Final Film

For the final film process, I’ve filmed further footage and put it together with my animation to make a very short film. Because I’d been working on the fire aspect of the animation, it being one of my biggest fears, I decided that I wanted to incorporate the fear aspect as part of the video.

My idea was to have a ‘film’ playing, and for me to get some popcorn and sit to watch some of the film – the film itself being the animation. I worked on showing this fear by creating a dark atmosphere in my living room.

There are things I would change about the video, that unfortunately I haven’t been able to change. Covid rules are changing and I’m finally back at work and therefore needing to split my time for other things too. So, while I’m not 100% happy with the final outcome, there are things that I would think of changing and maybe coming back to it in the future.

Firstly, I would add text. Now that I’ve finished the film, I think about all the cool things I could have added and made for the animation. I think that I could have played around with an element of text and made some cool effects, as a way of introducing the fire animation before the actual fire began, or after as a way of signalling the finish.

For the animation itself, I’ve been watching more videos online and found ways that would have cut my making time in half, but you live and you learn, right? I think that I would have liked me animation to have worked from a small flame, getting bigger as the clip went on. Hindsight right!

I mean the absolute dream would be to create something like the Take on Me music video, and I think that making something in this way in the future will definitely be on the cards, and who knows, maybe the flame will make an appearance then too! Knowing how to go about making something in this way is something that interests me and will definitely look into.

Evelyn Glennie – Touch The Sound

A couple of days ago I watched a 90 minute film called ‘Touch The Sound’, it’s a journey of sound, an exploration of the sensory world by musician Evelyn Glennie.

Glennie is a Scottish percussionist. She has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12, she began loosing her hearing at the age of 8. In the film, upon the diagnosis, the doctor told her she probably couldn’t carry on with music, to which her parents replied that she could do whatever she wanted to do, being deaf didn’t change that.

The film is just incredible, it focuses a lot of every day sounds; birds, building sites, shoes on the pavement, headphones, cars. It also focuses on the feeling of these, the vibrations and seeing sound rather than just hearing it.

What I loved about this film is that she made a point of explaining that loosing one of your senses wasn’t a big deal, I wouldn’t know how I’d feel about loosing one of my senses. She explained that thats what the mysterious 6th sense was for, to take over and aid the other five in becoming the extra sense thats missing.

Glennie makes incredible music, using absolutely anything as a form of inspiration to make a bit of music. I love music, and I wouldn’t know what I’d do without it, and this film has definitely made me appreciate everything I’ve got, when I go out for a walk, I love listening to the birds singing away, and all the leaves in the trees rustling. I think it’s so special and it makes me feel closer to nature. The film has definitely made me think of sound differently, in a positive way.

A fear of fire

For my video, as part of the identity aspects of it, I wanted to include my fear of fire into the video somehow. I set out using procreate to make my animation and plan on filming this week to incorporate it into my work.

Based on last week’s animation, I thought it was much to jumpy, so this week I went back in and added a couple extra frames to create the flames. I exported the video after doing this to show the process, that theres 4/5 frames where I’ve added the outlines of new flames.

Following that, I coloured it all in and exported it, this time at a faster fate to see if I liked it better.

I didn’t like it this fast and therefore exported it at a slower rate and I think that I’ve found my final animation video.

I’m much happier with how the final video turned out, I made some final adjustments and I’m looking forward to finding ways of embedding this into my final video process.

Animating Flames

For my flames animation, I’ve been struggling to grasp the concept of HOW to do it, but once I got the hang of it, it’s just been a matter of time to get it completed.

I just sat and watched my fire, trying to understand the movement of the flames.

Heres where I started out, the line to help me stay centre and on focus. I made a squiggly line right down the middle, this helped me focus on the direction the flames would go. It doesn’t quite look like it works though does it? It took me a while to figure out why. I needed the same background for all the frames. Duh Jess.

This lead me here, I was able to make the flames look jumpy and more alive, before adding the glow in the background, because of course, fire makes light. My next goal was to fill in the flames and make it look alive.

I went back to my fireplace and studied a bit more.

As can be seen in the video, the flames are white in the middle, and become darker towards the outside, but also have a thin thin lighter line outside the darker frame. I tried to replicate this.

It’s definitely a slow process, but I’m getting there.

Gregory Crewdson

Ultimately, an artist has one story to tell. They tell and re-tell the story in visual form and try and challenge the story, but, at the core, the story remains the same – the defining story of who you are.

Last week, I watched a mini documentary of sorts by Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters. It was incredible and I was blown away by not only the photographs, but by the concepts and ideas that he was conveying in his work. Crewdson called it ‘creating a world’ from the images that were inside his head and just getting it out in visual form – as a photograph.

Crewdson saying this definitely struck a cord with me, I knew exactly what he was trying to express. Having lost my dad at a young age, I know how important having a snippet of the past is. When I look at some photographs, I get transported back in time, to a moment thats frozen within a photograph. I understand the importance of that.

While a lot of photographs bring joy and happiness to me, most having happy memories, Crewdson takes the sadness and beauty and combines the two to make some incredible photographs.

I think that of all the photographs, the above one was my favourite, the story and patience behind the photo definitely adds to the piece, having this kind of knowledge about the photograph helps to understand the photo, but still rises internal questions, what happened here? I just think that the time and patience gone into taking this and listening to a baby cry for hours brings the impact of the photo. Over the last few days, I’ve been patient around two black swans that I’ve been photographing for a different project. The more I’ve gone there, the more the pair have willingly swam towards me, and allowing me to get some incredible photographs and insight into their nature.

This was another piece photographed, again raising questions about the woman sitting on the pavement, looking out at the smog. I really want a smoke machine after watching this!

