Portraits Part 2 - Relative Artist (Chad Moore)

After looking for artists that have similar work to what I want to achieve, I came across a photographer called Chad Moore. 30 year old Chad produced a series of photos called 'June' which was all about capturing the life of the youth of today. I absolutely adore some of the photos in this series, I love how they capture so many emotions and make me really feel warm and content when I see them. When asked about what draws him to portraiture, Moore said "People are just so fascinating to me. The most exciting thing to me is photographing someone. I feel like you can really look deep into someone when taking his or her picture. For me it’s so personal. As far as my generation goes, It’s kind of like I said earlier; it’s interesting for to think about people looking back in 20 years, or even 10 years, and seeing what it was like in NYC, or Paris, or wherever I’m taking these pictures." Another reason why I enjoy these photos so much is because I feel like they are very reminiscent and nostalgic to the older generations who feel like their teenaged years are over and seeing these photos are a beautiful way for them to look back on their youth.

Experimental Sound - Final Sound Piece

This is my final sound piece. This project has definitely been a learning curve for me. I know that there are a lot of things that I could have done better but at the same time there is a lot of things for me to learn with sound so overall I would say that I am happy with what I have produced taking into consideration that I had never been near sound before this project.

Experimental Sound - Process of Making my Soundscape (Editing)

The editing process for this project was an interesting one. There were points where everything just fit very well together but there were other times which required manipulation to pitch, duration and tempo. One sound in particular that needed adjusting was the sound of the body being dragged across the floor. When recording this sound I must have made the mistake of not getting the microphone close enough to the bag so when it came to editing, the audio was quieter than the other sounds. Because of this I had to increase the volume of the whole clip, making it suitable to fit the rest of the track. 

Another problem that occurred was I hadn't read the brief completely and had made my soundscape about 2 minutes long. It wasn't until one of my classmates told me that the clip had to be between 30 seconds and a minute so because of this I had to cut a lot of sound out which was a bit of a pain at times. I had to take out certain clips which sometimes made other clips ping out of place but eventually I managed to fix it. Overall I am fairly happy with the outcome of the soundscape. If I were to do this again I would want to try and be more abstract instead of creating a narrative so I could experiment with more clips and try to distort them.

Experimental Sound - Process of Making my Soundscape (Recording)

When recording the sounds for my project, I didn't exactly know what I wanted to record. I had the idea to see what sound I could record with the resources that were available to me and then come up with a narrative based around the sounds that I gathered. One of the first sounds that I recorded was of 2 knives sharpening against each other. This was the sound that made me think of the narrative for my soundscape. After recording the knives I decided to try and collect sound that would make a soundscape for a murder scene taking place. After deciding to follow the route of a murder scene, I then had to think about the sounds that you would normally hear in a murder scene. I thought about what sort of noises I could use to replicate a body falling on the floor and so I used a packed bag and dropped in on the floor from head hight which created the sound perfectly. Another sound that I created was of the body being dragged across the floor; I got this sound by using the same bag and just dragged it across my bedroom floor and the outcome was exactly what I needed. Overall I really enjoy recording sound , the only problem that I find with it is knowing what materials to use to create the best possible outcome.

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. 

Experimental Film - Making a Short Film

We were given the task to make a short film that lasts between 1 - 2 minutes and had to be on the topic of 'time'. Originally, I didn't have a clue what to make my film about as I was trying to think what could be interesting enough to gain the viewers attention in the small space of only 1 minute. I eventually decided on the idea of time travel. I decided the way I wanted to approach it was to be along the lines of chance and not knowing which way through time you would go. Because of this I chose to make the story of the film about the chances of flipping a coin and how probability is completely random. My main aim towards this film was to personally focus on trying out different camera angles as I want to get better with how I frame my shots.
The general Idea for the film was to have a man who is in a rush runs up to his kitchen to flip a coin. We don't know why he is in a rush but we go with it. He flips the coin and it lands on heads and we go into his head and come out in a empty beetroot field. This is to show that with just a simple flip of a coin, you could end up in paradise and that it is all chance. We go back into his head and are back in the kitchen where the man likes what just happened to him so he flips the coin again and it lands on tails, we go back into his head again but nothing happens. The man is confused and keeps flipping the coin, constantly getting tails and nothing happens. He then flips the coin out of his reach and the coin rolls under the fridge, never to be seen again. I wanted this to symbolise how you should appreciate where life takes you and not always want something better or essentially gamble away what you have to get something better. I hope this was showed by us seeing the man enjoy what the heads side of the coin gave him, being in a lovely surrounding which he was happy with but deciding to try and get something better by flipping the coin again, not getting what he wanted and eventually losing it all in the end.

Portraits Part 2 - Initial Idea

In this unit, we have been told that we are allowed to manipulate our images opposed to our previous portrait project where we was only allowed to use the raw file. At first I struggled to think of an idea that I could pursue. After a short while I began to develop an idea about nature and nurture and how the people who are around us most seem to affect our personalities, dress sense and outlook on life. My original plan was to choose my closest friends at university and select what I think is the most outstanding and interesting feature on them appearance wise and put all of the features on one person through the use of Photoshop. For example, I could use Alice's ear as she has a lot of piercings in it whereas a lot of people don't, making her prominent feature her ear. The same could be used for Jacob's goatee or tattoo's, each are very well known features of what makes Jacob who he is. I liked this idea until another similar idea was suggested to me which was to do a series of self portraits trying to dress as my closest friends and try to make myself look as much like them as possible to symbolise how they have each had an impact on my personality, shaping me to be the type of person I am today. I feel like this idea could work very well especially as luckily I have friends who have their own very distinct dress sense which would show a substantial difference in each portrait picture taken.

