 Hello everyone. Thank you Peter. Today is our final presentation in ASL Lectures and we have a absolutely wonderful person who used to work here at NTID teaching English. He left here in 1997. Currently he's teaching at Caledet University. We know this person in his presentation. I saw his presentation he's going to be giving today in California and I thought it was an absolutely wonderful presentation and invited him to come here so to come here and share his work with NTID and the topic is as you can see line shot montage. So please welcome Derksen Ballman. Thank you very much. Can everybody see me okay? Good. Great. First I just want to say what an honor it is to be here. I remember when I was here in 1992, 1996. It felt longer. It felt longer than just those few years. I know that I went to the ASL Lecture Series often. I remember that well. There were a lot of presentations that were really really wonderful. I remember when Marie Phillip was here. Oh my goodness. She was just wonderful. Lynn Kurtzi was here. Made me feel like wow. Now that I'm on stage I feel like I'm in the same group with him in the same class as those people but I don't know if I fit in that but anyway I'm honored to be here. First before I get to my presentation or before I get to my topic I want to give you a little bit of I'll try to make it short. I was born in Colorado. I was born hearing. I grew up hearing hearing just to let you know I was hearing but I wasn't hearing. Okay so what this means no I'm not hard of hearing. I am fully hearing. I'm profoundly hearing. Okay profoundly hearing but I went to a deaf school then. My identity was very confused. I didn't understand my identity was hearing. It meant nothing to me that word. I grew up with hearing people. I grew up in the hearing world. I never met any deaf people. That was something I was the only hearing person. I didn't know I wasn't aware of that that I was hearing until then and then I became hearing. I understood my identity as a hearing person that that was profoundly that was a profound experience and that really affected my life since then. So now I have identified myself as a hearing person or to the land of the hearing in the deaf world every day. My job now is in the deaf studies department at Gallaudet. Before I was in the English department for several years I taught for three years and then I moved to the deaf studies. I am the only hearing person in that department and that's an honor too. My role in ASL poetry is how I got into that. When I went into the deaf school or the school for the deaf I had just graduated with a bachelor's in English. I had a BA. I knew everything. I knew everything about literature. I was very literate person. I knew poetry. I knew everything. I knew it all. I had a degree. I didn't know where to get a job but I knew everything else. So finally I found a job at a school for the deaf as a dorm supervisor and that was very strange. One night we were in the cafeteria and I noticed a table a group of people sitting around a table and I noticed there was another group of people around a table. They were throwing food at each other and they were talking and they were taking turns. The first table was doing something different than the others. They explained to me that they were doing ASL literature. The ASL has literature. They were doing ABC stories, number stories. So ASL has all this literary stuff, all this stuff I didn't know about. So the bachelor's degree was from a hearing college. They never taught me that. They didn't teach me about deaf literature. That was a new world for me. I felt like I had to get into that. I had to investigate that to see what was there. That was in 1985 or something I think. And I've been into it ever since. So now let me get on with my presentation. Oh, before I start there's two things. First of all I want to let you know I am not a linguist. My training, I am all my training. In all my years I have never gotten into linguistics. I have no idea what a phoneme and a momeme or whatever of that. I know no linguistics. I am a literary scholar. That's what I do. And I'm not a film scholar. I'm not a movie maker. I enjoy watching, but formal, formally trained in movies. I have none of that. I like the cinematic aspects and the language aspects. I like to get into the ideas and analyze them more. That's my skill. That's my area. A shot as in camera. Can you have, I guess I'll have to spell that, who has recently passed away. I mean it was such a wonderful thing to meet him and have occasional access to his wonderful skill. We also went out for a couple of beers once in a while too, but he was just such an inspiration and just such a wonderful man. So the epicenter. I'm gonna use this sign for epicenter because epicenter is with the center of where things happen, okay? And I'm gonna use this sign for earthquake. Quake is when the land plates shift happens. What before? Considered sign language to be a monkey language until Dr. Stokie really paved the way for the respect of ASL, saying that it was a human language. So for about 2,000 years, it was a monkey language, a non-language, until Stokie totally knew way of thinking about ASL, a new perspective on ASL, signing itself, on the language itself. Language was not involved. Sign language was not included and then after Stokie, sign language was included. Have first the earthquake and you have the epicenter shock and then, okay, we've already discussed what language is and what language includes. So that's the epicenter, that's the main shock. So if we have language definition for that, it had to be expanded, it had to include sign. There's still many universities and colleges that don't recognize sign language. The ASL has literature, sign language has literary poetry. So that's one of the aftershocks and another aftershock is so many of you know sign, correct? And many of you know this sign for poetry. It's based on the sign for music, which is based on sound, okay? So that's how we got this sign for poetry. But that's not ASL, is it? So there's different signs. How do deaf people sign? I think if I have my history right, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the deaf way back in 1889, they had a lot of deaf poets come and they discussed about getting a new sign for poetry. They needed a new sign. So they