Monday, May 14, 2012
Thursday, April 14, 2011
The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz
On Tuesday April 12th I had the pleasure of joining my lil' CreComm buddies at the Rachel Browne Theatre for a play written by a former CreComm instructor, Armin Wiebe. The play is called "The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz."
The story focuses on a young Mennonite couple who live on a farm and are trying to start a family. They had been married for two years and were not yet fortunate enough to have a child. The man of the house comes across an old detuned piano and brings it home. Shortly thereafter a visitor shows up, a pianist from Russia, who ends up staying with the couple.
The pianist ends up tuning the piano by pulling dead animals and feathers (I call bull-sh#%,) out from the casing where the strings are, and starts to play an excerpt from the Moonlight Sonata over and over again. This beautiful song starts to woo the lady of the house, and eventually she has an affair with the pianist during a night when her husband is stuck in town due to a snowstorm.
Of course the woman loves her husband, but she wants a baby pretty badly, hence the affair.
Being Mennonite myself and having come from a family where my sister, my parents, some cousins and aunts and uncles talk with Mennonite accents, I am quite familiar with how the accent should sound. But there is a difference in the accent depending on where in Manitoba a Mennonite comes from. Back home in Steinbach we would say the people that had accents like the female lead in the play had were from "yant seid," or, the other side. This basically meant that these people were from Altona, Morden, and Winkler. Their accents were always thicker and more pronounced than ours.
The male lead character's accent was poorly done in my opinion. He kept dropping words, and sounded Scottish or Irish to me sometimes. I found that the female lead had a good handle on the yant seid accent, although at times it seemed overdone. It's hard to fault these actors, the accent is very challenging to pull off - I can't even do it that well. But I did find the bad accent moments hard to take after awhile.
I found the dialogue to be spot on as far as typical Mennonite conversations go. When the characters inserted things like nai-yo or oba-yo into their sentences, I was taken back to conversations with my grandmother. I thought the dialogue was very authentic Mennonite.
I myself was drawn to the lighting in the theatre. The set was fantastic, and old log cabin style house with a straw roof. I loved how a light shone through the rear window and the darker blue lights that shone outside the house stage right. With my interests in film continuing to grow more and more, I have been spending a lot of my time looking at lighting when I watch a play or a movie or whatever.
In the artist talkback, I was surprised that Mr. Wiebe was not more well spoken. I mean, he was an instructor here at the college. Maybe he was nervous, not sure. But he should be happy, the show was packed on Tuesday and I heard that they added an extra show.
That's success baby!
j
The story focuses on a young Mennonite couple who live on a farm and are trying to start a family. They had been married for two years and were not yet fortunate enough to have a child. The man of the house comes across an old detuned piano and brings it home. Shortly thereafter a visitor shows up, a pianist from Russia, who ends up staying with the couple.
The pianist ends up tuning the piano by pulling dead animals and feathers (I call bull-sh#%,) out from the casing where the strings are, and starts to play an excerpt from the Moonlight Sonata over and over again. This beautiful song starts to woo the lady of the house, and eventually she has an affair with the pianist during a night when her husband is stuck in town due to a snowstorm.
Of course the woman loves her husband, but she wants a baby pretty badly, hence the affair.
Being Mennonite myself and having come from a family where my sister, my parents, some cousins and aunts and uncles talk with Mennonite accents, I am quite familiar with how the accent should sound. But there is a difference in the accent depending on where in Manitoba a Mennonite comes from. Back home in Steinbach we would say the people that had accents like the female lead in the play had were from "yant seid," or, the other side. This basically meant that these people were from Altona, Morden, and Winkler. Their accents were always thicker and more pronounced than ours.
The male lead character's accent was poorly done in my opinion. He kept dropping words, and sounded Scottish or Irish to me sometimes. I found that the female lead had a good handle on the yant seid accent, although at times it seemed overdone. It's hard to fault these actors, the accent is very challenging to pull off - I can't even do it that well. But I did find the bad accent moments hard to take after awhile.
I found the dialogue to be spot on as far as typical Mennonite conversations go. When the characters inserted things like nai-yo or oba-yo into their sentences, I was taken back to conversations with my grandmother. I thought the dialogue was very authentic Mennonite.
