Video Project Final: "The Mein Event"

The team is in place and so is our subject matter. All we have to do now is shoot and edit our story on the top "Chinese Restaurants in New York City." The NY Post headline "The Mein Event" caught our eyes and now we are set to embark on our own exploration of the top Chinese eateries in the City. We were going to begin shooting last week and we visited one of the restaurants. But we realized that my camera is an older, Panasonic camcorder and is not in the mini dv format. We have reserved a camera that will provide us with the correct format so that we can shoot and edit without losing a generation. We are psyched to begin our shooting in a day or two from now.

My First Story Board

I have been producing tv news stories for years, but I never had to produce a story board. It proved to be a very interesting exercise and I am glad to have done it. The opening thirty minutes or so of Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" includes what has been described as one of the most realistic combat sequences in film history. I have watched it a number of times but never did a shot by shot analysis until now. It's painful enough watching this in real time, but stopping and pausing it made it more difficult. Speilberg used a lot of the "cinema verite" type of technique with handheld cameras and lots of "point of view" camera work. The shot sequences are quick. Some shots last only one second or so. Others go six or seven seconds and have pans and lots of movement. The sounds of whizzing bullets striking metal amidst shouts and screams still resound in my head.

The Writings of Dziga Vertov

Many writings of Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov seem timeless. For instance, in reference to cinema art, Vertov writes "the mixture of bad colors, even those ideally selected from the spectrum, produces not white, but mud." Such commentary, written in the early 1920's, seems apropos nowadays in light of the state of mass filmmaking. Many of the films produced for mass consumption are lacking and contain too much gratuitous violence. But hey,that must be what sells.

And in another writing, Vertov speaks of "Kino-Eye" which he explains as "showing people without masks, without makeup, catching them through the eye of the camera in a moment when they are not acting....laid bare by the camera." Again Vertov, writing in the 1920s certainly seems prophetic in light of all the reality programs produced in 2007 for television.