CRV: Process Piece: Cooking

(with Mitchell Dunn)

As we got together to work on this process piece, we both became increasingly aware of the sounds made by simple processes.  In fact, many of the sounds became more interesting to listen to when isolated from their visual context.  The process of cooking is filled with a wide variety of sounds, and as most of those are rather easily identifiable and interesting, it made sense for us to choose this to document.  

Hearing the audio of various processes without actually seeing them happening is rather common in films but more obviously in podcasts.  A completely fictional podcast entitled “Hello From The Magic Tavern” has background processes going on throughout each piece.  These are composed mainly of unnamed people conversing, eating and drinking, but they are drowned out by the main characters in the podcast.  At least once in every episode, there is a track of a confused Burger King employee working at the drive-through and trying to figure out what the strange interference is which he is getting on his headset.  Another piece (this one a lot more serious) has people telling their stories as a foghorn sounds several times as a symbol (https://beta.prx.org/stories/118343).

But using more basic sounds with little to no vocals is quite a bit different.  The sounds can become ambiguous sometimes and can be mixed in new and creative ways to describe entirely different processes. Originally, an entire elaborate dinner was planned to be recorded and cut down, but after listening to all the sound recorded by both of us, we decided to use the sounds we had in common to simplify the process to harvesting, preparing, and cooking potatoes. The beginning captures the actual digging up of potatoes from the earth. The potatoes are then ran under water and chopped up before being boiled. Finally, the dinner table is set and the food is served, and at the end, the leftovers are wrapped and stored.

The dinner preparation was simple enough to record on a smartphone, with each individual sound effect divided into separate files. After transferring them to a computer, they were imported into a film-editing program and trimmed down to 1 ½ minutes. Each segment was only given up to ten seconds before transitioning to the next - it doesn’t take much to recognize or guess what it is. The whole piece together gives off the sound of food going through it’s natural course, from the earth to the plate.

CRV: Round Robin: Boy with a Paper

Collaboration on projects always seems to prove problematic, especially when a grade is involved. However, with this assignment, we felt like the project focused more on collaborating and fostering creativity than working towards a good grade despite the fact you are working with others. Something that was interesting about this project was that you did not necessarily have to continue the story, but could change the direction based on an aspect you liked within the story, such as an object or a theme. This allowed for a broader scope of ideas to make the stories change and progress more drastically until they were something completely their own, like how DJ Spooky asserts that Pacman is a mere derivative of Chutes and Ladders, comprising of samples taken from the latter to create a new, relatively original game. As long as each of us used our own artistic talent to our best ability, that made the storytelling process worth it.

Something else that made this project stimulating (and to some even challenging) was the word limit on the stories. Not only did you have to create a story from the work of someone else, but you had to do it in thirty words or less. So while the directions you could take your peers’ stories were endless, they were also limited in that they must have completed or resembled an entire story arc within those parameters, which required us to be clever and creative in the way we presented our pieces.

Working on individual stories and drawing pictures for them was fun, but seeing all the separate stories together as one series is quite enlightening, and even humorous. This definitely helped debunk a commonly held notion that all collaborations or group projects are painful. It has shed a bright light on the appeal of widespread collaborative projects, like the Tiny Book of Tiny Stories series, which was started by Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRecord. It was also humbling to learn that others’ ideas and stories can take your story in a direction you may have never even considered, which can help anyone get out of a creative rut. While they may not have been decisions you personally would have made creatively, it still resulted in pieces that were entertaining, well-crafted, and new. It helped us get out of our minds and to be more open to other ideas, suggestions, and even whole worlds that are held in our stories’ potential.

No. 1: by Me

A boy drew out a piece of paper to draw on, 

but realized he ran out of things to draw with.

No. 2: by Rebekah Olson

 No. 3: by Michael Stanley

 No. 4: by Nadia Turek

Out of no where, his stuffed duck came to life 

and was very angry because there were no hats at this celebration.

 No. 5: by Rebekah Olson

He ripped a strip off the bottom of his pant-leg and rolled it in to a party hat, 

placing it on the stuffed duck's head, so the party could continue happily.

CRV: Music Mosaic: "Drive to Freedom" by Steven Price

Nothing reassures me about life more than being out in nature. Steven Price’s “Drive to Freedom” is an expression to me of the wonderment of nature and the distractions of human intervention. His use of electronic notes mixed with real instruments, piano and strings, fluctuate between each other like my own life experiences of finding excitement in a modern urban society, followed by the refreshing joy of just being in nature. There seems to be no single way to perform this song, with so many pieces to it, so I chose to have some of my pictures portray different views on common places in life.

The article “Seeing” by Annie Dillard touches heavily on learning to see things differently, or seeing things for the first time. In her section where she quoted the findings of doctors who removed cataracts of blind people, the reactions of those people to newfound sight are all very interesting and quite sad at first. They just don’t know what to do with their sight, how to attach it to things and how to use it to navigate. As one observer pointed out, they are just as babies born with sight from that point. It may take years to get used to it.

In a similar way, it takes anyone a while to get used to a new way of seeing things. Something I’m used to seeing right now is the sky, with the clouds and sun. What always makes a view of the sky unique is if something else is visible on the side, as long as it’s not the main feature. I show this in the Photoshopped image of the sun with a bird to the left of it, and the real images with different buildings off to the side of an overcast sky and a partly cloudy sky. Something else I’m used to seeing (being in college) is being in crowds of people. A way of seeing that which I’m not used to is seeing those crowds from a bird’s eye view, so I took pictures of class breaks both on the ground and from a four-story balcony.

