Hello Everybody,
After investigating Frida Kahlo's life and paintings for 5 weeks, I started feeling like "I want to be her!!!!!!!"
(without the mustache part of course :))))
So at the end of our class here's a little overlook of the movie I chose and the conceptual solution of the opening titles I am redesigning:
Frida Kahlo is known for her surreal style and unique method of self-portrait paintings in art history. The movie traces Kahlo's story, from the debilitating trolley accident she suffered as a teen and her stormy relationship with muralist husband Diego Rivera to the duo's many extramarital flings and Kahlo's search for her own identity in her art. It explains the stories behind her paintings and the movie does a good job by covering them in a unique way that is not too far from Frida Kahlo's style. Puppet and 3D Animations, and collage style motion graphics integrates with her paintings in various scenes.
In most of these scenes reproductions of Frida Kahlo paintings are used with changed portraits of Frida to Salma Hayek, actress starred as Frida. This works together with the movie as a whole piece and story telling element, but looking from a broader picture since the movie is all about Frida Kahlo and her paintings, apparently we end up not seeing any examples of her original paintings.
Because of this reason for the redesign of the opening titles I decided to use Kahlo's self-portraits. This would give a chance to the viewer to experience Frida's original art and it would create the mood of the movie before the story starts. Since all of her paintings are strongly expressive by their own, I mostly used simple cuts and transitions between the paintings in my animatic. I traced some objects out of her paintings and used them as active elements to create visual flow and consistency in motion and transition. Kahlo used her handwriting in lots of her paintings and I found it appropriate to trace the letters out from her various paintings and create the titles out of her own script. I didn't use the same song of the original opening but edited the length of a song from the award winning soundtrack of the movie.
I'm still working on the animatic and wish to bring something as close as possible of the picture in my head for next class. I hope everybody else is doing great with their titles and I'm curriosly waiting for wednesday to see the results.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
FRIDA_ a film by Julie Taymor
Hello Everyone,
Congratulations, everybody picked up really good movies so far and I'm very excited to see the results.
Since our last class, I watched a lot of old and new movies, the ones that I saw and watched over and over and also some I never watched before.. It's true Tamar, there are LOTS of great movies out there, it was hard to pick one up.
For the ones who don't know I would strongly recommend Brooklyn Library's Media Library department which is downstairs of Brooklyn Library building, it's open till 11 pm during weekdays and there's a great archive. You can watch either there or take DVD's, VHS's out with your student ID's for free..
Saying that I would like to talk about the movie I picked for this assignment, it's FRIDA. It's a film made by Julie Taymor in 2002 based on the book Frida by Hayden Herrera which tells the real-life story of artist Frida Kahlo(1907-54).
The reason I picked this movie is first, because I really like Frida's paintings a lot and I thought that would be a great element to play with in the opening credits.
The movie is great as well, it won Academy Awards for Best Makeup and Best Music, Original Score. It was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Salma Hayek), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design and Best Music, Original Song..
The Movie focuses on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera whose lives were bound up with some of the great issues of the twentieth century. The Mexican and Russian Revolutions, Trotskyism and Stalinism, socialism and art.
Besides providing a skeletal biography of Frida Kahlo, essentially devoid of historical, political and artistic analysis, another reason for me to pick up this movie was how director Taymor spiced up the movie with some great graphics, animation and puppetry that would help me to build up the graphics for my version of opening titles for this movie.
Frida begins and ends with the artist’s trademark colors surrealistically grafted onto scenes of her courtyard, where monkeys and peacocks magically wander among the flowering cactuses. A masterful use of puppets occurs in the unsettling dream sequence when chattering Day of the Dead figures minister to Kahlo in the hospital after her near-fatal accident. In a jarring manner, paintings come into being in “real time.” Kahlo’s famous self-portrait with fetus springs forth graphically from the misery and pain of her miscarriage. Human beings flatten into painting surfaces and paintings become three-dimensional. In New York City, Frida’s emotional state concerning Diego’s womanizing is given visual expression in the King Kong mechanical cut-out sequence, with Kong-Diego terrorizing the city and meeting his demise atop the Empire State building.
Despite this rich usage of graphics in the movie, the original opening titles integrate with some simple script font to the footage at the start of the movie. It's a great camera movement and compositionally it works very good but I'm still curious how it would look with a graphical approach.
I want to make a good search of Frida's paintings, her early and late works that I could use in the opening. I read that some of the paintings used in the movie were made by Salma Hayek, so I will take a look at those as well, and may be draw myself to get things work, it sounds exciting, we'll see..
good luck
nesli
Congratulations, everybody picked up really good movies so far and I'm very excited to see the results.
Since our last class, I watched a lot of old and new movies, the ones that I saw and watched over and over and also some I never watched before.. It's true Tamar, there are LOTS of great movies out there, it was hard to pick one up.
For the ones who don't know I would strongly recommend Brooklyn Library's Media Library department which is downstairs of Brooklyn Library building, it's open till 11 pm during weekdays and there's a great archive. You can watch either there or take DVD's, VHS's out with your student ID's for free..
Saying that I would like to talk about the movie I picked for this assignment, it's FRIDA. It's a film made by Julie Taymor in 2002 based on the book Frida by Hayden Herrera which tells the real-life story of artist Frida Kahlo(1907-54).
The reason I picked this movie is first, because I really like Frida's paintings a lot and I thought that would be a great element to play with in the opening credits.
The movie is great as well, it won Academy Awards for Best Makeup and Best Music, Original Score. It was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role (Salma Hayek), Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Costume Design and Best Music, Original Song..
The Movie focuses on the relationship between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera whose lives were bound up with some of the great issues of the twentieth century. The Mexican and Russian Revolutions, Trotskyism and Stalinism, socialism and art.
Besides providing a skeletal biography of Frida Kahlo, essentially devoid of historical, political and artistic analysis, another reason for me to pick up this movie was how director Taymor spiced up the movie with some great graphics, animation and puppetry that would help me to build up the graphics for my version of opening titles for this movie.
Frida begins and ends with the artist’s trademark colors surrealistically grafted onto scenes of her courtyard, where monkeys and peacocks magically wander among the flowering cactuses. A masterful use of puppets occurs in the unsettling dream sequence when chattering Day of the Dead figures minister to Kahlo in the hospital after her near-fatal accident. In a jarring manner, paintings come into being in “real time.” Kahlo’s famous self-portrait with fetus springs forth graphically from the misery and pain of her miscarriage. Human beings flatten into painting surfaces and paintings become three-dimensional. In New York City, Frida’s emotional state concerning Diego’s womanizing is given visual expression in the King Kong mechanical cut-out sequence, with Kong-Diego terrorizing the city and meeting his demise atop the Empire State building.
Despite this rich usage of graphics in the movie, the original opening titles integrate with some simple script font to the footage at the start of the movie. It's a great camera movement and compositionally it works very good but I'm still curious how it would look with a graphical approach.
I want to make a good search of Frida's paintings, her early and late works that I could use in the opening. I read that some of the paintings used in the movie were made by Salma Hayek, so I will take a look at those as well, and may be draw myself to get things work, it sounds exciting, we'll see..
good luck
nesli
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Hello to Film Title cLass
Hello everybody,
It's nice and exciting to send my first blog up to you guys,
so right on this class gonna rock!!!!
Best
Nesli
It's nice and exciting to send my first blog up to you guys,
so right on this class gonna rock!!!!
Best
Nesli
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