decided on the sign for poetry. So that came the new sign for poetry. Everyone reached consensus on that sign and then went on. And that was ASL, that was the deaf sign for poetry. So I'm gonna make that delineation. The P sign and the sign for music, the poetry, that's a hearing sign. And the sign for expression, that's the deaf sign for poetry. Okay, so I'm gonna use those two signs and mean that. So that was another aftershock. Linguist, a lingual, a literature from Latin. It means a litter. It means to write, L-I-T-T-E-R-E. It means writing. And the root of the, so that's the Latin for literature. So how you make a word and how the root of the word influences the word is very interesting to me. So the objective for literature is we want to expand how we look at an analogous to, that we have film language, okay, and sign language and they're parallel and they have many similarities. Any discussion of analytical poetry must have fundamental questions, which are how do we start? I mean, hearing poetry has many, many, many poems and many, many years along history. You can find a lot of information about that. ASL doesn't use words. Hearing poetry is based on sound. So how do we start to analyze ASL poetry? I mean there's some gestures, there's some mouth movements and that kind of thing, but they're not strong sounds. So where do we begin? So there's also vocabulary to describe, to describe hearing poetry and there's no describing, there's no vocabulary to describe death poetry. So to our analysis, we found that hearing poetry has rules and those rules are many on those same rules, a lot of the same rules in sign language poetry. It has structure, additional approach to analyzing poetry, some ordinary everyday ASL conversations and analyzing poetry. At the same time, we notice the differences. So what kind of path? I noticed this rhythm. Okay, tiger, tiger, bird, two, three, right? Okay, one, two, one, two, one, two, three. So it's a rhythm. One, two, one, two, one, two. Also, bright and night sound the same. Okay, so there's a rhyme. Many stanzas, but the rhythm is the same. One, two, one, two, one, two, three. And the rhyme scheme is the same. So everyday language, everyday speaking doesn't have that kind of rhythm and rhyme. We don't talk in that kind of rhythm. And everyday poetry emphasizes that. Okay, so poetry has all these rules, sign language, and the answer is yes. Well, the idea of rhyming is based on sound. But does poetry? Yes. Who first came up with this research and did the beginning research on this into rhyme? Was Clayton Valley? His research found and the stat was established and that set the tone for the day. It became the structure for analysis ever since. So I gave you a brief snippet from that poem. So let's see what kind of rhyme scheme we've got. Like a snowflake. We start with this, just watch. Okay, so that's a snippet. There's five handshapes that we use, all fives, trees, fluffy trees, fallen leaves falling down to the ground. So we have a common movement path where the sign goes where it travels up down sideways, tree, fluffy tree, leaves falling down. So it has the same it has handshape patterns and movement paths. There's a movement rhyme. Also location where the sign is placed, where we established the tree where we put the puffy tree where the snow where the leaves fall. Okay, I can't put them in different places. I have to leave the tree in the same place. So that's another type of rhyme. My handshake, the palms are facing down or to the side and that is in ASL rhyme too. And then of course we have the non manual markers. When I say this, when I say put the tree up, you can see the scene. I'm setting the scene so my eyebrows are up. All my non-manuals on my face are showing you that I'm setting the scene. I'm preparing you. And when I come down, my eyebrows come down, I'm explaining to you. And that's all together happening at the same time, handshape, movement path, location, palm orientation and non-manual signals. And that's all, all these parameters. Make a line division like you just had with tiger, tiger, bright, forest in the middle of the night on the last line and the first line, night and bright. It's the same with ASL poetry. It all ends, each line ends with a line division. So there are different pauses, different places where the rhyme stops. The pauses are where the line stops. So if we're talking about a traditional approach, there's a lot of benefits for that. There's other ways to discuss meter and other technicalities that we can discuss, but you get the idea. So this approach has many benefits to it. So we have the sign has meaning so that there is poetry, so the benefits of analyzing this means it's validated. Rhyme more than just spoken language poems. So what has been found is what has been found has validated signed poetry. It establishes a common vocabulary. We can all agree on how to do a deaf school and now who are studying from California and from New York, two different groups of students meet in Ohio and they discuss poetry. They have the same vocabulary, the common vocabulary in the same meanings to discuss it with. It provides tools for analyzing. One has some limitations to this approach. When I first started reading about line was very confused. Lines and I didn't see that in ASL. I can see it in written. You can see that tiger tiger in the night forest in the night bright. You can see that but in ASL I couldn't find where the line delineations were. You can see for yourself. Clayton Valley said it very well. Okay. So spoken language, spoken poetry. You can hear it, you can see and written. You can see it, very visual. So where the line delineations are it's very hard to see because the structure is very different. So I wondered if to view the movement as the structure didn't. I couldn't apply that as the same structure to ASL and and written poetry. So we have to build on the structure. We have the structure and then we have to build on the structure. So we don't always have to look at spoken and written language and all their rules. Cell itself is a language and it has literature. We already know that. We don't need to discuss it anymore. So now new language. Let's talk about movie language. I mean if you might say movie language has a language. I say yes. Kind of stories that you can tell through film. Can