Museum Blog post

At the museum of the moving image, our tour guide, Margaret, brought our group to a few interactive exhibits that I found particularly interesting or fun. The stop motion demonstration, which allowed us to create 10 shots using props and playback our montage, was simple, yet interesting. It was surprising that we could create a funny little scene in about a minute, but it showed how making an actual stop motion film must be tedious work, moving each scene by just the smallest amount for every shot.

The moving sculpture, along with the strobe light was mesmerizing. Margaret explained that an artist created a specific amount of space between each part of the sculpture, and timed the light to create an optical illusion that works in the same way as a moving picture. The strobe worked as the intermittent movement used to create the illusion of seamless movement in film. This sculpture was definitely my favorite exhibit due to its creativity and the detailed work that must have gone into creating it.

The exhibit that allowed us to add different music to well known scenes further conveyed Professor Lucas' demonstration of the power of music to create mood in a scene. We worked with a well-known scene from Vertigo that felt scary, or silly, without Bernard Hermann's original score. This really made me think about the type of music I want to use, and for what purpose, in my audio piece.

The ADR booth was a lot of fun, mostly because our group added ridiculous audio over the famous scene from the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy lands in Oz. However, I could only imagine how difficult it is to re-record dialogue in a studio after shooting, trying to sync the movement of your mouth with the sound of your voice in a studio.

Margaret showed us the camera used for some of the first color films, which was enormous and practically immovable during filming. Its huge size was then obvious in the clip from Meet me in St. Louis, where the camera did little moving, but instead the characters were all over the place. This must have led to extremely planned out scenes with little spontaneity because the filmmakers could not easily set up another shot quickly.

Overall the museum was fun, interesting and really explained complex parts of filmmaking in fun and simple ways. The way that we interacted with what are usually extremely detailed aspects of movies conveyed their place in the film, but did not do justice to the work that really goes into filmmaking. That being said, the museum was a blast, and is super informative for those who know little about the history of film and how films are made.