Blog Assigment - Visit to MoMI

Having grown up in Astoria, I was fairly familiar with the Museum of Moving Images. However, after the trip we had through Hunter, I’ve come to realize that you can never become too familiar with such a diverse and expansive museum experience. Our tour guide directs our attention towards a room filled with vintage cameras used in the early film world which also emphasized the evolution of film making throughout the years. She showed us different sound editing tools that are still being used today in scores as well as different lighting tools that may burn your eyes if you look directly at them.

            One thing that was memorable was the screening of “The Great Train Robbery” which was projected in a small room against a blank wall. The black and white look really fit the feel of the movie, though at the time, that’s all they could really work with. The guide pointed out that this film was actually shot in two locations, however the setting takes place in one. The use of continuity editing allowed this fun fact to be hard to believe given the smooth transitions in between shots.

            On the other hand, the tour guide showed us a contemporary film that used Foley sound effects to somewhat narrate the famous scene in “Titanic” where the ship goes down. It really put into perspective the amount of work that goes into making a scene saturated with actions, whether they were human-made or not. For example, the guide broke down the different sound effects are added post production to really emphasize a wire being pulled apart or a side of the ship falling down upon the people swimming to the life boats.

            The museum itself offered a great variety of contemporary and vintage examples of different media atmospheres in terms of film, TV and even arcade games.