Monday, October 19, 2009

Flerida's Brainthoughts Throughout Critique Day

I want to talk about our critique on Saturday. I know Kristina already made a post about it but I really wanted to write one as well.

I cringed y'all. I cringed harder than an audience member at a Sarah Silverman show. I saw the small camera movements that I thought I had cut out, I heard the choppy background audio that I did not notice during editing, I couldn't figure out why the opening bothered me a heck of a lot, basically a lot of things happened.

Let's start at the beginning:

10 am
Flerida is at home. She is attempting to export the film into a Quicktime movie that doesn't stretch the aspect ratio 100x and therefore make the whole thing look terrible.

10:30 am
"Holy mother, I'm supposed to meet the Clutch Peeps at 12 before the critique!"
Please note, it takes about an hour and a half for Flerida to get to the Kapisanan. She starts another Quicktime export and takes a shower hoping it's done by the time she's out.

10:50 am
Shower over.

11:00 am
Quicktime export over. It looks better, yay! But there must be an even better version. She decides to just leave and figure out the exporting business at the K.

12:30 pm
Another export attempt. It is however thwarted by the lack of memory in her computer. Deletion occurs.

1:30 pm
Ahhh deletion still occurring! Must make do with the proper-aspect-ratio version that looks the best. Kevin Centeno sets up the computer-television connection because he's awesome like that.

1:35 pm
Watching the film and CRINGING CRINGING CRINGING. Like that picture up there.

1:50 pm
Critique begins. Romeo Candido (Senior Producer at Much More Music), Vincent Galvez (Freelance Filmographer), and Michelle Turingan (Freelance Filmographer) sit on one side of the boardroom table and us Clutch Ladies on the other. Many good points and suggestions that we shall indeed follow up on. The main one being that we're doing the voiceover again. Also it will be much slower.

I admit, I was worried about the short film dragging on and that people would be bored while watching, but what they said makes a lot of sense. Since we have a voiceover, we have to allow the words to sink in for the audience and so we can't make it so fast. Otherwise all these words that are integral to the story will get lost in the visuals and then it won't make any sense!

2:15 pm
Deletion finally finishes. Sigh.

2:30 pm
End of critique.
And that's what happened on Saturday with regards to our short film.


Sidenote:

After the critique we worked on our encaustic painting/collages. But before we did that we had to figure out how to plug all the equipment in for the encaustic painting/collages. There were five minds working for 15 minutes or so and we couldn't figure out how to plug in all the different extension cords. And then Karyl Agana walks by and figures it out in honestly like thirty seconds. Whaa-aaaatt? Go Karyl. :)


FP

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Short film critique and encaustic collage

Our short film was presented to the jury that consisted of Romeo, Michelle and Vince. Their suggestions were really helpful because we all agreed that the short film really needed some tweaking. I feel like there's something missing in the vibe and mood. It seemed detached and unemotional. We should be able to work on it on the next couple of weeks. 

Since I missed the Encaustic collage workshop last Saturday, Flerida, Des and myself spent the whole afternoon working on our collage outside. It was interesting how people got curious with what we were doing on the table. A few random strangers would come up to us just to look and inquire. 

Kristina

Monday, October 12, 2009




Here is a blog taken from Leah Gold, regarding the Encaustic Collage session that we had with her!

"So Saturday was great. I ran a workshop for the lovely ladies of CLUTCH, who get together to explore their identities as young Filipina women living in Toronto in various arty ways. Apparently the encaustic was a welcome break from the exhausting work of movie production ( I don't know...it's sounds kind of cool to me). Desiree and Flerida, and later April and Kristina, came by the studio to do some encaustic collaging. Desiree brought a ton of personal material to incorporate, and was doing a bang up job of bringing it all together: her many homes, the images and objects that connect them, music... Flerida was working more with found photos and quotes, but I have a feeling she'll still end up with something that expresses a totally individual outlook- the images and words she was working with were beautifully strange.

I stole the last photo from Desiree's own blog post, which you can findhere. Hopefully they'll send me more photos of the finished collages. That's right guys, I'm talking to you. You better deliver." - Leah Gold





Sunday, October 11, 2009

Encaustic Art with Leah Gold (and other cool updates)

Yesterday, we did encaustic collages with Toronto-based artist Leah Gold (http://www.leahgoldart.com/) at her studio, located in the midst of Chinatown’s busiest marketplaces. For those who don’t know (like myself, who humbly had to ask what it was we were about to do exactly), encaustic painting, a.k.a. hot wax painting, involves heated beeswax with colour pigments applied to a clean, wooden surface. Apparently this technique is ancient — I’m talking 'Egyptian mummy portraits' and '6th century iconic paintings of saints' ancient. Encaustic techniques were even used in Kut-Kut, which is a lost form of Philippine art from the 1600s.

Enough facts — the encaustic workshop was a revelation to me. I didn’t know these art forms existed and we oooh’d and ahhh’d outloud upon every step Leah introduced us to.

Our project was to collage photos and tiny objects into to the wax/wood panel that would express ourselves. Leah told us not to be afraid of “messing up” and that the self-expression will come on its own. So we jumped right into it and mentally zonked out for more than three hours, eyebrows furrowed in fascination at what WE were coming up with.
This particular collage, which I took from my phone cam, is a work-in-progress for sure. I still think I’m missing something. But I like how the horse-turned-unicorn’s horn is a map compass…

Anyway, the workshop was a success and I was addicted to the art form. Hopefully we’ll bump into the talented Ms. Gold once again. (Plus her studio is a sweeeet dig)

Update on past CLUTCH weeks: 1. Short film “Perched” — we're still working on it. We really want to produce something we can all seriously be proud of. Romeo Candido’s workshop on video editing truly pushed us to think out of the box in terms of sound effects and musical tones to fit the sort of mood we want to convey. It’s getting there…

2. PSL’s Charity is Our Second Lanuguage event a.k.a. Nuit Brun — the CLUTCH girls were there that night to help out with the balikbayan boxes for the Typhoon Ondoy victims, but also to breathe in the energy of the spoken word artists and bask in their creative pool of poetic language. Words can’t describe the outcome of that night. Let’s just say it was a packed house and I had chills the entire night.

More to come soon...

DG