Corinna Sherman

I just attended the first session of a course called Design: Past, Present, and Future. It is pretty much what it sounds like: a survey of design history from 15,000 BC to the present day, with speculation on future directions. Sitting through the instructor’s halting, verbatim reading of his slides was mostly an exercise in contained boredom, but the class finished with a thought-provoking, structured discussion of the evolution of design. We selected examples of design from the past, ranging from cave paintings to illuminated manuscripts to the Rococo style; identified modern-day analogues; and projected how the designs may continue to evolve. Plenty of my classmates came up with examples from the present, but I noticed that the two people in class who contributed almost all of the ideas in the future trends category were me and another person in class who, shall we say, skew nerdy. Take a look at a few of the ideas brainstormed:

Most of the conjectures for the future were inspired by things we’d read about or seen as emerging technologies that could one day be developed into commercially viable products. It seems extraordinarily difficult to come up with visions of the future that don’t stem from something familiar and present. What do you see coming down the pipe in the next 20-50 years?

Here is a version of a Toy Story 2 trailer video cut to the audio track from a Dark Knight trailer. Although both the video and audio sources were probably used without permission, the resulting recut on YouTube is entertaining in its own right because of the juxtapositions the creator chose to make. Watching it reminded me of the ongoing debates surrounding copyright and fair use which Professor Henry Jenkins explores on his blog. Disney in particular gets a mention for its extremely aggressive copyright control practices.

I spent a large part of today making compositions out of dots. Above is a digital reproduction of one of my creations for a studio course at NYU called 2D Design Principles. The course covers the basic principles of two-dimensional design as a foundation for future work in graphic and product design. Today we learned about fundamentals such as points, lines, shapes, visual relationships and symmetry, capped off with a bit about color theory. One of the exercises asked us to create compositions, using blank sheets of white paper and black and orange dot stickers, ranging from formal to informal and from symmetrical to asymmetrical. I already understood the difference between symmetrical and asymmetrical, but the terms formal and informal were new to me. The instructor didn’t exactly spell out the difference between the terms, but from the analysis of examples he showed us, I got the sense that a composition with a high degree of regularity (e.g. evenly spaced elements, regular angles, and repetitive patterns) can be characterized as formal, while a composition with unevenly spaced elements, irregular angles, and few discernable patterns can be characterized as informal. Our challenge during the exercise was to use visual relationships among the elements on the page to create balanced compositions. You can judge for yourself whether I succeeded, but at the very least, I had an enjoyable and even theraputic experience. Given the ongoing insanity of the financial markets, a dedicated dot day was just what I needed.

Tomorrow will be the last session of my Art of Editing class. The class definitely became more interesting in the last couple of weeks, largely due to an increase in student participation as we gave our final presentations. Each person brought in a clip from one of their favorite movies or television shows and discussed the editing techniques used. For my own presentation, I showed the first few minutes of a season five episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer called “The Body.” Only a few of the other students had seen the show before, but I was happy to discover that most people seemed to appreciate the brief segment. There is something thrilling about sharing something beloved with another person, be it a favorite song, TV show, or place. Watching them experience it for the first time recalls a whiff of the original euphoria, that magic moment of delighted discovery that leaves an indelible mark on the memory but fades with subsequent exposures to the same material.

I had watched the episode several times while preparing for my presentation and noticed details I had never registered consciously before. My understanding of the characters and show’s construction evolved as a result, but the revelations were academic in nature, not driven by the fan’s enthusiasm that had led me to revisit the content in the first place. It reminded me that there is a definite distinction between studying a work of art as a critic/producer and consuming it as a spectator; while the former can deepen one’s appreciation, it cannot match the emotional charge of the latter. Once my brain latches onto the technical aspects of the production, it is no longer in the state of suspended disbelief that would otherwise buoy it through the narrative. Evaluating the framing of shots and transitions between handheld and steadycam, I cannot feel the heroine’s despair as she finds her mother lying limp on the sofa. Examining the manipulation of time through a fantasy sequence, I’m not swept along on the brief wave of false hope that the heroine experiences as the EMTs attempt to revive her mother. My classroom audience operated one one level, and I, in the didactic role, operated on a parallel level.

