Month: November 2022

Film: Parasite

Scene: The plan to get rid of the old housekeeper 

Scene link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfnUxezKcu0

 

Project Reflection 

The memory that I have chosen for the assignment is when I was a kid hearing my dad cooking for me after coming back from school. This cooking routine was a large part of my youth memory because when I was younger, I’ve always never thought about how much effort and to work it is to cook different dishes every day, especially when cooking Chinese-style dishes. For the sound file that I submitted, I focused on the actual sounds of the memory in order to straightforwardly convey what’s happening to the audience. I planned for my soundscape to show solitude, growth, and adulthood responsibility. However, for the resubmission, I plan to focus more on the feeling aspect of my father, showing the rushing movements and his mood being in a hurry. 

When collecting sounds for this project, I experimented with creating different sounds that I hear when people cook, including footsteps, ventilation, chopping, slicing, cutting, water dripping, putting plates on the table, and finally opening the door to wait for me to come back from school. When recreating these sounds, brings me back to my childhood when my family would cook for me every day, unlike now in college where I learned how to cook for ourselves. For most of the sounds, I placed the Tascam recorder at a fixed spot close to where I created the sounds. Overall, the only problem I encountered was the sounds being too light the first time I recorded them, I then turned up the volume on the side of the recorder and retried recording, but it was too loud. So I had to readjust to find a fitting volume level for my sounds when editing them in Audition.

As for my editing process, I wasn’t sure what effects exactly I should add to convey a mundane and mature feeling. As previously mentioned, I adjusted the DB level for my sound clips because some were extra loud while some were very light sounds. I amplified them a bit and I also played around with panning and only heard some sounds on the left and some sounds on the right to create a more realistic kitchen environment. I also changed some sounds’ volumes to gradually increase but it didn’t show up well in the final soundscape clip.  Some learnings I have after editing on Audition would be to explore combining the sounds instead of putting most sounds in sequence, with one after another. 

If I had more time, I would improve my project’s sounds to be more surprising to the audience and less obvious. By this I mean to add more surprises and keep the audience engaged because my clip was edited to be in a very sequential manner and the audience could guess what the next sound would be. This doesn’t very much convey a feeling to the audience. On the presentation day, I received feedback as the sound was too realistic and there wasn’t much anticipation of wanting to know what was happening from the sound clip. I agree with this comment and I will note this when I re-edit the sounds as I plan to play around with merging them and as well as adding repetitions of sounds to make it more interesting to the audience.

My work in Adobe Audition:

Response

The significance of authenticity and representation of the media that I consume on a daily basis plays a big role in shaping my view of the world and following up with what’s happening. Consuming what is true is something that I prefer rather than trusting what might have been made up of, where the source is unreliable. This reading said about how sometimes documentary forms create false intimacy and even false presence, so media like this will lead people into building wrong knowledge caused by misinformation. 

 

The role of a live broadcast would be to provide a moving and lively image media source that tells truth to the audience and allows the audience to imagine in their head something that they might not be able to imagine through a still photograph. 

 

Photo Diptych Project Ideation & Reflection

My original concept for my diptych is to take pictures of anything that reveals uniformity, whether it’s the same patterns or same character movements. The photoshopped image would consist of adding unexpected color combinations to objects that don’t usually go together. After taking pictures and putting them together onto the contact sheet, I decided to change my concept for the diptych to create mystery and peek into the past of one’s life in a cinematic style. For my first photo in the diptych, I selected a photo of someone quickly passing by an old fashioned telephone booth. For the photoshopped image, I used a close-up photo of the telephone stand and added photos I took of an old couple walking and a young couple holding hands. These two paired images relate to one another as the telephone booth symbolizes the passing of an era and how it’s almost eliminated by today’s society because nowadays people use smartphones and rarely use telephone booths. However, in the old people’s youth, these telephone stands were commonly used. In a way, the telephone stand symbolizes looking back at the time that has passed.

In staging and photographing part I, I looked around the streets of Shanghai of objects that represent uniformity and have history behind it. While walking on the streets in Puxi, I came across these telephone stands that people always pass by and its colors caught my eyes. I took photos of it from different distances and angles, with people and without people. The final photo I picked for the project only shows a partial view of the telephone booth in the composition and the overall color is very muted to portray a cinematic effect:

In creating the part II image, I really want to work around this close-up photo of the telephone stand because I see possibilities in masking the center screen display to reflect the 20th century Shanghai street scenes. I realized that this may be too simple and I want my photoshopped image to have more layers. I thought that perhaps I can incorporate a photo of couples walking into their past, that’s shown on the telephone screen display. So, I first added masking to the telephone screen display and changed it to displaying a young couple holding hands:

Then I merged that photo with a photo I took of an old couple passing the crosswalk holding hands. I also changed the colors of the crossings to yellow so it matches with the color on the telephone stand and creates an effect that they are walking into the world inside the telephone stand:

During the process of creating the diptych, the most significant steps I have taken would be choosing a photo to work with from my contact sheet. There are many shots from my contact sheet that I like and there are many different ideas and possibilities I have in mind for each of them. What led me in picking my final selection for the Part I photo is because it best matches the themes of a diptych, which is that one photo cannot be completely understood without the other and I feel that this image best represents the mysterious vibe I was pursuing with the telephone booth. I also really liked the close-up photo of the booth because of how perfectly the patterns and grids are symmetrical and it’s really giving off Wes Anderson style. So I decided that I have to use this in the second part of the diptych for sure.

If I have more time, I would improve on fixing some details in the photoshopped photo and making it more creative instead of simply masking, but also explore more effects and make it more “photoshopped”!

Contact sheet:

 

Diptych:

         

 

The piece of memory that I decided to pick for the memory soundscape project is a casual day in my life during my third-grade summer break. This part of my memory represents a large chunk of my childhood memory of me actively having fun with my friends downstairs of my home within the compound while my family cooks dinner in our home. The relevant sounds found in this memory are the wind chime hanging by the balcony window, children’s noises such as shouts and laughter, noises from biking, the wind blowing on trees and plants in the compound, cooking/splashing water bubble sound, opening door and closing door sound, and footstep sound within the home. This is what represents a casual afternoon/evening when I was younger and the idea behind this memory is a stress-free child enjoying her time as a kid. The sounds all come together to express indoor and outdoor movements.