I went to the Museum of the Moving Image on April 25th with my sister while the museum was mostly empty due to special holiday hours. The top floor of exhibits was hands on (though geared towards a younger crowd), allowing visitors to create flipbook animations, make short stop motion films, experience the tedious ADR process, and experiment with foley sound. My personal favorite “hands on” experience was the zoetrope when one first enters the floor, that being the first time I had ever seen and played with one in real life rather than looking at a picture of it in a textbook. I also thoroughly enjoyed the sound dubbing station. At first we had tried to make a serious attempt at saying the lines with the actor/actress, but it was so tedious we resorted to giving Dorothy a heavy Jersey accent and changing the subject of her line to something a little less PG. I could only imagine the hours actors have to spend to dub their lines and have it match perfectly.
The floor below was full of posters and portraits, masks, prosthetics, memorabilia, and scaled down sets. My personal favorite was the set for Anomalisa, a 2015 stop motion film. The museum has on display a street set they had used for one short scene, but up close the amount of detail and labor put into it astounded me – down to the puddles painted onto the street that truly made it look like real water. The prosthetics had an impact on me as well as I had never really noticed when an actor might be wearing an entirely fake nose, chin, etc, which speaks to how little the audience notices what goes into a film or TV show.
I watched “Reflections” (2012) directed by Max Lamonte, a 2 and a half minute long film hosted on Youtube. This film is driven by sound, primarily a heart beating, stilting low tones, and piercing high tones. The music drives the action, the character first reacting to the sound of knives and creaking doors, but at some points reacts to the crescendo of the music as if it exists within his world. The music also seems to drive the cuts, most notably in the beginning of the film. When the music pauses, the shot ends and a new one begins with the music starting up again. This isn't universal across the length of the film – many times the music's phrasing will encompass two or three shots.
In addition to driving the pacing, the music seems to get louder during the darker shots and then lightens up again with just a heart beating (similar to the beginning of the film) nearing the end when the character comes back to the lit living room. At the end, the final piercing note is heard as the knife is lifted and the camera follows, pointing towards the shadowed ceiling.
The shots themselves are all similar in quality – warm tones, soft and minimal lighting. Through the suspense, the shots gradually grow dimmer and then slowly lighten up again at the end – no shot seems too lit, too dark, or out of place because we are slowly guided through the cyclical lighting structure until the end. The shots in relation to each other are highly responsive – guy on laptop, we see what he's typing, back to previous shot of him on the couch – reaction shot to knife sound. The film as a whole is traditionally structured without much risk being taken in editing.