make grammatical errors in film. You can shoot a different shot in a wrong place and have sequence errors. You can also continuity errors where in one shot the guy is smoking with one with his right hand and the next shot he's has got the cigarette in his left hand. Well it's a continuity error. It's a sequencing error. Yeah the next that parallels film, language, and ASL poetry language. This is not a new idea. I just kind of picked this up out of the dirt and dusted it off and now this is very old. This is from 1979 and noticing the parallels between ASL poetry and film. Or maybe he was just internalizing that and it hadn't been analyzed yet. After this lecture from now on when you when you notice people signing you're going to notice that these techniques are involved. Any story, life history stories or 10 years old and writing in my bicycle in 10 in Colorado. Four days we rode bicycles up the mountains and for four days in one morning. I was really tired and was really nice but I felt like I was going to pass out. I was so exhausted. My legs were still going but I was so exhausted. I fell asleep at the wheel of my bike and hit my brother when he left me. He sped on ahead. The idea of that story shows you the different techniques. I had close-up shots and a normal view and a distance shot. Here's a close-up shot. Okay so you zoom in for that. Here's a far shot when the bike hits the rock. I got close for a zoom shot into my face when I hit the ground. Okay so good sign he goes back and forth from medium to long to close-up shots just like any film and Stoke recognized. So who gave Stoke that idea? It was another deaf person years ago. In deaf performance Bernard Bragg. This was his thing. He talked about the visual vernacular. There's a strong movie technology involved. Words from the cinema involved. A little bit of mime. That kind of thing but to explain exactly what visual vernacular is let me tell you it looks a little bit like this. Become the tree and you notice that this man with an axe is hitting you in the leg and now we have a far shot with the tree going down going down into the ground and now we have a close-up zoom shot with the man hitting the tree with the edge. So you have a series of cuts. It's like a movie. It's like you're watching a film. Okay that's what a visual vernacular is. So you get the idea of that. What Stoke already realized linguists are starting to analyze and performers already knew because that was their work. They took the language and applied it to cinematic techniques and then analyzed it. Now what's stopping us from doing that? Cinematic and we're gonna put poetry poetic techniques or poetic vernacular. I'm applying that to ASL poetry and why haven't we? We have other parallels so why not use them. Also editing. So we want to give you some vocabulary. This is also something we have from Valley. Let's get some vocabulary and we're gonna okay now the shot which are symbols or signs. Okay that's one part. In the movies the cinematic parts have your shots. You have your long shot your medium shot and your close-up shot in space in frame time which means duration. How long is the shot? How long do you stay on that one subject or is it a quick like MTV you know you get bumparded with all these editing all these different shots and it comes at you fast so it doesn't stay long okay. So movement in the frame can't have characters or people walking back and forth in the frame or you can have speed control. You can have slow motion but when I was a kid I always used to love watching television. I love football and I loved when they did those slow motion shots it was just great to watch that ball be snapped and watch it spinning very slowly in a close-up shot in the crowd and watch the receiver running down the field in slow motion and the catch when it just hit that sweet spot and he went over the goal line. When I watched finally a real game in person I was so disappointed because it didn't have all that slow motion and it was so far away I was sitting way up in those cheap seats and I couldn't see the players it was awful. I loved much better watching it on television I could see them. I had the music and I had the movement and it was wonderful some of it was fast and some of it was slow so ASL poetry. So you've got your frame right the frame is stable but the camera moves okay so your camera can pan your camera can pan all the way across the large field means your camera can follow a character like ER if many of you watch ER they're famous for that they're always tracking their people all over the place you feel like you're in the camera moving around the hospital okay so that's the point of view the camera is your point of view so suppose you have a house in the distance you can zoom you can zoom fast and all of a sudden you're right there at the door of the house so you can play with space in ASL you can have shots with space and time and they each have their own vocabulary so let's go back to the valley okay so the first shot is a medium shot in the opening he says every day in the morning I would drive okay it's like a narrator it's a narrative so he's kind of a medium shot every morning I would drive but where's the camera on that the camera's like from his waist to his head okay so it's like a medium shot refers to itself it's got a reverse angle and it shows the landscape it's not on Clayton Valley in a medium shot anymore it's reversed itself and sees the landscape and it's panning through the through the landscape the camera that is tracking and panning then the tree is not close the tree is a long shot so you so that's the medium shot of the tree and there's no movement you just see the tree statically so that's one two three opening shots if you want to talk cinematic language then he shows the sun bearing down on the tree he has a long shot and a medium shot so you can go back and shots mediums so we've been talking about shot parts right so what does that have to do with vocabulary and words and what do we do with all these using language I mean in everyday language editing brief film snippet Sergei and Stein so it's a silent it has music but it's basically a silent film so you get the idea okay I we get the idea we don't need to go on with that a little bit more sorry but okay impact so how do you make that impact you edit