To have or not to have; a director's personal thought on becoming a single mom.

A documentary is a great medium that can be used to reflect some interesting aspects of many lives in reality. The director Anne Catherine Hundhausen who is a former graduate of Hunter College, brings her latest documentary called Single Choice: Many lives. This brilliant film tells the director’s search for an answer on becoming a single mother by undergoing procedure called donor insemination. Ann Catherine is sets out on a journey to interview some women who have had (or having) children via donor insemination. She also meets people who are the creations of this procedure. The film explores either side of the main subject: pro or con, advantages or disadvantages. The director herself is in her mid thirty woman who have experienced many monogamous relationships with men and failed to have a family with any one of them. She, like many other women out there, is tired of being in a relationship and getting married. Therefore, becoming a single mom is an option for her. Because, all women want to be mothers which can be the most precious thing to do as a woman. The more they wait, the less chance they will have become pregnant due to fecundity which is likely reduced as women are getting old. The topic also concerns about women’s anxieties of getting old without having any family in our society. However, Ann Catherine gives the audience (especially women) a chance to examine our role or true  identity of being a women, with her insightful and easy to grasp work of art.

The earliest credit sequences were for silent films. Presented on title cards and containing printed material that were photographed and later incorporated into the movie. These cards also included the dialogue and set the time, place and action for the scenes. As the movie industry evolved, so did the titles. After the achievement of sound, titles began to function as a transition: taking on the responsibility of displaying the movie's title, the name of the director and establishing the hierarchy of actors. In the 1950s, titles began to move beyond realistic communication and evolved into complete narratives, establishing the mood and visual character of the film.

Since then, the creation of film titles have changed dramatically. During the 90s a new wave of designers have elevated the art of film titles to a new phase desktop motion graphics. As technology of desktop computers advance at a rapid pace, design companies are able to create visually stunning motion graphics that had been by a big production house in the past. With faster processors and affordable compositing and editing softwares, designers assume a greater control in creativity.
Saul Bass was the industry's pioneer. His work spans 50 years, 60 films and dozens of corporate projects, with his most famous achievement of the storyboards for Psycho's shower scene also being his most controversial.

Saul Bass

The Double Life of Véronique

The cinematographer Sławomir Idziak photographed the film using a golden yellow filter, and the resulting sepia color scheme. When Weronika sits on a train, she holds up to the window (already offering a warped view of a townscape,interestingly, a cathedral most prominently) a small translucent ball with little stars frozen inside it. A close-up camera shot of the ball again gives the viewer the same point-of-view as Weronika, and once again the world outside is inverted while the stars grab our attention. Also, the color blue is deliberately eliminated from the film. True blue appears only a few times in the picture, in each instance reflecting a subjective feeling of love or otherness: Weronika's sighting of Veronique (where she appears almost haloed by the color); the blue dress of Weronika's aunt; Veronique's discovery of the puppeteer's reflection in a backstage mirror; Alexandre's van; and another subjective view of the puppeteer, as Veronique watches him covertly through a stained glass window. Also, her encounter with the puppeteer whom she is attracted to and also offended by, the scene from that moment, the warm green color became much more dominent throughout the film. Her attraction to the puppeteer is also suggestive of her search for the/an Other/other. Who is the puppeteer but the God-figure of the world of marionettes?

Museum of Moving Image

Upon visiting the museum of Moving Image in Astoria NYC, people can see the insightful glimpse of the history of how we develop our vision to see the world through the camera. In the museum, there are many different types of cameras on display. They vary from very early types of camera such as wooden boxes with lenses, a techno color, video and digital as well as huge Panavision cameras which are popular in feature film making in the present time. Arguably, cameras are the most primary tools to transfer various image to the film negatives. Then the images can be projected on screen. However, early moving pictures had to be viewed through the peep hole machine called kinetoscope, an early motion picture exhibition device which was invented by William Kennedy Laurie Dickson and Thomas Edison between 1889 and 1892. There were two kinetoscopes in the museum which allow people can use to view two early films by Georges Méliès called Le Voyage dans la lune and Eating a Soup which features Charlie Chaplin. Also, people can go into a sound editing room where they can record their own voices and play it over a scene from Wizard of Oz. There is sound track editing room for people to choose one of several kind of music to play over some scenes from different movies. These experiments of the post production aspect of film making helps the people have more specific understanding of what movie making really is. And all these significant technical discoveries of motion pictures started from a toy called a Zoetrope (wheel of life). It is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures, invented in 180 AD. The toy needs three basic elements to make its illusion possible: light, frame and speed, which are very important in modern day film making.