I myself was drawn to the lighting in the theatre. The set was fantastic, and old log cabin style house with a straw roof. I loved how a light shone through the rear window and the darker blue lights that shone outside the house stage right. With my interests in film continuing to grow more and more, I have been spending a lot of my time looking at lighting when I watch a play or a movie or whatever.
In the artist talkback, I was surprised that Mr. Wiebe was not more well spoken. I mean, he was an instructor here at the college. Maybe he was nervous, not sure. But he should be happy, the show was packed on Tuesday and I heard that they added an extra show.
That's success baby!
j
Saturday, April 9, 2011
You can't polish a turd!
After roughly 40 hours of editing, and three nights this week where I stayed up working until 4am, I finally completed my short film - montage assignment for school. I am so grateful for all the help I received from the actors: Andrew Parker, Mike Tanasychuk, Thomas Asselin, Veronica Neufeld, Alex Rohne, Ian Mikita, Bruce Berven, and Tim "Scratch" Friesen. I also want to give a shout out to Chris Gaudry and Robert Zirk for the Final Cut Pro editing tips that they gave me.
I learned a lot throughout the creation of this project, but the biggest thing was lighting. Obviously you'll see when you watch the video that some scenes are a little too bright, and some a little to dark. I had to trash a bunch of footage because it just didn't turn out the way I had hoped. But that's how we learn.
Although I played around with some filters which I will explain below, if the footage is no good, any amount of tweaking with filters and color balancing just can't polish a turd. You have to start getting great footage right from stage one for it to look really good. So watch your lighting and make sure the Iris is set just right on the camera. If you are shooting at school, pause for a bit and quickly check how the footage looks in an editing suite and then keep shooting knowing that it looks the way you want it to.
In the opening scene when you see Andrew Parker addressing the nations on tv, I used a filter called Bloom to create the effect of creepiness and to take down some of the bright light that shone off of his silver head. I used this effect later in the film during the marionette scene.
In the scenes where the men in black chase Veronica to her apartment, I used an effect called Relief to give the scenes an almost painted brush-stroke look. I tried to stick to themes when I used filters, as I was very concerned about over-doing it.
In the scene where Veronica gets arrested with the mask, the filter that made everything shiny was called Light Rays. I used this filter as my theme whenever someone got arrested or the masks were present and/or worn.
In the scenes where Veronica was writhing with the mask, I copied the clip twice, stacked them on top of each other, and shifted two of them slightly off centre from each other. Then I dropped the Opacity on the top two clips so the bottom third stood out. I had a lot of fun with Opacity actually, maybe a little too much fun!
I had a really tough time matching the interior of the mad scientists house to the exterior where Ian walks up to the door. It was filmed during the afternoon and I had my biggest issues with lighting. I used the RGB color balance filter to match the blue hue between the interior and exterior.
My favourite effect was Dazzle, which is what I used in the scenes with the mad scientist. All these neat little stars just showed up on the wall behind the actors in that shot. This filter takes reflected light and gives it a really cool sparkle.
The last few scenes where Andrew starts morphing from silver to white involve using Earthquake, Bad Film and Bad TV. The very last scene I added Solarize to the mix. Basically a cocktail of ridiculousness.
As far as all the effects go, I believe that covers it. If anyone has any questions just lemme know and I'd be happy to help out. Until then, click the link below to enjoy my short film!
j
I learned a lot throughout the creation of this project, but the biggest thing was lighting. Obviously you'll see when you watch the video that some scenes are a little too bright, and some a little to dark. I had to trash a bunch of footage because it just didn't turn out the way I had hoped. But that's how we learn.
Although I played around with some filters which I will explain below, if the footage is no good, any amount of tweaking with filters and color balancing just can't polish a turd. You have to start getting great footage right from stage one for it to look really good. So watch your lighting and make sure the Iris is set just right on the camera. If you are shooting at school, pause for a bit and quickly check how the footage looks in an editing suite and then keep shooting knowing that it looks the way you want it to.
