My trip to the Ann Arbor Film Festival Wednesday March 28th had its ups and downs. In the lobby of the theater there was art displayed throughout. The best piece was a 3 screen interactive piece arranged vertically that allowed the user to click a switchboard to change what each screen had on it. They transitioned side to side as they switched. They represented the head, body, and legs of a person.
The 1st movie I saw was very old. It was shot in film. The subject was simple home movies. There was no sound. It was one of the most amateur things I had ever seen. Recently, my family converted our home movies to DVD and even they had better quality than this movie. My families movies were older too, so there are no excuses.
The next 2 movies shown were pretty much the same concept. Their main focus seemed to be to make it look "trippy". It was very disappointing that they lacked a concept and that they kept repeating the same goofy effects over and over. It may have been interesting for a minute but it dragged on. The music for both was annoying ambient tones. This matched the dreadfulness of the video. One positive thing I took away from the 3rd movie was and effect that I had previously came across by accident during our 1st critique of project 2. This reinforced my use of it for my final project.
After the 3rd movie, my friends and I couldn't take it any longer. We left the theater and peeked our heads into the other screening. Before we walked in we saw a man naked in a field playing with himself. This was even more disturbing than the other movies! We decided that since we drove almost 2 hours to see some movies that we would wait it out and go in when he was done. We went into the theater 10 minutes later and sat down. On the screen was a man talking into the camera about his dad. Then, the screen split into 4 sections and other things started happening while he continued speaking. It was hard to tell what was going on in the other sections but 1 screen looked like 2 people having sex. Later, it became more graphic. Within time, it became obvious that it was 2 men. I am angry that they did not warn us about this because I could have brought my younger brother to this event. This is not the kind of thing you can surprise a family of people with. We left immediately. This has ruined my experience for film festivals. Next time I will have to do more reading before attending.
