Museum of the Moving Image

The Museum of the Moving Image offers a glimpse into the history and process of media production. In our tour groups, we learned television sets used to look like dresser drawers because people weren’t used to them in their homes, and screens used to be circular because of the correlation with the human face. Every failed experiment served a function we can easily create today- we saw a combination of an old rotary phone and a television screen in a large dresser to produce our modern-day “Facetime”, and a color wheel in the back of a television set to produce color. An interesting part of media production I learned about on the tour was related to a movie prop. They replicated the look of an entire building just by slowly panning up a large board decorated with “windows” and lights; they saved a lot of expenses in editing and got the “building” to look exactly how they wanted to by creating this small diorama.

My group and I decided to experience the voiceover demo. One of our group members rehearsed the lines and then recorded them while looking at the screen where the character was talking.We learned that matching up your words can be extremely difficult, and that conveying emotion when you are not acting in the scene can be difficult as well. Our group member messed up one of his lines, so we know several takes are needed for this process. We were excited, however, at how we could change a character’s voice with the process of editing, something never heard of in the past. Today, we can edit film before broadcasting it, add music, voice, sound effects, and change the colors and light as we choose. We can shoot in such a high resolution that we can see wrinkles in people’s faces. We viewed a few films in the museum where this was not possible; they were silent, grainy, and black and white. These editing techniques and advancements help us refine film to where the user becomes even more immersed in the world presented to him or her.