The YES

It was quite interesting to see how those important and high educated people didn't react when the guys were showing those insane things, it seems that people stop arguing what is right or wrong, what is fair or not, that's why I strongly disagree when people say that when we are in a university it is time to experiment, to manifest, to ask and to argue; I think we should do that ALWAYS, not only while we're studying, so what's the point? People seem to ignore the world's problems exactly when it's time to worry about them, 'cause right now there's a huge global issue regarding global warming, for example. Coming from a third-world country I can tell that down there we do worry about what's going wrong with the world and especially with some of our poor neighbors, and it is never late to try to solve them. Maybe I'm going off topic, but I'll give one good example of it that I just figured it would be interesting to share: There's this brazilian website called "click arvore" which translates to "click tree" where you can plant one tree per day for free, and you can also track where is your tree being planted (usually in amazon and rainforest areas), in the website, if you pay, you can plant more than 1 tree per day, and they give prizes for who plants more trees and those kinda stuff to encourage people to do that. It's interesting, inovating and it is so far working.
Comedy is a good approach when we talk about these issues, I liked the way the students reacted to that non-sense ideas they had, that was exactly how everybody should react and don't hesitate to speak. But we have to keep in mind that, besides the comedy part, there's this polemic and important subject which should not be ignored.
I think I will forever wonder why those high educated people didn't say anything, I don't see the point of not speaking up, were they afraid of their jobs? afraid of how they would look like in front of others? It's going to bug me forever.

Ideas for the 48-hour race film

Well, after the class which we were told that we could use for the 48-hour race film, I was really excited to do something using the webcam, but the fact of not knowing what the mistery prop is makes me a bit nervous and insecure, but excited at the same time!
I got my friends at the International House, some Americans, and told them: "Come on, I wanna create a music video using the webcam, right NOW!" I don't know, just to have fun editing, and I feel like posting here since the idea came from using the webcam for this next assignment.
This is just an experiment, it has nothing to do with the 48-hour race film

And this is another version of the same music with the same videos, but edited differently.

I am very into 3D this year so I might use some three dimensional software to create some basic animation, or I don't know, maybe using some old cell phone video recording and creating a new sound for it, applying the mistery prop (if that's possible)

Saturday shot

This assignment turned out to be my favorite so far, it started the day we went for a walk to plan what we would film, Jack had the ideas of using the arches for something, then Alex had the brilliant idea of using it for showing the "Stages of Life" of a character, one thing lead to another and we ended up with a great and ambicious long take plan! It could be more ambicious, to be honest, we had the idea of using some furniture to make the scenario more visually interesting but that would take too much effort and we had already to worry about all the props we were planning to use.

We made a drawing of 7 stages and we were discussing what should happen on each one. I was willing to act on this one, so I was going to be the main character. On the first stage I'd be a kid playing with his soccer ball, on the second one I'd go to college and meet a girl, on the third I'd graduate and receive my diploma, on the fourth I'd marry that girl from the college at the second stage, on the fifth I'd go to work and say bye to my wife and child, on the six I'd be old and say bye to my son who was going to work, on the seventh we were still planning what to do, but would be something to do with my death or the death of my wife.
On Saturday we decided to eliminate the seventh stage due to the lack of time we had, one minute for seven stages was too much, actually it turned out that we barely had time to do SIX stages, so it was challenging to manage the time for it.

We used some cool props, like rice (to throw at the wedding), backpack (for the college), a diploma made with regular book paper, some cans (also for the wedding), the soccer ball, a twig...
Everything helped to tell the story we wanted, our collegues also helped us to film and to arrange the set. We practiced a few times to check if we could do it in time and at the end we (especially I) knew that we have to hurry but it was possible to do it within one minute, and we succeeded!

About the other projects, I liked so much to work on this one where I had to interpret a telletubies running out of a magic tent, the only thing not so good was to be inside that "telletubie-clothing-thing" (I'm sorry, I don't know the name of it, but anyway, THAT hot thing) while it was around 32°C outside, I know you guys don't use Celcius, anyway, it was HOT hahaha). It was a great experience, the group had a nice and funny idea for the long take shot and I think it worked well.

Everything went fine that day, I like it and I can't wait to see the whole thing (I had to leave at 4 sharp to attend to a meeting, so I couldn't see it)

2nd response on the scratch film junkies

After seeing what everyone else did on their filmstrips I realized how far I could go if I put more effort on it, and I guess this is a general statement: patience is the key for good results in the scratch film world.
I appreciated every single frame of everyone else's project, some tried to manipulate the timing (which can be very hard), some tried to make a marvelous art not using so many frames, which is perfect, except the fact that if we blink our eyes we take the risk to miss it.
We learn from our errors, don't we? I'm glad I was not the only one who drew some things upside down; I wasn't considering the correct side of the filmstrip. Well, these kind of stuff happens.

I was mostly impressed by the collage technique. It is A-MAZING. I could take a whole day off to cut magazines in order to build an interesting story in my filmstrip. Words, faces, objects, advertisings, drawings... the things we can take from a magazine are endless.
I like every technique we used in general, I would take the darkroom more serious the next time, it's an awesome resource and we can surely make interestings shapes on our filmstrip using ordinary kitchen products or anything. I was amazed in particular for one filmstrip with a little chain in a shape of a snake I guess, I think it was a bracelet, anyway, it turned out amazing!
Everyone really got into the four elements, at least some of them. We could see some waves, fire burning, some water drops.; That was excellent!