002 stop motion write-up

Overall, I felt that the project was successful (as an experiment) despite some technical difficulties. Conceptually, I was working with the idea of limiting myself to a few materials (some old national geographics, tinfoil, cellophane, glue, tape and scissors), and to convert my ongoing obsession of covering real things/people/scenes to inanimate collages. In this case, tinfoil served as the covering. I also wanted to experiment on a small scale to see what it felt like to be completely in control, since these were inanimate objects being covered. This gave me some serious tedious time to try to work out why exactly I am so fascinated with covering things. I've came around to the conclusion that it must have something to do with the way society is constantly encouraging us to change, to improve. These old (early 1960s-early 1970's) National Geographics I was using are less than politically correct, and filled with especially questionable advertisements. I think they are the perfect example for what society expects a well-rounded American to enjoy, and the advertisements contained inside of it are an example of what Americans are supposed to be. The men are most often represented as explorers and conquerors (especially within the articles of the magazine), and the women are represented as housewifes, supporters, and items to be adorned, flaunted. I focused mostly on the expectations for women to be housewives, and the many, many kitchen advertisements that support this idea. The tinfoil comes from the kitchen, and I repeatedly make it explode from the inside of things, maybe a metaphor for the thing that we are told to be as something that is internalized and something that eventually becomes destructive. Those are the conceptual ideas I discovered as I was working on the project. I'd like to work to develop this concept some more through my next films.
As far as technical challenges go, I had some major difficulties with the istopmotion. It kept rearranging my images, and that got old, so I switched to just taking stills with the D40 and importing them into quick time movies, and doing all of the editing in quick time. I tried to edit in final cut pro, but I lost so much image quality, I may have been importing things the wrong way.