War Stencil

From way back when.
I guess I never put up my stencil photos so here they are –

Fooling Around

with Green Screening and Video Compositing. Lauren and I shoot a well-considered fake punch.

Art You Can Play With

Exploring Kinetic Sculpture for 3D Media Studio – Table Football in Water (Wood, Plexiglas, Water, Ping-Pong Ball).

Through this week-long project we wanted to create an interactive dynamic between the sculpture and the viewer. We immersed the structure in water and introduced a ping pong ball into the “playing field”. Et voila, you have a fluid game of table football. Players can grab onto alternate wooden paddles and use the pressure of water to move the ball over the water surface and score goals! Some interesting aesthetics come across through the materials in use. By a happy accident, my teammate bought foggy plexiglas instead of clear, and it created an interesting in-focus/out-of-focus dynamic in the gameplay. When the wooden paddles are close to the surface of the plexiglas they are clearly visible but as you plunge the paddle into the water, it moves out of focus. But then, as the water from inside the structure splashes against plexiglas, all of a sudden you have little pearls of water settled against the back of the glass, creating a scattered vision that lets you peep into the game.

Fortune

Or lack thereof.

Dinner at Orient Express. Fortune Cookie #1 – no fortune. My friend that I was at dinner with is thoughtful to grab another one for me on the way out after we pay our bill. I say this out loud – “Oh it would be really funny if this one was missing one too”. Haha guess what?

My life is so amusing sometimes. I love it.

Final Project Proposal

Just some brainstorming –

Idea 1:

Some kind of bittersweet – scrabble emotions, letting someone in, walls around yourself, wordplay,
Decisions – flashback?, dialogue/no dialogue, video composition and/or animation?, happy ending/bittersweet?

Stop-Motion Magic!

All you need is –

1. Long-lasting camera batteries.
2. Residents in Mudge who don’t mind having their living space being stolen for the night.
3. To not be clumsy with yourself (“I don’t know what to do with myself”..woahh did this tripod just move?) around the camera.
4. Friendly souls in the cluster who help you when Final Cut won’t cooperate.
5. Just a little patience (that Rachel had a lot of, 500 photos? whatttt. phew!)

There’s definitely flaws, maybe even big ones, but we loved the idea of putting the video and sound to this stop motion together so much!
Some things I really like – the light flickering, the audio-video syncing! oh my god, the syncing! the reversed clip at the end.
Here’s what I’d make better if we were to shoot this all over again – use the same camera to avoid changes in perspective and coloration, and probably put more thought into framing the table.

Hope you enjoy watching the magic just as much as we enjoyed making it!

Two Oh One Oh

Seniors 2010.

Photo Credit: Jessica Winn (My Freshman Year RA)

Time to bring out the unfinished lists and the unchecked boxes.

Nostalgic about Indian Television

TV soaps are the same everywhere – Bold and Beautiful, or “Kyunki Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi”, or Korean drama – it’s the same track playing over and over. I wasn’t into soap operas much while growing up, other than the occasional, alright-grandma-I’ll-watch-Tulsi-be-the-forgiving-housewife-whose-undying-loyalty-to-her-husband-after-he-cheats-on-her-twice-is-sickening-with-you-over-dinner. If at all I associated with anything on television, it was Roswell on Thursday nights, or Bewitched, or Grey’s Anatomy (I guess that kind of qualifies as a soap). And if nothing else was on, we were the MTV kids.

So what do I miss about Indian television? Quite anticlimactically, it’s the advertising. At the risk of sounding almost evangelical about this, here goes –

Airtel, the number one cellphone provider in the country has had a track record with phenomenal ad campaigns targeting the TV viewers, with A.R.Rehman (of Slumdog fame) doing their music compositions and what not. In the cellular network rivalry that ensued, Hutch  and Vodafone did just as well in playing that field to excellent potential. If you grew up in the 90s you knew that Preity Zinta got her break through that Cadbury Perk commercial. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Frooti, heck even Maggi, did some pretty fantastic television marketing.

I could go on but here’s this recent ad commerical from Orange Rewind TV that got me thinking –

Okay, and here’s a few more –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Kyb7U_djUk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slpElBClGy8