Video&Sound Final Project: A Documentary about acupuncturist

The video: https://vimeo.com/109993924

Things I learned:

I learned so much thing through this whole process, like how to choose a topic for a documentary, how to set story board, how to set key shoot, how to use 5D, how to edit video, and how to work as a team.

About the topic:

I knew nothing about acupuncture before. I just thought acupuncture was a ancient Chinese treatment. However, as we got to know the acupuncture through shooting the documentary, I was amazed by the acupuncturist. The acupuncturist can tell my current body state just by taking my pulse. She told me that I drank too less water per day, and I was a little bit stress out. She also asked me whether I had asthma before. And the truth is, I indeed had asthma when I was younger. And I also saw the patient who really felt much better after the treatment. We even interviewed an old man who told us the acupuncture help him avoid getting a surgery.

Here's the story board I drew:

I considered close-up shot, medium shot and wide shot.

Video&Sound week 2: create a short sound piece

I recorded the sound in the subway station,  and a conversation happened in the train, and mixed them with a song called Bullet train. https://soundcloud.com/septends/yining-videosound-assignment

I'm inspired by a poem called the commuter's lament. The poem is printed on the ceiling of in a subway station. The poem expresses every commuter's feeling.

Here's the conversation happened in the subway.

I want to express the feeling that in the morning, in the subway train, people are tired, overslept. But the train is so fast, the life is so fast, drives us to reality. Just like a song's lyric:

This is our decision to live fast and die young. We've got the vision, now let's have some fun. Yeah it's overwhelming, but what else can we do? Get jobs in offices and wake up for the morning commute?

Video&Sound Week 1: Sound Walk "Her Long Black hair"

This is the first time I experienced a Sound&Art work. I heard a woman's peaceful and sad voice, the foot steps, the songs, the sound of the birds and trees and other sounds.  All the sounds felt so real and dragged me into woman's story. Sometimes, I felt a mom spoke behind me, and sometimes I listened a man singing far far away from me. The sound is 3D, it creates an experience of physical immediacy. I'm so fascinated to this technology, and want to learn how to build sound like this. I heard about this technology before. This time, I googled it, and figured out its principle. Binaural recording is a method of recording sound that uses two microphones, arranged with the intent to create a 3D sound sensation for the listener of actually being in the room with the performers or instruments. Actually the principle is simple, the experience is very appealing. In the sound walk, I retraced the footsteps of an dark-haired woman. Listening to the instruction of the woman voice, and I saw the ice cream car and portraitists she's talking about. This is a amazing way to see what's the artist seeing, to hear what's she hearing, to feel what's she feeling, and in the end understand what's she thinking. Here's is the ice cream car and portraitists picture I took. Look, a portraitist was waving at me.

In the journey of tracing the woman's footsteps, the pictures really help to get me into the story. My favorite story is that the author encounter a man when she's looking at the this picture below. The man said, the woman in the picture is like his mother who has long black hair. His mother left him and went to New York City when he was 7. His dad wouldn't let him talk to his mother, and was just sitting ing the kitchen, drinking. The man blamed his father for this, but now he realized how sad was he. And then the man asked author what time is it, he had to go back to the hotel, because his wife may come back soon. I saw the impact from one generation to the next generation. The leaving happened in the man's childhood make him more care about his wife and their happiness.

There are so many information in the all journey. The local history, opera and gospel music. The other story moved me is the polo bear. The polo bear is like a slave, A man's suffering voice speaks for the polo bear and show us the history of the slavery. I also find many things changed since author's visitor in 2005. There is no pole bear in the park anymore. The last polo bear died in last year. They were too old. And this made me started to think, after the time went by, the pain will disappear, and  people can finally have a happy ending, just like the men who doesn't have a happy childhood, but he has a loving wife in the end.

Video&Sound Week 1: The new one can be not original, but it should be valuable.

Before I watched the 2 videos and read the 2 articles, I thought that originality is really good, but it also confuses me. Because back to the fourth year of my college, I was asked to design an interactive tool for children to learn some basic programming concepts. At first, I was very excited about designing something on my own, and I wanted to come up with something really "original" and cool. But after trying to build my original tool for 2 weeks, I found it's really hard for me to create an idea from nowhere. So I asked my advisor for help. She suggested me to get to know others' great work from their papers, and find their advantages and disadvantages, and think about how to improve their work. I did much literature review, and got inspired by many great ideas. Finally, I developed a new idea based on the work from MIT Media Lab, but my tool has two more advantages than MIT's work. And in the end, our work got published on a international conference(Interaction Design for Children). This experience made me start thinking about the originality and the value of one's work. And I believed the value of one's work matters more than its originality since then.  

After I read the articles and watched the videos, I learned a new point of view: maybe there is no originality. I have to admit that I never thought this before, it really blew my mind.

In the "embrace the remix" video, the speaker said, "Creator of everything is a Remix , we're always depend on each other". Bob Dylan said, "you can copy, transform and combine to make your own work". The rich example in the video made me agree with its view. Steve Jobs' Multi Touch is one example that really convince me. Many technologies in Apple's devices is really not original, like Multi Touch and "Pull up to see the menu" and so on. Some technologies are even already used on Android's phone three years ago. It seems very ironic that many users always accuse other company plagiarize Apple when they see some common features on two devices from the two company. I'm not saying that Apple plagiarize other company, I'm saying that being purely original is impossible and there must be something more important than originality. In this case, Apple seems more successful than other companies, although other companies brought up new technology first. I think it's because Apple made users believe in it, believe Apple is the best, is the most creative one.

In "The ecstasy of influence" article, a word caught my eyes--cryptomnesia. Cryptomnesia is a memory bias that occurs when a person mistakenly believes that they have come up with an original thought, idea, song or joke, when it was actually generated by someone else. The author also brought out this question "did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?" I started to think, if a person unconsciously borrow other's idea, does he break the patent law or not? Or if a person consciously borrow other's idea but his work is valuable,  does he break the patent law or not? At this time, I don't the answer, and I started to double the patent law...I googled the purpose of the patent law. It says, "The basic aim of patent law is the balance of the interests of inventors on one hand and the interests of the public on the other hand. The inventors are rewarded with a limited exclusive right on their invention, for providing technical progress to the public." I think the inspiration that comes from inventors is a important part of their contribution to the public. So I couldn't help but standing on the side of the JOY GARNETT in the "MOLOTOV man" article.

Now I have a philosophical question. In the "Allergy to Originality" video, it said,"every book is rewritten." If everything new is rewritten or re-performed from an old one, where did the very first one idea come from? I know this question maybe a little strange, but I was just wondering.