Thursday, December 11, 2008

3x1: Film Manipulation....Wouldn't That Be Nice

What would I do if I were to design a 6x1: Part 2? That question is so very open ended that it makes my brain hurt. The topics we covered in class could each be expanded on so much that I feel like you could essentially take one of them and make it an entire semester course. I think that you could easily design an entire course around Film manipulation, multi-plane animation, Bolex One-shot’s, or Rhythmic editing by themselves. The more I think about it, that is probably what I would do on some level. Many film students have room in their schedule for general film electives as they get closer to graduation and to know that every semester there would be a new class devoted to a particular aspect of one minute filmmaking would be exciting for those who were interested in experimental film. Imagine if you will an entire semester course on film manipulation. I believe that if students could spend all semester learning and perfecting all the various aspects of manipulating film they could really begin to create some very interesting films. Techniques like rayograms are complex in their nature and steep in their learning curve. Therefore, having only a week or so to experiment with them only allows so much creative freedom. If you had an entire month to spend on, say, painting on film, you could then really experiment with various techniques and paints to fully realize the possibilities of that type of filmmaking.
The same goes with multi-plane animation. The time-consuming nature of this type of filmmaking makes it a very good candidate for expanding into an entire semester course. You could then spend a month or more on an individual project, instead of only a few hours. This would most definitely lead to more interesting and creative results. The time spent could be greater, and therefore, the ideas and results could be greater. Even the Bolex camera project could be expanded to at least a month or so of class time. This would allow the groups to devise more complex set ups, and potentially combining multiple one-shot’s together to create a longer experimental film.
I do not mean to say that this is the only way to approach 6x1: Part 2. I believe that what I have laid out would be more of an advanced 6x1 class. Students, once they had taken 6x1, could then take whatever advanced 6x1 class was being offered in that particular semester. Fall semester might be 3x1: Film Manipulation while Spring semester would offer 3x1: Multi-Plane Animation. Students could then decide on which techniques they would want to spend more time on and take the appropriate class when it was offered. However, one pitfall to this would be that if you rotated which ones were offered each semester and a student couldn’t take the class because of a time conflict, then they would most likely be out of luck for their entire college career, if that makes sense. However, I feel like everything we studied this semester was interesting enough to warrant its own semester long course. I would gladly take a semester course on any one of the aspects of experimental filmmaking that we covered. It would allow me to experiment even more, and well, isn’t that the point.