Saturday, January 30, 2010

Synesthesia

So Synesthesia is when the brain mixes up visual, sound and taste, as in someone watches colors when listening to music? Well, who needs acid with a condition like that?! I think that so cool and if I had it I would save so much money, just kidding. But I can see how this ability would give painter and other visual artisans an edge considering that they would be surrounded by their art form of choice (color from music, color in grapheme, etc) and it would provide an unless supple of inspiration.
People with grapheme to color synesthesia, I can imagine how much color their lives contain in a day to day basis. Imagine opening a text book or newspaper and finds a rich display of color, which would give a whole new meaning to the idea of picture book. I guess they would be the only people who could see any real artistic relevance in Stephenie Meyer's writings. As for people with music to color synesthesia, every song is a fireworks show, a plethora of colors and movements in perfect rhythm with every song on their ipod play list, I don’t think there is an app for that. The only down side to this would be having to sit through an amateurish attempt to match dull spotted color ejaculations with cliché music from the 80s and 90s every Fourth of July.
The medium to most accurately show how a person with Synesthesia experiences music would be film. Over painting, which is a singular frame representing a single note is belittled in comparison to the shifting composed quality of a film’s voice. So I guess that’s what my goal should be in this class, to match music to color to inspire a since of wonder and astonishment to the audience. I found it especially innovated that Marcia Smilack uses her Synesthesia to capture memorable photographs. That she relies on her Synesthesia over her own ability to perceive beauty to express herself through her art. I wonder if this same notion could be applied to cinematography with narrative films? Her motto, beauty is lurking, is quite the quintessential goal of photographers, who “takes” a photo. This is in contras to cinematography, where the idea is to “make” a photo. So a motto as deep and catchy as, beauty is lurking, should be taken with a grain of salt.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

"To The Beat" Reflection

Today I sat down in my one and only class of the day, 6-by-1: Variations on the one-minute film. A class I was looking forward to as a fun easy production class that would require little to none mind-crunching studying. This assumption about avoiding mind crunching work was only half right. The first film we watched “To The Beat” by the Scratch Film Junkies was a major mental crunch. At first it was weird and confusing, an uneven collide of a non-repeating randomized music notes, which seem to come from a rag tag street band and an assortment of lights and darks colors. I instantly enjoyed the deep saturation of the colors but its over all effect left me asking “why”, as in why did the film maker make this queer film? Questions like why should we watch this slowly became clear about half way through the film. I got into the bet of the music, its smooth catchy melody. This in turn got me interested in the picture. The almost Mickey mouseing between the different musical interments and it parallel symbolic scratches became intriguing and amusing. Its musical order through chaos of nondescript colors and lines gave me inspiration for my first project assigned in the class. Its one im looking forward to however, I can already tell that the hardest part of this class will be these Blogs, I come to this conclusion by the mere face that they are to be around four hundred words in lengths and I have already said everything I could say about the first film and im only at 270 words. Thinking back to previous film of this nature, I recall watching one called Black Ice. This film played with different saturations of blues and blacks colors giving it a dark dream-like feel, while watching it I felt like I was watching the inner workings of water mix with gravel and other road oils being frozen simultaneously at different stages. It had a chilling effect. This brings me back to “to the beat” film, in some ways the street band jam session mix with images and colors work on a shallow level but if the music wasn’t driving this piece of art then the mind would. With the mind odds are the viewer could find a deeper meaning of the own from the film. Look I reached 400 words, maybe I was wrong about it being the hardest part of this class.