shayna on media

Friday, April 30, 2010

DONE

wow! I can't believe this is the last blog post of my college career! i am thankful to bjorn for introducing all of us to the concept of blogging, and making it a little less scary. hopefully we can use our blagoblag skills to get ideas out onto the cyber web post-degree.

well, it has certainly been an eventful year. a full two semesters of poetry workshop and online bjorn classes, plenty of sewing down at the costume shop, and i even got to design my own musical.

although, sorry media relations, i would have to say african drumming was the most fun i have had all college. i leave you with this clip, be well comm dudes.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

some world music


live music is still a form of media, yes? maybe it itsn't mass media, but it can help you think globally. khakatay, bridgewater's african drum ensemble, is having a concert this thursday.

for those of you who haven't been, it's an interesting time for sure. sound just fills horace mann auditorium, and people start getting into the groove.

if you go, you get to see yours truly wearing a dashiki:




so check it out! this thursday, at 8:00, in the Horace mann auditorium, located in Boyden Hall.

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

baraka

my roommate is doing a paper on non-verbal documentaries, and i thought the fine readers of my blog would like to hear about that genre. it's a cool one. theres a lot of time lapse in these movies, along with footage of landscapes, ruins, aboriginal cultures, and animals. The footage of all the scenes from around the world puts together an abstracted narrative as the film goes on, connecting themes but never with words, only with images and emotion. it's pretty cool. would recommend checking out. here's a cool scene from it:

Sunday, April 11, 2010

filming is over (if you want it)



well, the zombie movie is shot and ready to be edited :). this is my favorite part of the filming process, mainly because i don't have to do anything. and boy did i do a lot on the set. i've only done films where one person needed specialty makeup, and here i was doing eight actors faces in various states of decay. then, we were short a zombie so i had to roll around in the dirt eating helpless campers myself.

here is some of the makeup i have done before, on an emerson student's film. it is supposed to be a shot for shot remake of the winkie's scene in david lynch's mulholland drive (the effects makeup doesn't manifest until the end):

Friday, April 2, 2010

calling the undead




oh hi blag. i'm really excited about working on zombie makeup next weekend

should be a good time. i'm doing my zombie makeup research right now. i'm thinking grey zombies, because they have a more "freshly dead" look, which is easier to pull off. i need to make ten or so zombies, which is unfortunate because each zombie takes about a half hour to do. hopefully i can get some extra hands on board for this project, so we don't spend the whole day applying makeup-with no time to shoot!

hollar at me if you have sfx makeup experience :)

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

reminds me of atari

thanks to user generated content on the internet, i think more people realize you don't need to have a piece of media that has a high production value for something to be pretty or entertaining. i came across these videos that, other than figuring out a basic algorithm, probably weren't too hard to make, but are still fascinating to watch:






Tuesday, March 30, 2010

HEADIN DOWN THE HIGHWAY

hey all. so this is media studies class. so i'm going to talk about a movie.

EASY RIDER!



i saw it a couple days ago with my boyfriend. SO GOOD! it's a low budget motorcycle film produced in 1969 by dennis hopper and peter fonda. also, jack nickelson is in it.

they drive across the country on motorcycles, trafficing some sort of drug in their gas tank, and have 60's related shenanigans along the way. communes, pot, getting yelled at by conservative southerners, its all there.

but what struck me most about this movie was the message. that freedom is a word that gets thrown around by patriots, but once they see a person that is truly free, they get scared and hate those people. the movie is about trying to find the american dream, trying to find freedom. it truly resonates with the change that happened in the 60's.

what it made me think of was...does my generation have a movie like that? that one movie where you are like, wow, that's the message us young people are trying to get out. the only one i can think of that does that for me is idiocracy, but even still that movie isn't too serious.

well, how bout it? do we have a movie like that? or are we too spread out; opinion wise, entertainment wise, to have a strong unified feeling about anything?