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Title: The Lesson
Duration: 00:05:25
This was my first semester film from my first year in film school at S.V.A. I shot this in the fall of 1991 with a Bolex 16-mm movie camera with 300 ft. of B&W reversal film and an Arri lighting kit in Mammoth Billiards on 26th street NYC. The pool shark is played by my father and the kid was my classmate Neil Collogan. I had just recently got a telecine transfer and had not viewed it in about 14 years since I had lost a VHS tape that was of poor quality to begin with. Also I put it to the track “What is Soul” by Funkidelic. It is the same track that I played from a CD as I presented it to my class.
The titles and credits I recently added. I cleaned up a couple of the edits but left most of it untouched to preserve the RAW film school quality. Working with reversal, one has to remember that it’s the only print that you have that is being spliced up. And all is cut with a hand operated reel to reel and a plug in viewer to light up and magnify the film so you can see it. Avids and nonlinear digital off line editing were only available in the state of the art professional arena.
In classic DK style I did not get a grade for it cause I refused to follow the assignment and cut it in 10 edits which did have the coverage for. My money, my cut is the way I thought. I was allowed to present it to the class and although I did not get the grade the professor shook his head and said, “wow great story!”
I’ve hit a lull with work. Not much has been going on although there is tons to do. Recently I’ve been playing around with Facebook.com. Facebook.com is the third web based networking website that provides a networking platform and interface to link friends and associates. Friendster was the first, then Myspace and now Facebook. Facebook is today’s hype.
Now I’ve been slow in getting on the bandwagon of these cyberspace phenomena. When Friendster hit, I didn’t get it. I know I signed up with an account and had some friends on it but I never used it. So I never really explored its capabilities and what it may offer as a networking tool. It seemed a little abstract for me. I could never really see myself reaching out to strangers or friends of friends on some loose social connection.
Then Myspace hit. This caught on quickly. People seem to love the ability to customize their profile pages adding music, graphics and pictures allowing them to express how cool they are. I kind of liked this idea in theory and set up a page. However, I didn’t really feel like learning the intricacies of setting up the code to customize my page. I do that for my personal website and as you see with my blog, I am perfectly happy with using preprogrammed page themes that are limited in their aesthetic because their function takes priority. Myspace has given birth to a kind of visual anarchy that makes it difficult for me to even view friends and friends of friends’ pages. Also, I never really felt like writing on the walls of their pages and used the internal messaging functions rarely. Again it became another network tool that seemed frivolous and useless to me.
But now there is Facebook. Facebook is a network that I’m exploring more. This is because it is designed in away giving the user less choice in aesthetic but with functionality that is better suited for my purposes. In it’s function it provides a news feed that allows friends to passively promote as well as be updated with the activities of other friends in their network. For me this function is key. Now when I post a blog such as this one in which I feel does not merit a mass email to all my friends and associates, I now have a place that I can syndicate it to those in my network.
Now on another note, I was speaking to a friend of mine and he had told me that Home Land Security and the NSA where directly involved with development of Facebook. This maybe true. Remember… Big Brother is always watching!