New Semester Projects

Upon completing stage 1 of the masters programme I am venturing out on my own.
I want to observe the relationship between visual and sound by means of experimenting with different aspects of this relationship. After a tutorial with Lamberto I now have three different projects in mind.

The first idea involves a series of photographs taken of a walk through an urban park on my way into town everyday. The photos document the light each day as I walk through the park into uni or to work and mark the passing of time and will hopefully show the passing of the seasons in central Birmingham if I get enough pictures. I am interested in the subtle changes of atmosphere the light creates and wish to experiment with different soundscapes or maybe a sound narrative (due to the static nature of the stills). Lamberto suggested that something to establish the notion of passing time would be beneficial in the piece and I thought it would be important and immediately thought of Bill Violas 'The messenger' and the sounds of going underwater in it used in this piece to induce the notion of sleep between the days of the photos. I originally pictured the end result to be an installation, perhaps interactive, where the audience could control which picture and accompanying sounds to explore, maybe scamble up the sounds to perceive the, if any, difference sound makes on the atmosphere of the picture once it has already been established. At the moment I feel this is the least strongest of my ideas and feel it needs another level.

The second idea splits into two:- a performance and a fixed media piece.

The fixed media piece will involve presenting a number of film sound/music conventions and film grammar in order to form a narrative or improve the communication presenting a narrative. I am in the process of seeking out these conventions by watching a few films.

The performance will involve a dancer sculpting the sound by means of movement in a space, I am gona experiment with enclosing a space with some screens Lamberto has in his office, and use some sensors or something similar to capture the movement. I immediately thought of infra red sensors in films such as oceans eleven as a form of security for precious objects. I wish to observe the reaction of the dancer to the visuals or sound or both or in terms of sound to visual or the other way around. As the dancer would control an element of the sound or the visual there would be a feedback loop where the dancer would be reacting to what she/he controls and is controlling, and controls the sound/visual whilst reacting to it, would there be no end? I think it would be interesting to suggest a sculpting of space that controls sculpting the sound and project visual. I feel that this project needs a theme or a concept in order to progress. Lamberto suggested a text to follow, I am going to look at other works similar to get some inspiration.

LRRH Performance

Old Film

After showing Nick Jones the judderman video he suggested we tried a plug-in in an obscure editing program (on a PC!!!) It was incredibly simple to put the plug-in onto the film and adjust the properties to our desired effect. The result was the film looked like, well an old silent film with a hand cranked camera. Complete with blemishes, hairs, flicker, tint and jitter (juddery effect). It looked cool, and certainly complemented and enhanced the style of film film and for me because of the old film effect I associated it with the nosferatu film and so associated that sort of atmosphere with it. We added titles in a gothic styley font - we thought it was quite amusing as it was so over the top. Next week, (last week) we have booked the studio and are going to mix the audio in 5.1 Surround and do the DVD authoring to submit.......

Post Production

This week Carla and I have been putting the last touches to our music video. After having a break from the production over christmas I cam back to watch the video with fresh eyes and was pleased to find that the effect was creepy but in a quite amusing way. We were hoping that we would be able to film the establishing shot with the moon in shot. However, the weather did not permit this- so I had the idea that we could find a picture of the moon on the net and layer it over the establishing shot (zoom into the lake). Once we had placed the (resized) moon into the sky and used automation scaling and positioning to move the moon with the zoom. The effect looked ridiculous!! We spent quite abit of time trying to get it to look natural but had to give up and go for more of a comedy effect (I must have laughed everytime I saw it!). I was very pleased with it once I had gotten used to it - it was certainly very surreal, tying in nicely with the rest of the video. Next we attempted to lighten up details of some of the shots in the woods just to establish some background- we used contrast and tweaked the RGB Balance. We enhanced the red in a big way, Greg made a comment that we looked like east european witches and it was felt that the red made a contribution to this effect. I preferred the aesthetic look of the brighter red highlights anyway. A few fade in/outs and cross dissolves were added (although not too many or it would have cheapened the whole thing) to smooth out some transitions that needed it just to improve the flow of the film. A few edits were tweaked and now we are going to see if we can emulate the effect of a hand cranked camera. We have placed soft edges on the footage- it was felt that this frame gave the film an 'old' character. 

Everytime I watch the progress I feel more and more of a weirdo, the middle 8 scene that we acted backwards in order to reverse to play forward in particular looks effectively creepy. This certainly corresponds with our theme of dark fairytales.