Experimental Film - Relative Film (Semiotics of the Kitchen)

When mentioning about how I wanted to include elongated takes, I remembered the controversial film that we watched in class called Semiotics of the Kitchen, made in 1975. The film doesn't really have a narrative as it just shows a woman in the kitchen picking up kitchen appliances and naming them in alphabetical order. The reason why I find this video so relevant to my idea is because of the extremely awkward long silence right at the start of the video. It's exactly the sort of thing that I was imagining for my film. It's like we've seen everything we need to see in the shot but it still stays there for unwanted time, making the viewer question if anything is going to happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm5vZaE8Ysc

Experimental Film - Relative Film (Dog of Man)

Because my idea is quite abstract, I have been finding it fairly difficult to find videos that relate to my idea. Having said this, I remembered watching a very disturbing video a few years ago called Dog of Man. This rather disturbing film was made in 2008 by David Firth and is a four minute long animated short about a series of disturbing things that a man and his dog do together. The man cannot speak in this film and so he plugs a cable into the top of his dogs head and a speaker appears in the dogs mouth who then proceeds to give strange advice to the man in a posh, British accent. I felt like this part of the film relates to my idea with the cables being plugged in and I especially like the noise that is made in Dog of Man as the cable goes into the dogs head; it makes this squishing like sound effect which could quite easily make a few viewers squirm of they don't particularly like that sort of thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o31pmwWNUww

Experimental Film - Treatment

The theme for my experimental video is going to be partly thriller based and partly sci-fi based. I want it to have long takes in places as I want it to make the viewer feel uncomfortable when watching and I am hoping that by including longer takes than needed it will cause this awkward pause at the end of some takes, leaving the viewer being forced to watch something that they don't find comfortable. I plan to structure my video in a non linear way. By this I mean that I am planning to show things such as the exact shots that I use of showing the man enter the room will be played on the screen when he plugs himself into the television and this will hopefully disorientate the viewer which is exactly what I hope to do. With regards to the visual style, I think I want to keep the colour fairly saturated as I want it to represent the mans life but once he plugs in the cable to his neck, the look of the film flips as the colour will do a sharp gradient and have the hue and saturation increased to emphasise the colour as we are seeing what is going on in his head. Once he unplugs himself again the colour will then go back to being saturated and bland to represent that the only time the man feels anything will be when he is plugged into the television. The target audience for my film is suitable for both male and female and will be aimed around the ages of 16+ as I am going to be including themes in the film such as sex, war and bad language, meaning that this video will be suitable for people of a mature mind set.

Portraits Part 2 - First Shoot

Yesterday I did my first shoot for my portrait idea about grown ups acting like the things that they wanted to be growing up. I decided to try using a studio and using the studio lighting as it is something that I have never attempted before. Prior to the shoot, I took on the advice that was given to me by my tutor about making the materials of the costumes out of resources that would be likely for a child to use, i.e cardboard, tape and scissors. For these photos, I used a Canon 600D with a 50mm lens. I used a 50mm because I feel that these kind of lenses produce the most satisfying outcome for portrait images.

Before the shoot, I asked my models to bring in anything that related to what they wanted to be as a child and one person in particular stood out. Jodie decided to bring in a onesie of a monster (because that is what she wanted to be) and so when instructing her on the poses I wanted her to do, there was a small mixture of different things I wanted to try. I wanted some of her poses to be like she is thinking she is a huge monster that is destroying a city and terrorising the place where in a different pose, I wanted her to look sweet and vulnerable as that is what children are a lot of the time. I then had the idea to stand on a chair, capturing photos from a high angle and have Jodie do the same poses but looking up to the camera. I did this to symbolise us, the viewer looking down at the child (because children are smaller than us) and hoped that it could add to the innocence of her childlike behaviour in the picture.

'Monster'

My next model, George, wanted to be a king when he was younger. Because of this, I sculpted a crown and a sword out of cardboard and tape as I feel that that is what a child would attempt to build costumes out of. I instructed George to pretend he was 12 years old again and that he was play fighting with the camera having a sword fight. Those were the only instructions I gave to George and I feel like he did really well to play for the camera.

'King'

There were a few models who's pictures I wasn't too satisfied with, one of whom was Chris. Chris wanted to be a knight when he was younger which honestly, if done right could have been produced really well but Chris isn't exactly a confident person in front of the camera which isn't a completely bad thing but just meant that it was a bit more difficult to try and direct him to pose the way I wanted him to. 

'Knight'

Experimental Film - The Average Trumper (Short Film)

Last week we were given the task of making a 1 - 2 minute film based around 'The World with Trump'. I didn't really know how to approach this film as it is such a broad topic and there is a lot of material to work with. I wanted to show the side of not trump himself but focus on his followers and their thought process as to why they follow his questionable decisions.

Throughout the film I wanted to show how Trumps followers seem to follow anything he does just because of who he is which is why I first included the clip of myself mirroring the thumbs up picture before showing the 'Make America Great Again' hat clips.

  

Experimental Sound - Southern Guns (Short Film)

Although sound is definitely not my strongest asset, I wanted to improve it and I felt that the best way to do that would to be to implement my strength of sketch making and try to focus a lot more on the sound side. I decided to make this film called Southern Guns which is just a light hearted sketch of two men having a wild west stand off, using their fingers as hand guns. The reason I named it what I did was because it was filmed in the southern side of the country but they still shows signs of the old wild west fighting. I also tried to work on visual effects in this project which was very different but I think I pulled it off quite well for a first time of using effects.

