Three things I learned in class:
1. Sometimes pieces which appear ambiguous in their meaning have deeper messages and connotations that are not conveyed well.
2. iMovie can be a bitch when youre strapped for time.
3. DJ Spooky is black.

I did not enjoy the DJ Spooky video clip in class that much, but once I learned that it was a trailer rather than a finished piece, I understood why. Trailers are generally just a hodge podge of images and audio relating to a movie, with little coherent structure at all (although some are set up so that they reveal the entire movie, in effect spoiling it, which I think I hate even more.) I can understand how it would be difficult to make a coherent trailer with the subject matter though. I would really like to see the finished product; being familiar with both W.D. Griffith and DJ music would give me a good perspective to evaluate and critique it.

Speed questions:
1. Slow motion is an elargement, a microscopy of time, whereas speeded up motion is a foreshortening, a telescopy of time.
2. He was able to catch a bumblebee mid flight by the use of a high framerate camera, and could watch plants grow through stop motion photography.
3. One can either take frames very fast so that when they are projected at mornal speed, time appears to slow down; conversely, one can take franes at a much slower speed than they are projected, so as to speed time up when they are viewed.
4. Near death experiences, for the most part, make time seem to slow down to a crawl even though it is moving at lightning speed. WIllian James speculates that our judgement of time, our speed of perception, depends on how many "events" we can perceive in a given unit of time.
5. Concious perception is not continuous but consists of discrete moments, like the frames of a movie, which are then blended to give an appearance of continuity. By maniulating this idea in our videos, we can change how the viewer perceives the passage of time.
6. See question number 4.
7. By paying intense attention to what is being done, in a sport or piloting a jet, for example, our minds can start working faster than we can even realize, so that we do things subconciously which we are not even concious of until long after they have happened.
8. It reminds me of the 'Einstein's Dream's' reading involving still images, where so much attention is paied on just describing the details of the life which consists of still images, still moments in time.
9. Michaux compares the perception one experiences on a mescalin trip to a dream in that bath are not an accumulation of exact literal details but rather a series of overall impressions, dramatic highlights. Dreams can be largely ambiguous, as the series of events or places of a dream can be all mixed up and confused, thus being an amalgam of things rather than specific elements.