Blog Post #4: MOMI

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.