The Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image was extremely interesting and entertaining for me. I went with my two friends, and we were genuinely (pleasantly) surprised by the variety of different exhibits and sections of the museum. For some reason I thought it would be just about movies, and artifacts from movies, and while that isn't all it was at all, I ended up really loving the Jim Henson exhibit the most. I didn't even know who Jim Henson was before entering the museum, but my friends filled my in and I became really interested. It didn't only show his most popular and known work (Sesame Street, etc.) but also many other interesting artifacts, such as advertisements he made a long time ago in the 60's, early sketches and paintings and drawings. I love seeing the work of one artist over a span of time - how their works progress and change, especially from early on to later in life - it's very interesting to me to see that change and the growth of the artist. I also think its really interesting to see pieces of an artist's life that weren't really meant to be shown, or works that were in the 'process' but never finished - such as notes and storyboards and random doodling. My friends really liked the sound room, as did I, though we couldn't stay too long I would definitely go back for a more in depth experience. I enjoyed the time I spent there a lot.

Review

I really enjoyed this class - it's probably one of my favorite classes I've taken at Hunter! Some of the reasons I liked it were first of all, the teachers. I also particularly liked working in groups. Usually when a teacher says that the class will have to work in groups I get nervous or uncomfortable and shy, but since this media class (and being in the media field, in general) is all about teamwork, it felt very natural and comfortable and effortless, collaborating and working with other people who had the same ideas, or even conflicting ideas. It was fun because we were able to get our thoughts and creative ideas across to one another and work cooperatively and create something really cool, also while enjoying our time doing it. I haven't really been able to do that in any other classes so I loved that aspect of the class. I also like how we got to pick our own partners because it was almost at random, and it made the relationships with the people in your group more personal because you found each other rather then being 'assigned' a person.

I also really liked what we learned. I never knew how to do anything in Photoshop before - all my friends are really knowledgeable with it and I've always been kind of jealous because I wanted to edit pictures and stuff with the program, and I actually learned a lot about doing that. I definitely got a lot of the basics down, and know just enough to figure out the other stuff for myself. Even though the potato head assignment seemed kind of silly I actually think that was one of the most helpful assignments we had, the same goes for the stamp assignment.

Overall, I had a great time with this class, the only thing I wish was different was that we could meet more then once a week. Either way, I learned a lot and enjoyed my time.

Movie

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9opKuVjyNE&feature=youtu.be&fb_source=message

I wasn't sure how to upload the video into the blogging format, so I just put up the direct link. Anyway, for our video (Ray and Alden) we decided to do something that was suspenseful. We came up with the idea of a stalker, and weren't sure if we should make it have a serious tone or a humorous one. In the end, we had a little bit of both. We used a lot of quick, choppy shots for the chasing scenes. The beginning scenes are a little longer because there's less suspense there. One of my favorite scenes in our video is the scene where Alden notices me and starts walking quickly out of the library, but the camera is from her point of view. The camera is kind of shaky and she turns back twice, both times you see me following, and the third time she looks back I'm not there. The ending scene is the humorous part, and I like how we didn't take ourselves too seriously because that's what makes it entertaining, in my opinion. Also, the choice of music picked definitely added a lot the the movie. While editing it, the footage without the music wasn't very effective, but once added in, it really picked up the pace of the movie and made it a lot more exciting to watch, and finally gave the perfect overall 'feel' we wanted initially.