Queens and Fresh Pants

On a normal Wednesday, I spend my day working at NYPL. But today was an extra special day.

Aka FIELD TRIP DAY.

I have just been so fortunate to go on so many field trips.

Today we headed to Queens to check out the Museum of the Moving Image. This will be considered one of our "cinema" events so naturally, Alan, our film professor, met us at the museum.

This is a fantastic museum for anyone remotely interested in film. The building itself was pretty nifty, very modern and slick.

Three stories tall, the third floor is divided into early film, fun things to do with film, and then the specific parts of filming (the actual filming, sounds, editing, special effects, etc.). They had so many neat objects, like cameras from the beginnings of film all the way up to the mask of Chewbacca (my dad better be pretty jealous, he LOVES Chewy).

I had two favorite sections. The first was the section on sound. There was a neat interactive activity where a scene from a movie played, without background music. Then, you could chose what music would go under the scene and depending on what you chose, it really did make a difference in how the scene appeared to the audience. For example, there's a scene in the movie Vertigo (it holds a special place in the hearts of my immediate family). The museum scene (click here to see the section I'm talking about) is dramatically different if the background music leads the audience to believe the man and woman are attracted to each other. 

The other neat section was the one about editing. They actually had a large screen TV that displayed what "live-editing" looked like at a baseball game. It takes a TON of coordination and effort to make a baseball game seem as smooth as it does on TV.

The final nifty thing we got to do was see an episode of the Muppets in an art-deco Egyptian style theater. Kind of a crazy and unique atmosphere.

So now you're probably wondering why I have "fresh pants" in my title. WELL, I also did laundry today. Laundry is tricky (and expensive compared to our unlimited wash and dry for a small fee at Coe). Whitney and I conquered laundry today, heading over to a laundromat a few blocks away. Success. And warm, fresh-from-the-dryer pants. Winning.