Miss Representation

As a feminist, I'm always excited to be able to view media that focuses on girl power. Recently, I watched the documentary Miss Representation, which first aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2011.

The documentary is about how women are perceived in the media. It touches base on all types of female figures, such as politicians, actresses, reality television stars, and even fictional characters.

What I really enjoyed about this documentary was that the story was told from a diverse group of people. As I began the movie, I expected to hear mainly from adult women about the events they experienced as a woman. However, the first few minutes of the film show high school girls sharing their stories. The entire film was full of women of all different ages, and included strong female figures such as Katie Couric, Geena Davis, and Margret Cho. And further, we got to hear anecdotes from men as well. Many times, people who claim to be feminists turn to bashing men, rather than focusing on the issues at hand, so I was happy to be able to see multiple perspectives in this documentary.

The diverse group of people led to a great amount of information being passed on to viewers. The movie analyzes subjects such as the disrespectful way that female politicians like Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are treated in the media. Or how female characters are often written poorly, and are made to have no other purpose than to have their lives revolve around a boy.

The technical aspects of the movie were great.The film makers were able to get interesting people to be the subjects of their film, and they asked very meaningful questions which resulted in great pieces of audio from the people they interviewed, and they put it all together in a way that told a great story. There were multiple parts of the movie that included a montage of occurrences in the media which negatively depict women, which I think was edited in a great way that really got through to viewers and left a lasting impression.

If you are looking for a good movie about female empowerment, Miss Representation is for you. It is very informative and thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it to those who enjoy documentaries or are passionate about the women's rights movement.

North By Northwest

Recently, I watched the film North By Northwest with my film class. The film is about a man who is mistaken for a government agent, and is chased by a group of spies.

This film was made in 1959, and considering the time period it was produced in, it is a good movie. However, in present day, there are multiple things that could have been improved. One thing I noticed a lot was the sound. There were many scenes lacking foley, or only had about half of the foley noises that they needed. However, they never failed to add in a very dramatic, over the top noise every time some was punched in the face. Which was quite often.

Another element that could've been changed was they way they shot the scene where the two main characters, Roger and Eve, climb down Mount Rushmore. This scene was supposed to be very dramatic, but the way that it was shot and edited made it seem very slow. Most of the shots were either wide or medium, and the shots were extremely long. To give the scene more fast paced and action-packed, one simple thing to change would be to switch shots quickly, and have a wider variety of shots, including more close ups or moving shots.

Overall, I thought the movie was good for it's time. However, nowadays there are a lot of improvements needed. While watching, I found myself spending most of the movie just pointing out things that I would change.

"North by Northwest." IMDb. IMDb.com, n.d. Web. 29 Apr. 2015.

Discover Your Strengths

Like most jobs, filmmaking requires a lot of collaboration with others. Obviously, everyone has different talents and personalities, which is something you need to understand about a person when working with them. In order to better understand the personalities of ourselves and our peers, my e-Communications class took personality tests.

The first one we took was the Meyers-Briggs test, where personalities are composed by a four-letter code. My test results were ISTJ, meaning that I am introverted, sensing, thinking, and judging.

The second test, which we focused on the most, was the Gallup Strengths Test. This test gives you your five most dominant strengths in your personality. My five strengths were:

Adaptability: People with this trait prefer to go with the flow, and live in the moment. They discover the future one day at a time, and feel that their future is created from their present choices.

Connectedness: Those with the connectedness trait believe in the links among all things, and that everything has a meaning. They believe that everyone is part of something larger than themselves.

Consistency: People with the consistency trait believe in treating everyone equally.

Developer: Those with the developer trait see potential in others, and believe in praising them for their successes and progress.

Intellection: Those in this category are characterized by their intellectual activity, and enjoy having smart, intellectual discussions.

Each of these traits also belong to one of four domains. Mine included:

Relationship Building: Adaptability, Connectedness, Developer.
Executing: Consistency.
Strategic Thinking: Intellection.

After taking these tests, we had a speaker come in to talk about our results. One thing I liked about her presentation was her explanation of how opposite traits work well together. She explained that when you work with someone with different traits than you have, you can help balance each other out by bringing different strengths to the group.

One thing I also found interesting is that everyone in my department for the short film is dominant in the same domain, which is Relationship Building. Although the opposite traits do attract, my department has got all great so far. One thing we might need to work on though, is incorporating
 traits from other domains to balance out our team.

Documentarians

In the upcoming short film for my e-Communications class, I have the role of documentarian. My job is to document events in the form of pictures, videos, and writing, and to make sure all of this media is stored and organized properly. To learn more about my job, I read and article on No Film School, called "A Comprehensive List of the Top Tools in Documentary Filmmaking."  The article describes the type of equipment that is best for documentary film making. The article talks about how difficult it can be to decide on which type of equipment to buy, especially when you are on a low budget. When you don't have much money, you can't exactly try out a lot of different types of cameras. The article explains that there was a survey performed on many documentarians, asking them what kind of equipment the preferred. Many said that they liked DSLRs and Canon C300s because of their size and portability, as well as the quality of the footage they shoot. They also liked MKH 416 microphones.

I thought that the article was very helpful and informative. While providing the written information, the article also included an info graphic about equipment, including information on lenses, audio tools, tripods, and editing equipment.

Seasonal Music Video

The assignment for this video was to create a short, 90 second music video, which went with the theme of the winter holidays.

My original partner and I had a plan to create a music video to Little Saint Nick by The Beach Boys, where we show the office ladies decorating for the holidays. At first, the women in the office agreed, but whenever we had time to film, the office was extremely busy, and they had to time to film with us. In top of that, my partner was sick and missed school for a few days. Because of this, I had to switch partners. We didn't have much time left to make a great video, so we improvised quickly, and this was the result.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av31d5xBQog&feature=youtu.be

Roller Derby Montage

A good friend of mine is on a roller derby team. She is a filmmaker as well, and recently, her coach asked her to make a promo video for their team. Shortly after that, we were assigned to make a montage video for our film class. She asked me to help her film the video, and to kill two birds with one stone, we decided to mix the two projects and make the promo video a montage.

Codecs

What exactly are codecs? They can get pretty complex and confusing. Although they can get very in depth, all wee really need is a basic understanding of them. 

Codec is an acronym for compressor, decompressor. Come codecs are licensed and others are not, which is why computers can only have certain codecs. Lots of people get codecs confused with containers. Containers are types of files, and codecs go inside them. There are different types of codecs for different purposes. Capture codecs is what the camera records. Edit codecs take the capture codecs and turn them into something to edit. Delivery codes are the files you put online or give to clients, and Archival codecs are copies of your finished projects.