cameraless experience so far...

honestly, this isn't remotely what i thought i'd be doing at the start of the semester. cameraless filmmaking is a unique experience. at first, it felt sacrilegious to directly manipulate and alter filmstock, particularly stock that already had footage on it. during the very first exercise, i carefully scratched my section of film, handling it like an archivist. but then i saw some other students footage and they had hacked it up with sand paper, paints, and push pins... and it looked really interesting flying through the projector! my work was a little dull. so my thoughts so far amount to this: i need to play more. i need to allow myself the opportunity to really jack things up. that's been another realization: i worry about "messing up." but there's no possible way to do that here. this class is one grandiose experiment and an opportunity to be inventive. sure, a lot of the manipulation techniques i'll employ won't be home runs, but that's not the point. the ponit is to see what happens.
i have discovered a trick that i wil definitely use again at some point. microsoft publisher and powerpoint are great film tools. publisher offers much control over images (cropping, stretching, saturating, etc), and i've recently discovered that power point can be used as a pre-viz tool. load images and then create a slide slow. it's exciting for me to put those programs (which at one point i had to master for administrative horse squeeze), and put them to creative use instead. one quick for instance: i found a picture of a lovely girl in a swimsuit, and duplicated her image, changed it to b/w, and then created a template for my magazine transfer, all in publisher!
moving forward, i think i'll continue to gain more confidence with my experimentation, but the major concern I have at this point is that i don't know what is due when. that's my most pressing goal, to make sure I have my deadlines in place. i once read that the best part of film school is meeting people and having deadlines. otherwise nothing ever gets finished!