English 585 Journals

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Paul Sharits' T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G

Response to Paul Sharits' T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G:

In response to Paul Sharits' T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, I wanted to see how I could make a digital structural film. I photographed my own tongue as the subject of the movie. I have the peculiar ability of curling my tongue into three waves, which I did for this shot. I then recorded the soundtrack in the three languages I speak, beginning with English, my primary spoken language, then Hungarian, which I learned along with English but speak less frequently, and finally French which I learned in school. To do so, I used the Garage Band program that came with my computer.

The word spoken in each language means both tongue, the body part, and language, drawing attention to the sound of the language and the tongue that made the noise. I also have a low track of me making a clucking noise with my tongue, the only other "tongue only" noise I could make.

For the movie itself I began by importing the picture into iMovie. I let the first few frames last for one second to ease the viewer into the movie, but each subsequent still lasts 0.3 seconds, the shortest time iMovie will allow. I then altered each shot by changing different elements in the Video Adjustment menu. I also planned on zooming closer and closer in on the picture ending with pixels, but iMovie would only cut the frame down to the smallest size that appears in the movie.

In this way, the film is constructed according to the constraints of the program my computer comes with, and the pseudo flickering effect is created by the Video Adjustment options provided. I can curl my tongue in three and speak three languages, and by chance, the constrain of the .3 second image in iMovie aligned perfectly with this trend, so that there are three sets of threes governing the movie.