different shots you track you close up your distance you get that little all that little boy that was a close up of his face saying mama okay zoomed in on him and the people running down the stairs okay lots of impact shots lots of editing was the first time that people really used a lot of editing technology so you'd have to do that you'd have to okay so pair the woman's in the shower there's a shower you have this creepy music and then you have this man coming in the door like this and then you cut back to the woman in the shower she doesn't know what's happening and then you cut back to the man and he pulls out the shower with a knife and then you cut back to the woman in the shower she sees him she screams and then you cut back to the man stabbing the woman okay the camera's on one person so the character's story goes on and then you so you saw that editing asl poetry is just one person that one post editor they pick which literature they want braider they decide what the shots are to be and if they're going to track or if they're going to pan they're the actor themselves like clean valley he was in himself in the movie if you will he was an actor what becomes an editor they switch the shots around and decide what sequence the shots are going to be in and also all together they are the two so you can analyze the skills on different levels maybe some poets are beautiful as far as screenwriting or writing or but they're beautiful as far as can maybe their acting skills are not quite areas of skill they will see if time permits but i'd like to show you enough heels these different techniques missing children i can't show you all okay another happy story there sorry i didn't realize what i was picking i suppose i want to show the audience all this death and destruction maybe i did a bad editing job on that sorry anyway maybe it was winter when i picked those i wasn't feeling quite as happy as now it is spring but anyway okay so obviously impact obviously has impact and did you notice the different techniques you had an opening sequence okay more close-up with the man explaining what it looked like so there was definite with the boy off in the distance and then it zoomed in and you could see what was happening and that was important because of what was going to happen later on and then when the boy finally died so it was there was no slow motion until the end that was really important and the boy was handing the seed to the soldier but it wasn't going to do him any good anyway it was slow motion as the gun okay so you want to use slow motion for that for emphasis okay also so later when you were close up around so you could see you could pan the coffee farm you could see the picture of the whole field and then you could come back in on the boy and the father and their reactions okay and then you could pan back out to see the people dying the soldiers killing all of you'd like to our time's running out otherwise i would like to go into depth on some more techniques for you but now first in his poem remember he did show you the hill close up on the tree and it was important that you see the environment around the tree okay so you pan over and then you close in on the tree after you've established the shot you've established it's important to create the environment because then you know that the tree is alone it's a lonely tree is a lone deaf person going every day back to work so you set the Clinton family set the stage he showed you that he was the only one on the road and that there was an all-blown tree there he identified with the tree the struggle of the tree against the winds and the storms the tree was still standing but not up straight tough tree so there's a lot of identification clinton valley was the lone driver the tree was the lone tree now renny's point she used a slow dissolve valley gave you a long shot you know a far shot to show the environment renny started close and then went long after that okay so it was the opposite and there was different reasons for that you have to consider the goal you have to consider what impact you want and then you pick your shots and you pick your sequencing so you can make the most impact so most discussion up to the year 2000 has been about new technology okay computers had a great influence on our lives so what's next i'm interested to see what we're going to talk about next have you ever seen the matrix i saw that movie oh my gosh that movie was wild after that i'm a changed person after i saw that movie i mean the story wasn't you know like all great but mj to the max the i max you know the i max theaters they used that technology they used i max technology that was just this incredible technology my god it would bring you slow motion and then it quick into fast motion anyway the technology is already there and the technology is influencing sign language and language and then this showed up second in the movies or vice versa i'm not sure turns into something else and becomes motion and then it morphs into something different you all know what morphing is visual vernacular you can see that okay you see the the the reverse shooting reverse shots cubism maybe doing cubism right how do you represent that there's your morphing right there again that morphing became something else there that was good that was happy right okay no war and destruction death and blood okay that was good finally so you see the morphing in that or the earth planet or something and then goes back to the paint out on the canvas then becomes a butterfly okay so the other question is where the shot begins and where the shot ends okay the lines are gray they're not clear anymore so that's kind of a new world of technology a new world of cinematic poetry if you will so i think that's uh all that shot discussion all that discussion we did about the shots and all that stuff i gave you maybe antiquated by next year to the original question cinematic nature it already uses the cinematic technistic creative purposes when i use cinematic language i've lived for many many thousands of years for bc the greeks knew for two thousand twenty five hundred years it's not new in their language it's always been a part of their language we're just discovering it as a technology as a technique dirksen for coming and we'll see you all next fall thank you very much thank you dirksen