Gateway is the video production workshop that I have been teaching for the past two years at the University of Macau.  It is a graduation project for 4th year students majoring in English communication that  I inherited.  Generally speaking, each semester involves a theme.  I have consistently tried to theme the course in a way that straddles the border between narrative fiction and documentary or ethnographic approaches.  This semester, the contrast of styles is clear as one film, “One less lonely fish,” is a narrative short and the other, “This Stop, Macau,”  is a kind of ethnographic reflection on the lives of mainland Chinese students studying at UM. The connection is between these films is that both are original approaches to the theme of “Crossing Cultures.”

I was a bit reluctant to use the name, “crossing cultures,” as it sounds a bit too anthropology 101 to my ears; but I eventually came around to it as good starting point.  I like it both because I can relate to it from my own personal experience of living in Macao; and I like it as it forces some working definition of culture.  What is it?  How can we work with it or combine it?  How can you mark or define it’s boundaries?  These questions are not so easily answered.  The student films are not so much answers as invitations to the audiences to consider along with them how we see and experience a world that is largely cross cultural.

You can watch “This Stop, Macau” here and soon I also hope to have “One less lonely fish” available.  We are also working to make the previous semesters films available.  I would love to hear feedback from anyone whose managed to find their way to this site and takes the time to watch these videos.  I am proud of their hard work and as always finish off the semester eager for the next.

+853 is the area code of Macau and the name of my student’s gateway video project this year. Empowered to work together as one production team, they were able to realize a larger scale project. The reward for all their hard work was a big turnout from the Macau community to see their premiere at the first “Commfest” festival of student work here at the University of Macau. Their invest and this large show of community support suggests a some what unrealized potential within Macau for local productions. I hope we can do our part in the University and work together with others locally to grow this scene and industry in Macau.

So thank you to everyone who participated in the production and the first screening. And for those of you reading this that didn’t, I’ll update this post later with information on where to see it.

Here are a few ways of searching of images that have been licensed using one of the creative commons licenses. First one can use google to search for such images from this link, http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2009/06/find-creative-commons-images-in-google.html and next you can do a similar search on flicker from here, http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/by-2.0/

Other sites include http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page and http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Image which contains links to still other archives of cc licensed images.

And for inspiration here are a few sites that focus on advertising. Adaccess http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/browse is a searchable archive maintained by Duke University. Coloribus http://www.coloribus.com is a large archive of advertising in print, tv, and radio. It has a searchable archive but the first page of results are only viewable without subscription.

And a collection of English perspectives on china, and chinese media/advertising, http://www.danwei.org/blogs/model_workers_eng_2008.php and
http://jeanneboden.typepad.com/jeanneboden/advertising/

And lastly some blogs that offer collections of older advertising and poster design, http://www.iisg.nl/landsberger/ provides a collection of Chinese propaganda posters. http://pzrservices.typepad.com/ contains vintage advertising of all kinds.

These are some initial logo designs for the launch of a unified end of the semester communication festival at the University of Macau. Also included is a new logo for “gateway,” the fourth year video workshop that I’ve been teaching over the past couple of semesters. The inspiration for the first design comes from one of the three, or four depending on how you count, bridges that connect Taipa and the University Campus with Macau.

I’ve been working with the open source paint program mypaint for the past few months. I noticed it when I came across it’s use in the Durian open movie project at the Blender Foundation. David Revoy is the concept artist for this project and a user of this relatively young program.

Working in mypaint feels like both a continuation of my studies of light and form in photography and 3d animation but also a significant departure. I’ve gained more confidence by using reference images; but still I feel like I am painting toward and not necessary with reference images. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I do see how a more experienced painter would use these references in another way.

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I had the pleasure of participating in the “This is My City” workshop in this summer. It was organized by Bert de Muynck, Mónica Carriço, Belgian and Portuguese architects working out of Beijing, and Nuno Soares, a local architect in Macau. The premise was to “explore Macau’s urban landscape by investigating the relation between the cultural/media imaginaries and the concrete conditions of the everyday.” Practically speaking, this involved surveying the city from a few hand picked vantage points and then a second day spent producing designs that envisioned possible directions for Macau’s future development.

It was nice being a tourist again in the city that has become my home over the past year. The rapid development and confined geography of Macau, together with the vernacular architecture of the gaming industry certainly make for a unique urban environment.

Below is a frame from a short animation I rendered for the exhibit and a speculative design of Macau’s future development. Their value obviously lays more in the attention they bring to their surrounding than any real architectural value.
Images from the exhibition can be found here

Quoting wikipedia, “from the theater, the French term mise en scène literally means “putting on stage.” When applied to the cinema, mise-en-scène refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement—sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting.[2] Mise-en-scène also includes the positioning and movement of actors on the set, which is called blocking. These are all the areas overseen by the director, and thus, in French film credits, the director’s title is metteur en scène, “putter on scene.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mise_en_scène

The International Film Society at the University of Macau is putting on a French New Wave film fest. The information is below and at the film society’s blog. The French New Wave ushered in a playfulness with regard to the conventions traditional genre filmmaking and a renewed enthusiasm for the techniques involved in such productions. This films are definitely worth checking out for those of you in the area.

A ratio is simply a relationship between two things. So for instance, the 16×9 frame is a ratio between the width and height of the frame. In terms of lighting, it is often talked about as the relationship between light and dark in a given image. In portrait photography this might be the relationship between the light and dark side of a subject’s face. In landscape photography it might be the lighting contrast between the foreground and background. Different ratios relate to different styles and traditions of photography and portraiture. A higher ratio, or bigger difference between light and darker is often reffered to as a contrasty image. Film noir light is a classic example of contrasty light. Hard, dark shadows slice through the frame punctuated by bright highlights. Often though, even in film noir lighting, subjects are lit with a softer or smaller ratio when shot in closeup. Particularly women are given a softer light so as to smooth out the contours of their face.

When lighting ratios near a 1:1 relationship, lighting can be refered to as “flat.” This is due to the leveling out of depth that occurs when things are lit from all directions with an equal amount of light. Contrast, on the other hand, reveals contours and dimensionality. There are no hard rules with regards too lighting ratios, there are simply traditions and impression of dimensionality one gets from various lighting ratios.

< -- the amount of space left or not left< -- above a subject's head
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