Blog #3 - MOMI Trip

Unable to go with the class, I visited the Museum of the Moving Image last Friday and found it to be a very interesting experience. It was fascinating to see all these mechanisms that we’ve discussed in class and the enormous, older apparatuses that were used in filmmaking’s past. It’s hard to imagine, in a world that now places so much value on smaller sized technology that such colossal machines were lugged around on the set of films. The changes in moving image technology have certainly made the filmmaking experience more efficient. The ability to construct machines that are higher quality but also lesser in size make the filmmaking process easier as well and better for audiences to visually experience. The material we produce these days are clearly better in quality but can also take us to worlds that we do not necessarily know (space, war, etc.) but also worlds we do know (family life, friends, coming of age, etc.) in a more heightened and realistic way.

One of my favorite exhibits had to be the “Behind the Screen: The Actors” gallery. I loved seeing portraits of all the older actresses and actors that were the faces of my childhood, as I watched all these movies with my parents. Similarly, the Chuck Jones exhibit was really well done as well. I loved reading all the excerpts and animation sequences featuring cartoons such as Looney Toons and Dr. Seuss characters like the Grinch. I’ve always been captivated by animation, the art associated with animation, and companies that specialize in animated features such as Disney/Pixar. The exhibit was highly informative and visually appealing with all the bright colors used and the arrangement of all the sequences.

This leads to the first of my favorite demos. The stop-motion animation demo was simply very enjoyable and a very nice way of interacting with visitors in the museum. Playing around with the various “scenes” such as waves or the rainbow or the city skyline to make a small animation by slowly moving each image with each photograph taken, consumed a good portion of my time at the museum. It was very amusing. The second demonstration that I was particularly fascinated by was the music demo. As I mentioned in my artists statement, I’ve always loved playing around with the tension of sound and image and the disparity created when the tone of sound/image does not necessarily match the tone of its counterpart. Therefore, given a scene and allowed to play different scores with it and then analyzing the difference that it made in the overall tone was extremely intriguing. I chose a scene from Punch-Drunk Love, a film that my Practical Film Analysis class analyzed over the summer. An important part of the film itself was the anxiety-ridden characteristic of the score and how that affected our understanding of the characters and plot. This demonstration further proved how important the score truly was in that movie. 

(one of my stop motion pieces)