How does the discerning artist reconcile these two modalities? Is it possible to fuse them into a single multi-layered experience, to learn craft while enjoying the ride? To me, it feels like trying to stand on one foot, then stand on the other without lowering the first. If you can manage it, congratulations – you’ve learned how to levitate. For the rest of us poor one-foot-hopping wannabes, the rewind/play buttons are there for us, time after time.

The inevitable has happened. My final Sound Design class has come to an end, and I am sad. It was one of the most enjoyable and interesting courses I’ve ever taken but, at eight weeks, also the shortest. My reflex action is to sign up for another course on this ever-winding road of haphazard self-education, but I will restrain myself for now. There are possibilities more tempting than school for long summer days, namely vacation, writing, and film production. Hopefully, the skills I have learned will serve me in a practical sense. Study is fun in and of itself, but it is accomplishment that defines a person. It is time to create!

My Art of Editing instructor commented this week that we are now halfway through the semester and asked if anyone has any questions or comments about that fact. I do. I want to know when we are going to start discussing the Art of Editing. Because so far we’ve watched a hodge podge of sometimes grainy, sometimes inadvertently silent, sometimes disappointingly muddled movie clips accompanied by only the most blindingly obvious observations, and it’s starting to grate on me.

I think the trouble stems from the fact that we’re trying to analyze the creative process of editing based on the finished product. It seems to me that’s like trying to analyze the process of novel writing based on the finished book. Sure, if you have an instinct for what works and what doesn’t, that may be all you need, but I wouldn’t sign up for a writing class where I sit and read individual chapters of novels and hope to be struck by insight. That seems like A Waste of Money™. We had one good class where we saw the dailies from Gunsmoke and three alternative edits, discussed the choices the different editors made, and commented on the effectiveness of those choices. We focused on the decision-making process, technical and aesthetic considerations, and storytelling. This, to me, is the art of editing! So why don’t we do that every week?

Hello! I’m back from Spring Break, and I’m ready to finish up the final month of Sound Design. For the rest of the course, I’ll be creating the soundtrack for a short film in ProTools using the audio recordings previously gathered in Washington Square Park.

As an extra twist, the instructor is having each of the original groups use a different group’s recordings during the editing process. When he announced this at the start of class this week, there was a collective furtive glance around the room as we all realized that all of our painstaking slating and meticulous recording would benefit another lucky party. But, as he rightly pointed out, the people doing the sound editing are often not the same people doing the recording. Sneaky, though, how he didn’t tell us until after we finished recording…

On the bright side, I am starting to get more comfortable using ProTools. I’m finding that syncing footsteps to picture is much less frustrating than cutting marching band music clips together and, believe it or not, oddly relaxing. Perhaps I should market a sleep-aid sound effects CD featuring the regular clop-clop-clop of shoes on asphalt in lieu of the more typical ocean waves.

Armed with a collection of freshly recorded sounds from the previous week’s recording adventures in Washington Square Park, I entered this week’s Sound Design class ready to dive into a real ProTools sound editing session. Of all the things covered in the course, I figured the part involving computers would fall right into my comfort zone. What I neglected to consider, however, was the fact that ProTools is a software program intended for professionals in the sound industry – in short, professional listeners – and the most my job demands of my ears is to register the occasional application alert beep.

For the in-class assignment, we were supposed to assemble a collection of music clips so that the final edited version sounded like a reference recording of a marching band. The instructor first demonstrated how to scrub regions of audio and listen to the resulting sound output to find the best edit point. He dragged the cursor back and forth across one section of a track, and out of the computer’s speakers, I heard the equivalent of a bunch of bolts rolling around in a metal trash can. He paused for a microsecond. “That’s a lot of trombone, not so easy to find a good edit spot. Keep looking.” He did the same thing to another section that sounded exactly the same. “Ah, there’s the beginning of the cymbals! Cut there!” I had the uneasy feeling that I was missing something but hoped everything would crystallize once I tried it myself.

