MOMI Response

My trip to The Museum of the Moving Image was a fun experience. Although this was not my first time attending the museum it was still amusing playing around with the different exhibits. The tour did not take very long and we only got to focus on a few aspects of moving image technology but I thought it was still a useful experience as a group.

The first exhibit we went to was the music for a specific scene. The tour guide chose a scene from Vertigo and played different musical options and asked for our feedbacks on each other. The music was important because it created an emotion and had the audience connect to the scene we were watching. Some of the musical choices did not coincide with the scene and the last choice won. It taught the group to understand how important it was to have a piece of music that worked with the message the scene was trying to communicate.

The second exhibit was the sound effects for a Simpsons scene. We were able to decide on which sound effects we thought were appropriate for which parts in the scene. This scene consisted of us choosing the sound of the clock, the answer fill in, the pogo stick, the erasing an answer and the eyebrow movements by Milhouse. The significance of this exhibit was to understand the importance the sound of a specific effect could have on a scene as a whole.

The third exhibit was the Titanic scene. This was really fun because the times I've come here before I was unable to experience this exhibit as you needed someone who worked there to log into the computer. The tour guide took us through the scene in Titanic step by step. She was able to break it down for us by the dialogue, sound effects and music. Understanding how these worked separately as well as together was very important. The group learned how these all worked together to come up with a smooth scene that exerted a special feeling and emotion to the audience it intended. We also learned how these artists created these sounds for the scene which was extremely useful.

The last exhibit was the part where they had special effects that were created on display. The group focused on Freddy Krueger's sweater from Nightmare on Elm Street. This sweater was created in a larger form with real actors seen coming out of it to create a specific scene in the movie where it appeared as people coming out of his chest. This was very useful because we understood the different ways in order to achieve a part of a scene in a film and how to use props. There was also a Blade Runner figure that was used in the film to show landscape of the building. These we were all important in teaching us different techniques in sound and visual creations to come up with an interesting film or video.

Overall it was a fun experience and having gone to the museum multiple times before I think that there was a lot more to learn about the development of cameras, lighting and even television sets that could have benefited us as a group. We were unable to go into the ADR room which would have been a lot of fun understanding how actors record or rerecord their lines in a film. The museum has a lot of hands on activities to help understand the the changes throughout the moving image history. Everything is more digital and we don't always appreciate the way things were done before our technology. Also understanding the way we were able to achieve our technology could give us a better understanding of the possibilities we are faced to create media.