Experimental Film - Video Idea: 'Porcelain' (Synopsis)

Since beginning this unit, I have began to think of some ideas that I think would make very interesting films. One of these ideas is an experimental film which I have named 'Porcelain'. When thinking about this idea I wanted to try and make something which I have never tried before, because of this I have chosen the approach of the film to be touching and upsetting as this type of genre is something that I have never attempted before and I feel that there are many ways I can approach it. A song will be playing throughout the video called 'Porcelain', hence the title. I chose this song because I feel that the tempo and the soft voices of the man and woman singing fits the feel that I want for the film perfectly and also how there is a reoccurring line in the song which sings "My brain is porcelain" which I think fits the message of the film extremely well as it suggests the main character isn't mentally stable. The idea for this video is quite complex; it starts with a man laying awake in bed with his blonde wife who is asleep. The man gets up and drives to a large building and enters a small room that is completely white and blank except for a tv screen, a cable and a chair. The man sits in the chair and plugs the cable into the back of his neck, making the pupils of his eyes turn grey and lifeless (this will be done by using contact lenses). The mans memories and feelings are then displayed on the monitor and as he tries to tune the tv, various different images are shown rapidly, some normal, some oddly disturbing; this will be included to show the sensitiveness of his brain and emotions. When he tunes the tv to his desired memory, it is of him and his past lover (who is brunette), dancing slowly together. The shots will cut back to the mans face every so often to show his reactions to certain memories being shown, focusing on his expressions, breathing and overall body language (e.g. twitching, sweating, fidgeting etc). The man tunes the television again to see another memory but slips and horrific scenes of horror films, riots, war and other inhumanly things are played loudly, startling the man (and hopefully the viewer). He finally tunes the television for the last time and the monitor shows a grave of his wife, making the story clear to the viewer that his one true love has actually previously died and so he sneaks off most nights from his current wife to relive his happiest memories with his past lover. The man unplugs himself from the television and drives back to his current wife. He gets back into bed, stares at the ceiling and the film ends. 

Experimental Film - Introduction

To start off this project, we began looking at various experimental films that past students had created. The one that stood out most for me was one called 'Lost and Found'. In this particular film, the students wanted to use items found in Farnham that were not wanted or needed by anyone. An example of this is how the students ended up asking various charity shops if they were allowed to go through their bins to find things that they felt were interesting enough to use. The actual execution of how they showed the items was what I liked most about the film. They made it so that there was a glass screen and it was as though you were sat looking from underneath looking upwards. They would then proceed to put the things that they found on the glass screen which would then be followed with some aged footage of what corresponds to the item; an example of this is when they put leaves down on the glass screen, they would then show footage of some tree's or bushes to show that that is where the chosen item came from. 

Documentary - Personal Reflection

Overall, I am unbelievably proud of myself and my groups efforts towards this project. I feel that there have been many times where we could have easily just accepted defeat and taken the easy way out but every one of us kept true to our idea and powered through until the very end.
There were many risks taken during this project; There was no way we could be 100% sure that we would get the shots of the flatmates that we wanted, because of this we had to spend most of our days just loitering around the flat until people came out of their rooms and were willing to talk to us.

One thing that I do think that I have lacked in is ongoing research during the project. I feel as though I have been so engulfed in the practical side of it that I haven't done as much written work as I originally would've hoped. I know now that this is something that I am going to have to work on in future projects as it will help me track my progress.

I also feel as though my knowledge of documentaries is very minimal. I feel as though I would have had a much better idea of how to film a documentary if only I had watched a lot more in my own time ; This would've given me a much better understanding as to what styles of documentary make them so different from one another.

With all of this being said, I am very happy with the outcome of our documentary. I feel as though the feedback that has been given so far has been amazing and is pleasing to hear that it had such a good impact on those, especially students who can relate to living with strangers. This project has definitely opened up my perspective on documentaries and I hope to use my new found skills in the future if I ever make another one.

Documentary - Editing

When the editing began, it was initially quite a difficult process. I was using Premiere Pro which isn't the editing software that I am usually familiar with; This caused some problems as it was though I was trying to edit a documentary with a piece of software that I had no clue how to use. The edit had a very slow start as I found it difficult to adapt to using a transcript to help with the editing. Eventually after a day or so I got the hang of it and the transcripts made things so much easier whilst editing. 

After trying to edit on Premiere Pro for a few hours I was really struggling. For some reason the clips that I was importing were not staying in their designated folders and every clip that I imported was being imported 3 times instead of just the once. Because of these reasons, I decided to change to the editing software that I was most comfortable with; Final Cut Pro. Once I started using Final Cut, the whole edit began to take shape. The clips seemed so much easier to trim and put together. 

There was a point in the edit where there was a clip of myself and Callum singing. Because this clip was recorded on an iPhone, I wanted to try and give more of a 'home video' kind of look so I wanted to try and add a old camcorder filter to put over the clip. I searched online for a downloadable filter but was unable to find one. The clip still looked good without a filter but hopefully in the future I can try and find a filter if ever I need it again.