Video Tutorials (New Media Tools & Practise)

Following the previous tutorials, here I complete the series of tutorials on Slicing

MAKING YOUR SLICE

In this tutorial, we learn to make user defined slices and learn about auto slices. We draw the slices manually

Any doubts, feel free to contact me for clarifications: 

 LAYER BASED SLICES

to make our life easier, photoshop allows us to define slices according to layers. If you have the foresight to create your layer design in photoshop with layers, it will help you a long way to quickly convert your layers into slices. Follow the tutorial to know more.

 

OPTIMIZING SLICES  

this is what we have been aiming at all this while, build slices and then optimize it in different file formats like jpegs or gifs. In the design we have been working at - we will be doing exactly that. 

Any doubts, feel free to discuss further: 

Video Tutorial for my students (NEW MEDIA TOOLS & PRACTICE)

WEBSITE SIZE ISSUES ADDRESSED

What should be the screen size of my website? A question often asked by many students. This tutorial aims to answer that.

Any doubts - feel free to discuss...

WHAT IS SLICING?

If you have prepared your design layout comp on photoshop and ready to move to your web design platform - Dreamweaver? May be you want to consider slicing up the images to optimise it for your website first. Here's my second tutorial on the same. 

Any doubts, feel free to discuss...

I AM ME and YOU ARE YOU and NEITHER OF US IS HAPPY..

ARTIST: DAVID KRAMER

We live in this time where everything is in the present tense. Memories are simply the source materials for "tonight's act." Any film clip or historical document can be summoned by surfing the web, and entire TV networks are devised to trot out re-runs of Westerns and cartoons, all juxtaposed against the backdrop of people downloading what just happened, off of their telephones for public consumption. Through this, I am a storyteller. An archivist and an entertainer. And most importantly an artist. My job is to use all of this source material, and run it through the prism of my own life and create a moment. To make an experience for the audience to experience. Laughter and the wry smile are my payoff. The work works best when I get these same results every time the audience comes back for more. I use the familiar, and cram my own self into it to see how it fits. Then I parade around to show off how badly it usually does. For the most part, I dispense with naming names. I like it that people get the idea without them. People seem to get what I am talking about without them. But sometimes the name is the crucial ingredient.

Which reminds me of a story…—David Kramer, New York City, 2010

Using his own life as source material for his art, Kramer is the consummate storyteller. But like a movie star who we recognize from the roles that they play, and the stories we read in the tabloids, there is a disconnection between the man himself and the stage persona he has created. The character presented in his artwork is both an idealized and vilified version of himself, with the truth often stretched in service of the story.

Kramer's experiences become the universal struggle of the everyman for greatness. He gets up and goes to work every day. He is married with a son. He struggles to make ends meet. And he often takes comfort at the end of the day in a bottle. The imagery in his work is culled from 1970s print advertising. Hot girls and big cars are symbols of having arrived. Cowboys are metaphors for the lonely and hardscrabble life of the artist. Modernist architecture creates space for better living. Cigarettes are eternally cool and represent an irrational love for things that may destroy us. Re-inscribing romanticized and highly stylized versions of the American Dream, Kramer explores our desire for halcyon days and the hangover of disappointment with a razor sharp wit.—Sarah Murkett

Approaching the EDIT

PUT THE AUDIENCE FIRST. CUT TO ENRICH THEIR VIEWING EXPERIENCE

As editors, we're thinking audience all the time, I've always said editors are proxy for audience. We love our audience, and we want them to be happy and be enriched. And we want them to stay with it, of course, especially if it's for television

WHEN SCREENING DAILIES, BE SENSITIVE TO THE WAY THE FOOTAGE WAS CAPTURED. 

TRY TO SEE WHAT THE CAMERA PERSON SAW IN IT, THE LIFE AND MEANING OF THE MOMENT. BUT DON'T USE MATERIAL PURELY FOR ITS STRONG AESTHETIC VALUES

Cameraman like what I do with their material, or obvious reasons. I respect the quality of what they're doing. I don't muscle it into some intellectual thing. I respect their curiosity. I use their curiosity, it matches my own. And of course, that doesn't mean that therefore I use only their best stuff. But, I'm certainly very sensitive to what I think is effective material. Very often I lose their best stuff, because it doesn't work

DON'T SPOON-FEED THE AUDIENCE. TRUST THEM TO DISCOVER THEIR MEANING OF THE FILM

To a lot of television producers, a documentary is like a term paper. They're not loving the audience, particularly. They believe you have to tell them what they're going to see, tell them what they're seeing, and tell them what they saw. There's an excessive use of narration in television because that's the one thing they know how to do, they were taught well in college and they know how to write. And the audience is just switching channels, or dozing off, because they's spoon-fed. So you have to wrestle with that, and argue for the audience. I would rather confront someone I'm working with than make a heavily scripted film that is totally boring the hell out of an audience

- Larry Silk 

Editing Biographical Portraits

A documentary editor shapes the film narrative. With a biographical film that means being accountable for telling someone's life story. Getting the story right is an enormous responsibility; making the film entertaining and watchable, which is the larger job of the editor, requires careful balance.

Documentary editors pore over material for weeks and months, digesting the meaning of what they are given: film clips, photographs, interviews, transcripts. In making a biographical film, through viewing the subject's life artifacts, the editor comes to know the person intimately, but great editing always requires distance. The interpersonal dynamics of making a biographical or autobiographical documentary with the living subject of the film can be challenging. Because the editor's job is to represent the interest of the audience, she is focused entirely on the quality of the storytelling; the director, on the other hand, is inevitably invested in how he or she will come off. With every cut, the editor makes conjectures and statements about the person's character; as an emphatic person, an editor cannot help but be distracted by the nagging question, "What will the subject think of this portrayal?"