The focus then shifts away from urban society to out in the country, where you can tell the environment has changed just from the sight of tall, dry grass. Some of the more majestic views are out where barely any people live, and the place I chose just outside of Spanish Fork, Utah comes with fields, the nearby Utah Lake, and the West Mountain. The final shot I took of my car facing right, looking down into the valley below, showcases the rewards, as well as future possibilities, of searching for escapes from human distractions.

"Drive to Freedom", by Steven Price: Spotify, YouTube (first song)

CRV: Thinking & Writing: "The Tree of Life" for Life

Independent movies that get a limited release hardly get noticed by the general public. Even rarer is when such a movie gets a Best Picture nomination at the Oscars. And even rarer beyond that, is such a nominee a huge advocate for spiritual and family values. In 2012, such a nominee came to public attention in the form of the film The Tree of Life, being written and directed by Terrence Malick, whose other films include Badlands, The Thin Red Line, and The New World. A faith-based family movie about finding the meaning of life that is critically noticed and acclaimed? One would think this would be among the top of anyone’s list, but the general people say otherwise, that it was too “artsy”, ambiguous, and couldn’t carry whatever intentions it had across to the average viewer, especially one who is more bent on fast-paced films such as Avatar or the Marvel movies. Philosophical films that actually inspire questions and respectable views on life, that deserve to be embraced, sadly drown in a world demanding the easier/edgier things, where the average idea of a family is becoming just a recipe for disaster, and it’s continually showing that it’s separating from ideal love.

The Tree of Life premiered at the 2011 Cannes Film festival, winning the Palme d’Or award, the festival’s highest honor (http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/archives/2011/awardCompetition.html). It’s interesting to note that at that same event, the audience gave mixed feedback including applause and boos (http://www.hollywoodnews.com/2011/05/16/brad-pitt-terrence-malicks-tree-of-life-booed-in-cannes/). The resulting responses from the rest of those few who got to see it during its limited theatrical run and release on Blu-ray almost proved no different, with its RottenTomatoes.com audience score averaging at 60%. On the outside, this could easily seem to be another case of artsy movies being accepted more by the pundits than the people, but another analysis shows this as a representation of how the values of the world in general have slipped so far from the things that really matter, that they can’t recognize them anymore. One critic who sympathized with the haters summarized it with this: “Could a work of art be more handsome? Could it be more borderline profound? This movie weighs so much, yet contains so little. It’s all vault and little coin.” http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2011/06/03/movie_review_terrence_malicks_the_tree_of_life_open_to_interpretation/?page=full)

So what is The Tree of Life actually about? It’s an impressionistic story mainly focused on a Catholic Texas family in the ‘50s. The unnamed father (Brad Pitt) and mother (Jessica Chastain) are polar opposites in their household, and their three sons struggle to know what direction to follow in terms of their views on life and love. The film revolves around the eldest son, Jack (Hunter McCracken), and even inter-cuts flash-forwards to the present day (2008-ish) when adult Jack (Sean Penn) struggles to remember his incentive on pushing forward in life. We basically fly through normal-life experiences of young Jack involving him with his parents, brothers, and neighborhood friends; and see his emotions as they grow ever deeper. The film also features a few sequences from only a god-like point of view that show the creation of the universe and life as we know it, followed up by the foreseen end of the earth, and finishing with a portrayal of the paradise of Heaven.

What made this film a critical darling was mainly its story, direction and cinematography, but the key to it being so emotionally special is its underrated message of the delicate tie of family that is so easily harmed by acts of anger and bitterness; as well as the real power of humility and forgiveness applied to it. This kind of message isn’t invisible to viewers, and some critics even positively identified with it, such as in this review by Roger Ebert, who grew up in a very similar setting to what Terrence Malick did:

"…I know the imperfect family life Malick evokes. I know how even good parents sometimes lose their tempers. How children resent what seems to be the unforgivable cruelty of one parent, and the refuge seemingly offered by the other. … What Malick does in "The Tree of Life" is create the span of lives. Of birth, childhood, the flush of triumph, the anger of belittlement, the poison of resentment, the warmth of forgiving.” (http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/a-prayer-beneath-the-tree-of-life)

Granted, the film is a strangely constructed one. It’s a non-linear narrative, which is always difficult for someone to piece together and figure out the purpose of presenting the story as shuffled. There’s barely any dialogue, with half of what’s there being a “thinking voiceover” (a staple for Malick's films). Even more striking is the visuals, such as a shot of a kitchen chair moving seemingly on its own, one of the family’s mother bobbing up and down in mid-air for some contemplative reason, or another that just stares at a blank wall. The extra-narrative scenes likely confuse the most, with outer space shots being compressed with nebulas and stars, microscopic shots of cells and animal fetuses, and the final scene with familiar people walking around on a sandy beach; all backed up with ambiguously unique music comprised of a solo female opera singer and a separate choir. These examples and more only function as symbolism, and analysis of which is barely ever taught in today’s society. Thinking back, you may never find another professional movie that portrays the creation of the universe so reverently and focused, as to allude to a divine design, or a movie where Heaven is not shown as appearing on clouds but still encompassing natural beauty, and most importantly, where families are all brought back together and happily go on loving each other.

Here’s The Tree of Life’s philosophy: nothing stands still. The hustles and trouble in it mean nothing in the long run. What does mean something is happiness and kindness. That’s what makes real change in people’s hearts and minds, and it’s imperative to family growth. Who can possibly deny that our current society, let alone our world, increasingly needs that?