Deep Listening

As for my deep listening exercise, I decided to just sit at the kitchen counter late at night after everyone was asleep.  There were a few sounds that were constant such as a fan in the upper rooms and the clock in the kitchen.  In the kitchen sounds were created mostly from the fridge.  It rumbled once at a low pitch with about a medium amplitude.  It did snap on, with a loud thud and proceeded to hum at a low pitch for the rest of the session.  I could also hear noises from the basement like the furnace that consisted of low amp and low pitch rumbles.  There were also several low amp, high pitch beeps that lasted for about a second that probably originated from the softener.  Other sounds were low pitch, low amp rumbles from the house due to wind or just noises that originate from the house settling.  These usually took the form of snaps though.  They came from the walls, the doors, and a few from the outside.  Overall, most of the sounds did not overlap aside from rumbles or sounds that were constant throughout the session.  The beeps seemed to go off every minute or two so time could be followed.  The sounds usually carried associations with machines, nature, or wood.  Finally, the mood of the house was just the quiet of the night creating a peaceful mood with random interruptions breaking through the stillness.

Stop Motion Project

The piece, I called "Kitchen Kick Out!", was constructed using myself as a living model and the kitchen.  The pictures were taken on a tri-pod that was moved for the various different scenes in order to show the illusion of motion in the scenes.  The scenes were also not taken in the exact order and thus, were reordered in Bridge.  The title and ending were shot last on a separate day and thus do not exactly follow the continuity.  The frame rate was set to 10 fps, due to the fact that I could not set it to 12 properly in the program I use at home.  At 12 fps it would have been ended at a little over 31 seconds so I still would have fit the requirements.  Other challenges I faced was with the brightness and flash.  My house even with the lights on is dark so flash was needed in order to light the room.  There was no problem when shooting the intro, but the other scenes had different brightness levels or the coloring was off so the light seems to flash in a few of the frames.  I tried to fix it in photoshop, but I had to eyeball each picture because each required a different editing.  I did try changing the video to black and white to see if it reduced the light flashes, but it did not work and I left it as is.

The conflict in the video is the Kitchen versus me.  The kitchen is given a life of its own and it does not like people trying to take food out of it.  So in order to defend itself it smacks me around a bit and ultimately out of the kitchen.  The kitchen resolves the conflict by the pan to the face at the end as its final act of defiance.  There are various meanings that could be taken from this.  An example meaning could be a creative way to diet where the kitchen forces you to stay out so you do not get any extra food.

story boards

practice stop motion

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