Richland Digital Video Evening Class 2017

Hi everyone. Tran here. After I read “The Writings of Dziga Vertov”, I saw some interesting points to think. One of them is that the author is sure about the quality of cameras. He thinks that they are much better than human eyes. They could not be limited by time and space like our eyes. They show what they see to the real world without distort like theater, which is a new concept he wants to mention. From there, I think he supports for anti-illusionism theory. He likes something real and alive like documentary or biography. However, as an artist, is there any contrast inside here? In my view, I think we need illusion to make the stories or films more attractive.  

My take away from this article was that the author feels that the cinematographer has been restricted when filming, to seeing things from the natural eye's perspective. It is an interesting prospective to think of how the camera can help you see things better than what the human eye can. I also think that his way of creating films seems to break the rules of Continuity principles that we used to complete our first video.

one of the most important elements in a movie is cinematography! That's why videographers try to show you different perspectives and camera angles, it may be things that you witness in your daily life but not from that perspective or angle. My personal opinion is that perfect angles are everything, it would make a movie a winner or a loser. I always look for different angles when I'm shooting but after reading what Dziga vertov did I'll try to look harder for better angles!

What I learned about the Kino Eye is how it captures what the human eyes cannot at times. The way the camera makes what I'm seeing more interesting was not something that I'm used to; it also brought a new perspective on different types of filmmaking there are out there.

To be honest, even though I tried, I still don't really understand what is this reading is about. But I think I still get the gist of it. I believe it is about the different point of view of a human eye compared to the eye of the camera. The way I see things is different than the way things are depicted on film. Like when watching a horror film, the director will choose creepy things to film instead of cute and colorful thing to describe a mysterious, scary atmosphere. After reading this, I know that I need to pay more attention to normal things I see in life. So that when I want to create a certain feeling in my movie, I will know what things I should put in my product.

Kino eyes – Dziga Vertov has given me a brand new point of view of using camera to make a movie. I used to think that camera was just a tool for me to create my creation. Somehow, it was the same as a printer which would copy my thoughts and my opinion and made them become a logic montage for me to tell the story. Therefore, after reading Kino eyes, I am really surprised about how amazing and great a camera can do. I now know that, cameraman are trying to show viewers a thousand varieties of camera angles and this make viewer have a more completed point of view whenever they watch a TV show or a movie. We can describe and create emotions and concepts of the movie through camera, on the other ways, it can be said that camera will make sense everything. For example, low angles usually describe how scaried  a character is. In conclusion, Kino eyes – Dziga Vertov has made me change my thoughts about using camera when making movie. 

     The reading had some interesting (albeit unusual) points that contrast with the filming standard at the time. One of the main things people tried to do with film was to emulate what the human eye could see with the camera. But the Kino-Eye style contrasts that, by wanting to do what a camera cannot do while emulating the human eye. Capturing motion of objects, chaos, and other elements that made things look unnatural in traditional formats is what the Kino-Eye aimed to achieve. It is definitely an interesting perspective and I don't think I would have considered "capturing chaos" as a objective of filming. Overall, I think this reading has given me more to consider and made me think about "how" I want to film, having choices between human eye emulation vs. Kino-Eye motion and chaos, which is something I had not considered up to this point.