documentary filmmaking and how it empowers youth as agents of social change.

Steve Goodman explained the documentary culture at the EVC and its methods of teaching counter narrative and bearing witness to social injustices. The goal of the EVC is to inspire counter-culture communities of practice through the solidarity of documentary filmmaking. Over his many years as founder and director of this organization, he has seen the value of youth media in raising awareness for the poverty-stricken communities of New York City. 

Professor Taub-Pervizpour discussed her role in the HYPE program in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Not only does this program teach these children basic technological skills in media and documentary filmmaking, but it connects the underprivileged youth to a possible future in this career and area of study. She also criticized Neoliberalism for the recent domination of coding, gaming, and app development in government-funded after school activities rather than media integration education. Emphasizing that "there's nothing revolutionary in creating a next generation of coders that capitalism rewards," she closed with the necessity of helping learners invent and enact possible selves through digital media making.

Professor Sawhney concluded the panel with a discussion about his work with community youth groups in Gaza and how basic documentary making and journalism skills positively affected the children. He showed a clip from his full-length documentary called Flying Paper, which cross-cut stories of children growing up in war-torn Gaza with them making and flying kites for a festival to show solidarity amongst the youth community. The documentary was made with six production units of the children trained through the programs Sawhney created.

The Rabbit Hole - An Interview with Chad Stonehocker