What I am interested in is that moment of transcendence, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.

Lighting

Lighting wasn’t the first thing on my mind when I thought about my film, for my idea, my first scene of the video will be rather dark as it’s going to appear like I’m waking up to start my day. As in the previous video I made of the walking sequence, the last scene focused on myself turning the lights on. This time, I want me idea to be different, in that the first light will come in from opening the curtains. As part of my everyday routine, I have a wake me up light (It’s SO handy, I don’t have to set an alarm because the light gently wakes me up!) so the light will most probably be on for me to create some sort of first scene that isn’t completely pitch black. Other than this lighting idea, I plan on using the natural light for the remainder of the video (hopefully – depending on what kind of weather we get in the next few days!)

So, I decided to take some photos in dark lighting to see what kind of mood I got. In my previous post, I said I was afraid of fire and apparently its good to face fears head on to get over them or whatever (rolling eye emoji) so I lit a candle. Internally screamed a little, and got as close as I dared with my camera. One small step and all that…

So here are some of the photos:

I like the first photo thats projecting a bit of a blue glow. The second and third really took a long time to get this kind of see-through effect, and I burned half my mums candle away when I was finally able to see the wick in the middle.

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Usually at this point, I’d say I had a lot of fun doing this, but I really didn’t. No point lying, my post it note that I had stuck on the wall fell off, caught fire and I frantically blew it out. Not doing that again.

Simple Animation

I feel like I could possibly include a small snippet of an animation into my short video, I’m not really sure how I want to do that as part of the Identity/Work/Process/Discovery that I could include in my video. I’d been thinking of putting it in the Process aspect, but having zero animation skills or knowledge, I didn’t know how I could possibly animate my working process.

So I went back to the drawing board. Well, a post it note. On my little yellow post it note I wrote down the first few things that came to mind when I thought of identity. I ended up deciding on fire because ironically, my element is fire and I’m afraid of it. I thought that this was a way I could include simple animation into my video, although I’m still not positive about how I would go about doing this.

I wrote on another little post it note with some little annotations of what I could include for my identity/work/process and discovery.

Ok so I did say before hand that I’ve never done an animation besides a tiny little paper animation years ago. So I just decided to create a simple ball sequence. It was the only place I really knew where I could start without getting too complicated about things.

Bouncing Ball

To make this, I used the rectangle and ellipsis shapes on procreate, I think that it gave the shape a cleaner look to the first one, which I just hand drew. This took less than five minutes but it gave me a bit of a boost to give a different animation a go, before giving up on it completely.

Storyboard ideas

Following the storyboards I made I wasn’t really sure where to go with the short video that I’d made. I didn’t know where I wanted to go with the rest of my idea and I was just really stumped.

I had a real good think about my ideas and what I wanted to do and went back to my iPad with the intention of getting something down at least.

I started with a different aspect of my life, simply, waking up and making a cup of coffee.

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So I’ve started here with these really quick sketches, and I’m planning to start filming aspects of these in the hopes that I will be more inspired by them.

Steven Spielberg

Spielberg is an American filmmaker, considered one of the founding pioneers of the ‘New Hollywood’ era and one of the most popular directors and producers in film history. His subsequent releases focus typically on science fiction and adventure films. In this blog, I want to focus on how Spielberg uses music to complete a scene and to get me thinking about how I will using music for my film.

In some of Spielberg’s later films, he begins addressing serious issues in films such as Schindler’s List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Munich (2005).

Some of Spielberg’s most well known films include:

-Jaws, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, A.I Artificial Intelligence, War Horse, The BFG.. and so many more. Spielberg’s filmography list is long.

Jaws is a prime example of where music is essential to a film shot. Not just in this scene, but especially towards the end, where the suspense is high. The effect of the music is to bring up the fear within someone. Well maybe not so much fear in jaws (unless you’re like me, I get afraid at anything lol), but the music creates the excitement, and suspense of whats about to happen in the film.

I think that Jaws is just one of them films you have to watch at least once in your life!

E.T is another brilliant example, where music can express a mood. The music in this scene is “mischievous” if you get what I mean, and viewers know that the scene is meant to be light hearted, even laughed at.

Depending on which Spielberg film you’re watching, you’re getting a different experience every time.

Schindler’s List addresses some big issues including; power, dehumanisation, loyalty.. the power of one man. A young Liam Neeson (who, by the way, is one of my favourite actors if anyone is interested), plays Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved more than a thousand Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, by employing them to work in his factory during World War 2. If, like me, you cried during this scene, what made you cry? For me, “just one more,” the power of words in a film can evoke emotion, its quite incredible really. The music is sad, slow, its quiet and subtle, but it’s there, and it also gives a massive impact to this emotional scene. For Schindler, though he saved more than a thousand people, it wasn’t enough for him. Story, music, speech, they all play such an important role in making up a scene and I feel like this scene, sums up how a film can evoke emotions, even with just one sentence and a bit of slow music. Or maybe its just me…

Storyboarding

I’ve got an idea for the beginning of my video practicing, and it’s been a while so I want to get a practice test run video in before I begin thinking of making my proper video, my idea is to just have continuity sequence. This is where you need to make sure that the shots filmed fit together properly. I did this by filming the same shot at different angles/camera positions and this allowed me to edit and cut to different shots when I needed to.

So, I’m a bit weird about storyboarding and like to make the video before the storyboard. That way, I like to watch the video and decide to sketch out any changes that I want to make and when would be appropriate to make changes. It also gives me the opportunity to make scene changes in terms of how close up I film or if I change it to a wide shot etc.

So I made these quickly using procreate, and then put them together to follow the sequence that I wanted it to.

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