Week 10

After a long Thanksgiving break, it was time to refocus on the final project. On Monday morning with a realization of week 10 and renewed panic, we set out with the camera and a purpose. We sought to shoot the iconic footage that we were missing for our intro. Jessica shot the Reichstag, Potsdamer Platz, and the Brandenburg Gate. Frodo and I then headed to the shoot the Oberbaumbruecke, Eastside Gallery, and the U-bahn as it crossed through that area above ground.

With the material that we needed captured, Jon and I began laying the footage into Premier, and aquainting ourselves with the program. Joel's help was crucial in getting us started. He showed us the more technical ins and outs of the program, to speak technically. We realized that we couldn't work with the HD footage, so every clip that we would like to use must first be rendered into NTSC, a process that takes about a half our for every five minutes of footage. The really frustrating part is that rendering uses so much cpu power that it is impossible to do anything else with the computer. In order to deal with this problem we have realized that we must stay ahead of ourselves by rendering the clips we would like to work with beforehand. So whenever we're in class or asleep, the computer is always working.

On Tuesday Jon and I again got out and filmed. The highlight was a time lapse on Friedrichstrasse from dusk to dark of the construction going on there, and standing out there for twenty minutes in the cold really paid off. That night we put a lot of work into the project and as a group sat down and went over the course of the film in step by step detail with each other. We discussed perspective a lot and decided on a third person perspective that I have a lot of hope for right now. It will allow for the type of commentary that we feel will be most entertaining and best contribute to the point of the film.

One major problem that I have had in the group is delegating work. I don't know that much about film, nor do I feel that it is really my place to start handing out tasks seeing as this is suppossed to be a group project. The main thing that I have tried to contribute to the group is leading by example. I get out there and capture video, I use my limited language skills to my advantage to communicate with locals regarding our project, and I have taken a large initiative to learn the editing software, which at this point I feel relatively comfortable with. Jon has been great to get film with and recently has taken a lot of initiative to learn the editing software on our work with the final project, it makes everything much easier. Before I felt like I was the only one who really knew how to manipulate everything. So we have worked together on the first minute of the film so far and I really like what we've been able to put together. This week I saw a turnaround, group participation was much stronger than I've seen before, and we had a solid outing as an entire group where a lot was accomplished. I hope that this level of involvement continues, if it does not I doubt we will be successful in realizing a finished product.

The Wednesday film viewing of Me Boss, You Sneaker, was great and I really enjoyed the humor that it had. I thought it was a very entertaining film and was happy to see a film from a Turkish perspective. As far as a Berlin film, it had great city imagery, that included very iconic shots, and also represented the Turkish neighborhood well. It was fun to see the places that we live right next to in film. During the film I paid a lot of attention to the transitions, hoping to get an idea of how to make them in our own film. Often they were very distinct transitions from one setting to another and yet they didn't seem out of place. Most of the time the transition effect was very simple. Me Boss, You Sneaker, was a good film to pay attention to with regard to transitions because its production was simple enough to try and replicate.

I think that the type of humor in the film does well to address the aspects that it was centered around, as long as the humor doesn't undermine itself as we talked about in class. The reading addressed the historical uses of humor, and I found that to be very interesting. The reading specifically pointed out the way in which humor can be by one group to evoke certain ideas. Normally when I think of humor and comedy I think of it from a simplistic entertainment standpoint, when I a public forum like film it needs to be addressed with more care. It is clear to me that comedy is in many ways as strong as a drama for making people reflect on certain ideas and for that reason it really should be analyzed as such. The article mentioned the role of humor as a device, and explored to some extent how it is used by different groups. Which brought us to the discussion in class of who has the right to use certain comedic devices. In a public context this has a lot of legitmacy. We talked about how comedy can be used with disrespect towards someone or something, and also how it can be used to make us reflect on the absurdity of a situation. It seemed that some people were critical of the way the director Kutlucan directed his humorous stereotyping of the asylum seekers, but I saw it as him using those stereotypes for the purpose of pointing out their absurdity. The film was successful in that it left me feeling that the entire situation surrounding integration and immigration in Germany was absurd. How that by placing so many restrictions on a people they made it nearly impossible for immigrants to achieve was asked of them. As a result of this discussion, in the future I will be more analytical of humor's uses and its motives. As for our film I feel lucky in getting around this scrutiny, because the humor we are shooting for is directed only at us or the spectacle that we're creating.