There were a few different ways in which I recorded the sound for this film. All of the sound that was recorded during the filming never made the final cut, instead I wanted to make the soundtrack the most dominant thing in the film. I then found sounds online for the sounds of the guns and also re-recorded the sounds of the runaway cowboy's screams as he ran off on a different day in a quiet room so the screams were as clear quality as they could be. The final technique I used was to do with editing a sound clip. The sound that is played right before the sniper shot is taken is same sound as the actual sniper being fired but just reversed and so it ends up in this kind of build up sound of tension. 

Overall I was really proud of this project, I think visually the film looked good but more so I had a lot of great feedback about the sound in particular on the project.

Experimental Film - Flip (Short film)

We were given a task last week to make a 1 - 2 minute film on the subject of 'Time'. There were many approaches that could have been taken when making this film but the way in which I wanted to do it was through time travel. Through looking at feature films that are based about time travel, it became apparent that there was a reoccurring theme throughout and that was that time travel has a lot to do with chance. An example of this is the 1985 film, Back to the Future. In the film there is a particular scene in which Marty is driving the De Lorean at a high speed towards a wall, expecting Doc to connect a power source at the right time, thus throwing him back in time. Following this, I wanted to make a film based on chance and so I made this film, Flip.

The underlying message of the film is to not gamble away what you are already happy with for something better. This implements to all things in life be it relationships, money or even peers. The man flips the coin on heads and is taken to a beautiful place that makes him extremely happy, when he returns he instantly wants to see what would happen if he were to get a tails but unfortunately keeps on flipping heads and eventually loses the coin under the fridge. This was meant to symbolise the gambling element of life and show that if you keep trying to attain better things than the ones you already have, you may eventually end up with nothing at all.

Experimental Sound - Introduction

In our first lesson with James, he have us our brief for the soundscape project and inducted the class on how to use the zoom microphones. He also split us up into groups and gave each group an emotion and we were told to go off and record sounds that we felt best represented the emotion we were given. My group were given 'Serenity' so we decided to record sounds that we felt would put the audience at ease and help them relax and appreciate the tranquility of the sounds. One of the sounds we recorded was the sound of a kettle boiling and when we played it back, it sounded a lot like rain which was very soothing. Another sound that we managed to get was the sound of spreading butter onto a slice of toast which when played back really was lovely to listen to in such a clear frequency.

The brief that we have been set is to choose one of the provided images and make a soundscape that we think best represents it, considering it follows one of the following:

• A Journey
• A Narrative
• A Space
• A Passage of Time

Below are the 8 images that we were given to choose from. I have decided to choose 'House' by Rachael Whiteread as the image I want to make a soundscape to.

House, Rachael Whiteread, 1999

Study After Velasquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X, Francis Bacon, 1953

The Mystery and Melancholy of the Street, Georgio Di Chirico, 1914

Dull Gret, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562

Maman, Louise Bourgeois, 1999

Obnoxious Liberals, Jean-Michel Basquait, 1982

Shibboleth, Doris Salcedo, 2007

Yellow Red Blue, Wassily Kandinsky, 1925

Experimental Film - Further Development (Updated Synopsis)

After much thought and having asked my friends and peers about my idea, I have come to the conclusion that my original idea may be too complex. I'm not going to completely abandon the idea as I still think it has a lot of potential to be a good film. I have decided to simplify the idea and instead of showing the relationship between the man and the woman and actually telling a story throughout the video, I wanted to focus on the experimental part of the video which is of course when the man plugs himself into a television and certain videos are played whilst he sits gormlessly. I feel like I really want to try different things when going for the experimental part of the film (deciding what is shown on the television when the man plugs himself in). I do also want to make the viewer feel uncomfortable at times and I have thought about doing this by using certain sound effects like when the man plugs the cable into himself, instead of just seeing it go in, I was thinking about possibly using a squelch sort of effect to emphasise the cable piercing through his skin. Another way I thought about possibly making the viewer uncomfortable was by showing things on the television which the viewers may find distressing like sex or similar explicit content. Of course I wouldn't show videos of people having sex as I want the video to be able to be suitable for all ages but I would work my way around it by changing the shot so that the mans head covers what we see on the television, thus making it so we cannot see the explicit videos.

Portraits Part 2 - Idea Development

Spiralling off from my first idea, I have had some time to do some thinking about what I think would be most affective through portraits. Although my first idea was a quite personal idea, I realised that viewers may not find as personal as myself as they don't know the people who I would be dressing up as. Because of this reason, I have decided to slightly alter my idea to this; I will now be asking people to model for me, dressing up as the job that they wanted to do when they were children. I feel that this is going to be a much more intriguing idea to viewers because it shows a possible insight to the model as we could see how they have changed their aspirations as a child to what they are now. For example, there could be a model dressed as an astronaut which tells us that as a child, the person was full of belief and ambition that anything is possible but now they are grown up, they may be stuck in a boring office job with no ambition. Hopefully this will show the contrast in personalities from being a child to being an adult.