In the opening scene when you see Andrew Parker addressing the nations on tv, I used a filter called Bloom to create the effect of creepiness and to take down some of the bright light that shone off of his silver head. I used this effect later in the film during the marionette scene.
In the scenes where the men in black chase Veronica to her apartment, I used an effect called Relief to give the scenes an almost painted brush-stroke look. I tried to stick to themes when I used filters, as I was very concerned about over-doing it.
In the scene where Veronica gets arrested with the mask, the filter that made everything shiny was called Light Rays. I used this filter as my theme whenever someone got arrested or the masks were present and/or worn.
In the scenes where Veronica was writhing with the mask, I copied the clip twice, stacked them on top of each other, and shifted two of them slightly off centre from each other. Then I dropped the Opacity on the top two clips so the bottom third stood out. I had a lot of fun with Opacity actually, maybe a little too much fun!
I had a really tough time matching the interior of the mad scientists house to the exterior where Ian walks up to the door. It was filmed during the afternoon and I had my biggest issues with lighting. I used the RGB color balance filter to match the blue hue between the interior and exterior.
My favourite effect was Dazzle, which is what I used in the scenes with the mad scientist. All these neat little stars just showed up on the wall behind the actors in that shot. This filter takes reflected light and gives it a really cool sparkle.
The last few scenes where Andrew starts morphing from silver to white involve using Earthquake, Bad Film and Bad TV. The very last scene I added Solarize to the mix. Basically a cocktail of ridiculousness.
As far as all the effects go, I believe that covers it. If anyone has any questions just lemme know and I'd be happy to help out. Until then, click the link below to enjoy my short film!
j
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Live at 5
So today is the last live at 5. I want to give a shout out to all the Broadcast J students who have worked so hard this semester on that show. It is sad to see the end of an era like this, but on to new horizons.
Best wishes to all.
j
Best wishes to all.
j
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
The home stretch
Now that the magazine project has been completed, I can breathe a sigh of relief. The amount of time it took to put everything together is staggering. Thankfully I worked with a solid group, where everyone busted their buns to make our magazine very professional looking. It will be interesting to hear what people say at the magazine trade fair next Thursday.
There are a few major assignments left, one of which is my montage. I have shot about 300 clips of material, and so far it is looking really good. By the end of this week I anticipate that I'll have all the material that I need. The home stretch is within reach!
j
There are a few major assignments left, one of which is my montage. I have shot about 300 clips of material, and so far it is looking really good. By the end of this week I anticipate that I'll have all the material that I need. The home stretch is within reach!
j
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Off to Riding Mountain
For an assignment in school, I am required to go on a trip somewhere in either Manitoba, Saskatchewan or even Ontario. My group chose Riding Mountain. It should be a great time, a chance to get to know some of my fellow students a little bit better. I am bringing my guitar along for some campfire sing-alongs. It's gonna be a great time. Hopefully I'll learn something new about Riding Mountain.
woohooo!
j
woohooo!
j
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Twitter vs. Facebook
Although I try to get on Twitter as much as possible, the reality is that I don't use it that much. Facebook is certainly something that I use more frequently, but in terms of my schedule with school and music, I just don't have time to spend communicating through these mediums. When I do find a moment here or there, I use Twitter to hopefully inspire people, I use Facebook to catch up with friends and promote my various musical activities. I notice that a lot of my friends use each medium in a similar manner. My sister uses Facebook to update everyone on what her kids did that day.
When it comes to people I befriend on Facebook, or follow on Twitter, I'll never know how much spam I get from them until I have signed up. If I find that I get spammed too much with useless info, I will unfriend or unfollow them.
Once I have completed school and have more time on my hands, I plan to use Twitter more as I believe it can be a powerful tool to inspire. I'd like to start yweeting song lyrics, I think that would be neat.
Cheerio,
j
When it comes to people I befriend on Facebook, or follow on Twitter, I'll never know how much spam I get from them until I have signed up. If I find that I get spammed too much with useless info, I will unfriend or unfollow them.
Once I have completed school and have more time on my hands, I plan to use Twitter more as I believe it can be a powerful tool to inspire. I'd like to start yweeting song lyrics, I think that would be neat.
Cheerio,
j
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