Reflection

At the beginning of this class, I considered myself nothing but an editor. It seemed that editing was all I really felt prepared to do. And while I still do not considered myself a narrative writer in any way, I do now feel that I have more knowledge to pull from that will help me improve my writing and storytelling skills.
As this semester has flown by, I have had more fun making audio and video projects than ever before. I have felt encouraged to be creative and this creativity has allowed for a lot more hands-on time with both Final Cut Pro and our new JVC HD cameras. Through this increased practice of composing new media pieces every few weeks, I have been lucky enough to be challenged by obstacles that I never would have taken the time to figure out and learn from without being pushed to create on a more regular basis.
The pieces I have turned in for this class, as well as for my experimental film class, have stirred up a strange combination of feelings for me as a student of film. Between the excitement of new possibilities and ideas, the frustration of their actual creation, and the relief of turning in a finished product, my emotions have run the gamut. But through utilizing the skills and theories learned in the classroom I have become at least a more confident media-maker, and at most, a better one.
Now that we are at the conclusion of what will be my last semester of actual classes, I feel that I am better prepared as both a storyteller and a filmmaker for whatever lies in my path. I will take both the theoretical and practical aspects of what I have learned and use them to better myself, as well as my film-making.

Like Spinning Plates

Like Spinning Plates from Kyle Mathews on Vimeo.

beatles remix in mono

Up until the last few albums they released, The Beatles saw the monophonic mix as the primary version of their albums. The stereo mixes were mixed by record companies as a gimmick. Usually, these stereo versions were terribly mixed, with vocals only in the right channel and instruments only in the left channel.

The reasoning behind this lack of focus on the stereo mixes comes from the limits of musical technology adoption. During the Sixties, most music was played on monophonic record players, jukeboxes, or AM radio. Listening to music in headphones, where the left and right channels are clearly separated, was just not the norm.

Due to this separation of instrumentation from the vocals, I was able to reconstruct pieces of songs by The Beatles into a new and original work.

Recently, I have come across two very interesting YouTube channels...

The first one is for a music group called Pompalamoose. They make, what they have dubbed, VideoSongs. A new medium that has two rules: Number 1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice). & Number 2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).




And the second comes from a guy that goes by the alias of MysteryGuitarMan. He makes a variety of musical videos, that are fun and overly/overtly technical.

Zombies!

Untitled from Kyle Mathews on Vimeo.

digital stories

Minutiae is the story of a man that has become too busy with life and raising two small children to have any big stories to tell. This makes digital storytelling the best means for Mark Rubin-Toles to illustrate the ridiculousness of his morning routine to an outsider. His digital story was created in June of 2007 in Tuscon, AZ and it exists solely to walk you through Mark's daily routine. Mark utilized photographs, videos, and music to encapsulate every detail of his morning and is edited with a sense of dry humor that follows exactly with his voiceover. Among the details of Mark's life, I found the quotes from his son Max to be the gems of this video, as well as his slightly cheesy use of quick edits that follow as he fills his pockets for the day ahead of him.



When Bix Gabriel moved away from her home in Hyderabad, India, she never would have thought that would lose touch with her roots. But as time passed without her in Hyderabad, the city transformed into something totally different. It was no longer the city of her childhood and she came to realize that she could never return. Bix utilizes nothing more than still photographs and the sound of chimes to tell the story of her Home... in Past Tense. This story engages me because I find the idea of returning to somewhere familiar, but it not being as you remembered to be a fascinating commentary on the notion of "progress" and what exactly that word truly means.

katie/mitch

For this project, I fused a recording I did of the musically gifted Mitch Guenther with a recent recording of my friend Katie recollecting a true story of her aunt's funeral.

"So it goes."

Media Diet

My life is inundated with media consumption. It is simply something that I enjoy, whether as focal point or background. My perception of most media outlets is that of a source of entertainment and an inspiration to make something better.

My only reservation with the assignment of logging my "media diet" was the worry that I wouldn't be able to remember to log every instance of my media consumption. This doubt inevitably became truth and the media I did remember to log was mostly in retrospect.

One aspect of this assignment, that I do not believe is humanly possible, would be the task of comprehensively logging every contact one has with the cluttered world of advertisements. So, for the sake of my sanity, I have abridged the countless advertisements from my logs.

Just glancing over my media diet, it was easy to spot patterns: Music is almost always playing in the background of my life via anything from my iPod, the radio, iTunes, CDs, or vinyl; I tend to check my email, Facebook, and several blogs numerous times throughout the course of a day; & I love watching movies and TV on DVD. Another pattern I noticed was my extreme preference for choice when it comes to my media consumption, but who prefers not to control the media to which they are exposed?

Long Portrait.

Music by +/-