As with first semester, the class exam period is spent watching final projects. Seniors who hope to meet exemption guidelines for senior exams need to have their final film ready for showing by June 4, the last senior class period for Blue 2. Elsewise, they need to show up with their film on June 8.

From College Humor

Film noir is . . .

1. A French term meaning “black film,” or film of the night, inspired by the Series Noir, a line of cheap paperbacks that translated hard-boiled American crime authors and found a popular audience in France.
2. A movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending.
3. Locations that reek of the night, of shadows, of alleys, of the back doors of fancy places, of apartment buildings with a high turnover rate, of taxi drivers and bartenders who have seen it all.
4. Cigarettes. Everybody in film noir is always smoking, as if to say, “On top of everything else, I’ve been assigned to get through three packs today.” The best smoking movie of all time is “Out of the Past,” in which Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas smoke furiously at each other. At one point, Mitchum enters a room, Douglas extends a pack and says, “Cigarette?” and Mitchum, holding up his hand, says, “Smoking.”
5. Women who would just as soon kill you as love you, and vice versa.
6. For women: low necklines, floppy hats, mascara, lipstick, dressing rooms, boudoirs, calling the doorman by his first name, high heels, red dresses, elbowlength gloves, mixing drinks, having gangsters as boyfriends, having soft spots for alcoholic private eyes, wanting a lot of someone else’s women, sprawling dead on the floor with every limb meticulously arranged and every hair in place.
7. For men: fedoras, suits and ties, shabby residential hotels with a neon sign blinking through the window, buying yourself a drink out of the office bottle, cars with running boards, all-night diners, protecting kids who shouldn’t be playing with the big guys, being on first-name terms with homicide cops, knowing a lot of people whose descriptions end in “ies,” such as bookies, newsies, junkies, alkys, jockeys and cabbies.
8. Movies either shot in black and white, or feeling like they were.
9. Relationships in which love is only the final flop card in the poker game of death.
10. The most American film genre, because no society could have created a world so filled with doom, fate, fear and betrayal, unless it were essentially naive and optimistic.

(from Roger Ebert’s Journal)

Classic web series, as reported in the New York Times, that started as self-financed, and then got a Vimeo contract. Former Mt. Ararat students are starting a web series in April, Good Grief.

iPhocus is a well-made iPhone app that lets you control depth of field. It will even do rack focus (if you can hold the phone steady enough).

Old article, but conceptually nothing has changed: use a transparent png as a cutaway to lay an image (words/title/etc.) on top of a clip.

Instagram’s Hyperlapse can produce astonishing video, using the iPhone’s gyroscopes to perform auto-stabilization. It can do this in time-lapse mode, and, surprisingly (for an app called “Hyperlapse”), 1X straight-up video.

Austin Mann has a new page with some great tips and examples of how to use it. Tip #1 explains how to use 4-finger-tap to access 1080p and much more.

Interesting analysis of how the new slow motion algorithm works on iPhone 6/6+.

FStoppers has a major article on the viral skiing video “One Of Those Days Part 2.” They wondered the same thing we did: how did they do the “putting on the googles in the mirror” shot? It’s discussed in the article (short answer: After Effects, and in the comments, in much more detail.

Interesting subtext about the “studied casualness” of the video.

Might be a fun project – shooting a convincing forced perspective scene using a miniature. Would work well even with a fixed-focus camera, since it’s focused from 1 or 2 feet to infinity.