At my own workstation, I cranked up the volume on my headphones and dutifully alternated between playing the track at normal speed and scrubbing, looking for strong beats on which to edit. All I heard through the headphones was a low growl, as though ProTools was a dog at the veterinarian’s office and could sense that it was my first time administering an exam. It clearly didn’t trust me, and I didn’t blame it. Realizing at last that I may as well be deaf for all the help my ears were going to be to me, I resorted to lining up the reference and editing tracks and comparing the waveforms visually so that I could at least edit at points where they looked the same. It was a painstaking process and not really the way we were supposed to do the exercise, but I am still mystified at how the whole scrubbing thing is supposed to work. I ran out of time at the end of class, but next time I will try to ask the instructor to explain it again. The only worry I have is that he’ll do the same demonstration for me as he did at the start of class and say, “See, they sound completely different!” My amateur ears just don’t get it.

Again, Sound Design eclipses The Art of Editing! Plagued by audio/visual issues, my editing class this week limped along with snowy footage and unintentionally silent clips from Law and Order and Fatal Attraction. We did examine an interesting planned sequence from Doctor Zhivago involving an exterior crane shot following the action inside a building through a series of windows, but as the instructor noted, such shots involve equipment and expense typically beyond the means of independent filmmakers. I would be happy just to have a lighting kit!

In contrast, this week’s Sound Design class featured a practical, hands-on, and relatively low-budget activity: recording sounds for Foley in Washington Square Park. We ventured into the darkness in groups of 3-4, each group armed with a Sennheiser shotgun, windsock, field recorder, headphones, and flashlight. By the end of the 3-hour class, our noses were runny, our toes were numb, our batteries were dead… oh yes, and we had some great sound recordings, including several takes of a total stranger (who had approached us to ask what we were doing) exclaiming, “Boy, that’s great ginger ale!” That little gem, in case you were wondering, will be used for ADR (automated dialog replacement aka dubbing) in post-production.

We also recorded footsteps on asphalt, dirt, and brick; some chains rattling on a metal fence; a squeaky gate; a security barrier scraping across the ground; fizzing soda; mouth swishing; soda swallowing; paper bag crinkles; and a pen dragging across a metal mesh fence. I was fortunate to have group mates who were friendly, funny, and organized, so even though we nearly froze out there, we all had a good time, and I’m fairly confident that we got all the material we will need for our upcoming ProTools session next week.

Incidentally, if you’ve never walked around a public park listening through headphones to sounds picked by by a shotgun microphone, I highly recommend it. Through the power of technology, it’s like you have super hearing; every pebble roll, every leaf shudder, every far-off conversation in the mic’s line is magnified and amazingly distinct. I kept getting the urge to stop, stare off into space for a moment, say “Someone’s in trouble!” and leap into the sky.

I had to get up at 5:00 AM this morning, and I’m feeling a bit sick, so apologies in advance for what probably reads as a rambling post.

First off, some good news: My sketch group performed in Sketchubator NYC at the PIT on Saturday to all-around positive reviews. *joy* The audience seemed to dig our faux New York accents, mastered by watching My Cousin Vinny the night before, and they reacted quite audibly to the material – always an encouraging sign. Being early in the show’s lineup, we got to do our thing on stage and then sit in the house and enjoy the rest as audience members. There was a party right after the show, too, so I got to chat with a lot of the audience and cast members over beers. A most memorable and fun time was had. Special thanks goes out to Party Central USA for hosting with hilarity.

In this past week’s editing class, I learned about editing workflow, from getting the dailies (raw footage for each scene, including the master shot plus coverage) to producing the final cut. I also learned that it costs, at a minimum, tens of thousands of dollars to produce a fairly basic live-action commercial. It takes a script writer, a storyboard artist, a producer, a director, lighting and sound experts, a script supervisor, actors, props, costumes, music and sound effects, a location and set dressing, cameras, microphones, cables, stands, lights, computers, editing and sound software, and food to feed all those union workers! I’ve seen a lot of commercials in my life, and yet it never occurred to me how many varied and specialized skill sets are involved in their production. If I still had a television set, I might now feel a twinge of guilt pressing the mute button.

On the sound design front, the highly anticipated field trip to Washington Square Park last Wednesday to record sounds for Foley got postponed due to bitterly cold weather. It was freezing all over the city, but for some reason, the area around Washington Square Park always feels ten degrees colder than anywhere else. Instead, the class got a little taste of ProTools. We learned a few keyboard shortcuts and how to set up a session but nothing to sink our teeth into yet. This week is forecast to be in the balmy 40s, so we will try again this Wednesday to do some recording in the field. I am keeping my gloved fingers crossed the weather is more accomodating this time.