Project Ideas

When me and my partner first met we decided to do a small spider diagram of ideas that we had thought of whilst being introduced to the project. We collected our ideas together and thought of numerous projects to create, this is the spider diagram of our ideas.

Picture to come.

Idea 1

We wanted as many sounds available and one of the ideas we came up with was a busy kitchen area, where someone is either cooking or baking a meal. We would have this sequence going in order, such as, opening of cupboards preparing the equipment for the meal, then the spark of a cooker being turned on with overlapping of other sounds such as eggs being broken and whisking noises at the same time. We then would have the hissing and spitting of meat being placed on a frying pan, and the low hum of an extractor fan.

We incorporated another idea from the one above of someone doing their weekly shopping in a supermarket.

Noises such as the squeaking of a trolley, then the rustling of carrier bags and goods bring brought off the shelve to be then thrown into the basket. With this idea we would have voices interspaced, such as a cashier talking or the calling of an intercom, and someone trying to sell certain food items.

With this idea I think it would be very achievable, we would have enough sound footage to fill the 3 minutes.

We would also have a large array of sounds to use. I also think the genre and concept of our project would be easily perceived for our audience to understand.

Sound Inspiration

Whilst I was watching Kill Bill 2, I noticed that the first fighting scene is very inspirational for the project I am creating.

Even though I have watched Kill Bill 2 before, i closed my eyes and played the first '2.30' (which is the fighting scene) to try and make sense of what may be happening, this is fully achieved as all the sounds used in this scene are ever day recognisable sounds such as, footsteps on grass, the low-pitch hum of a lawn mower, banging of car doors then the ringing of a door bell, quickly followed by footsteps opening the door. Once the door is open loud, serious music is played, immediately signalling something is happening creating tension. Throughout this whole sequence no voices are used.

The next part of the clip we hear fighting noises, such as punching and heavy grunting of the women fighting, we immediately hear glass smashing, choking of one of the characters and the banging of wood being used as weapons, all these sounds are interspersed within each other. All the sounds used are loud and repeated and many of them are over lapping.

This scene is very inspirational as sound is used to guide us through what is happening rather than a narrative being used.

Kill Bill Sequence 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg6rqDX-1wQ

Project 2, examples.

Once we was given the brief we was shown small examples of sound with no footage, we had to distinguish what each sounds where, and what affect it had on us. We had to look at how many layers are included in each clip and if the 'dynamic range' of sound helped create a sense of space.


Meat Factory, Ear worms.

This clip is a short documentary of a man's life entering and working at an abattoir. Within this clip we are given a narrative so we immediately know what the project is about.

Whilst he talks we can hear different sounds in the background creating a sense of space, we are placed directly into the slaughter house, noises such as cows and machinery with knifes clanging together can be heard. The narrator often digressed to his life outside the abattoir, such as meeting up with his work colleagues and finding a way to switch back on after his hard, gruesome day. Whilst he is talking about this we instantly hear car noises and cheery music is played, with the narrator singing along changing the mood of the story. I think the reason for this part is to show us the narrator switching on the end of the day, forgetting the horific sights of the slaughter house.
I found that this clip flowed and I understood from the offset what he was talking about.

My only concern with this documentary is that I didn't fully understand what he was saying due to his dialect, also, because he digressed a lot to happier cheery times, (with him singing and have fun with his colleagues) I did not know if I should have taken this clip seriously or not. All these factors I will take into consideration when creating my own project .


Tunnel Vision

This clip is a short documentary, giving us a small insight into the life’s of two different people, and their feelings upon entering the London tube train.

At the beginning of the clip we immediately hear the stopping and starting of the London tube. The doors open and the repetitive call of the women saying, "please mind the gap'. This sets the scene for the story.

We then hear the narrators commenting on their personal life’s. With this clip I found that it was rather embarrassing to hear as the narrators were revealing secrets, the listener would agree with this as the narrators often paused and coughed in embarrassment. None of these signs were edited out making the documentary very personal. A lot of the clips in this project were interspaced and it skipped from one narrator to the next with interspaced sounds of the tube in the background.
This documentary flowed and had rhythm, it was easy to understand as all the sounds where clear, this clip was enjoyable to listen to and has inspired me.

Creative Media Practice Project #2

On the 17/11/11 we were given our second project.

Again we had to work in pairs to create a '3 minute', Audio, 'Sense of space'. This project will contain no footage just sound, as no space is silent, sound always exists.
We are asked to look into how we can perceive given space as one of high activity, or of marked quietness. It can either contain that of human presence or even the presence of machines or nature.
Even though this project will contain no footage, I think it'll be exciting to create and experiment with sound as it is a major value to put into consideration.

Final Edit

Today ( 9/11/11) we have completed our final edit for 'Portrait of place'. After a lot of hours of choosing which clips go where we have finally polished off our film. Overall I have enjoyed making this film, it made us explore the country side using better equipped technology and allowed us to experiment with various effects to further our film. We have come across a few problems along the way, such as some of the footage being destroyed due to rain on the lense, and in post-production we didn't know if our film would bore the audience or not, but in our presentation we will see hopefully their full response. In this project I have thought outside the box creatively using the thought process of trees showing emotions. Due to the project being silent this has caused a problem for us trying to represent the theme of the film, but we have worked around this factor by using visuals such as De-saturation and opacity on certain images.

This project has given me experience with the camera equipment and it has helped me work on storyboards and shot lists which prove very helpful and I cannot wait for the next assignment!.

Editing 2

In this clip we wanted to show us editing and piecing together our footage.

Eventhough we did not use this effect, I wanted to show that we experimented with various effects to try and create an atmosphere for the audience.

In this image we wanted to show one of the transitions we have used, again it shows that we have experimented, and by doing this it has taught us how to use Final Cut Pro.

In this shot it shows the effect of Desaturation, it may not be inspiring to some but I think it portrays our effect of spooky a lot better than the actual colours.

This is the final image that we took and it shows the final piece of our project. We have begun to add the titles for our project once we for sure knew that it is perfect edited with no mistakes.

Editing

We are now at the editing stage piecing our rough edit together. Once the footage was in an order, we cut parts and muted the sound.
We showed our rough cut to our module leader and her feedback was very helpfully as it guided us into make the project have an effect. Our module leader said that the film had more of a dreamy outlook rather than a spooky uneasy affect, she said in her opinion that the project was a bit boring in the sequence we put it in and that newer images should be added.
Luckily, we had quite a lot of footage to look through which was a major advantage, however, due to the rainy weather some of that footage had been spoiled by rain drops on the lense of the camera through no fault of our own.
We then went back to properly editing our work and putting it in a more coherent narrative. As we wanted to make our project spooky and un-sure, we add a desaturation to each clip making it black and white. This worked well and we decided to keep it this way, we sped up some of the clips and even used reverse narrative, which I insisted upon.

Filming in Edale

As predicted the weather in Edale was atrocious. The sky was dull and we all got very wet, some of our shots were jeopardised by this and it was very stressful. However, Edale is a glorious place and we was able to capture a large amount of successful footage.
I was worrying though that some of the footage may be too repetitive and boring.
Another blow to the day as well was our change of mind to our project, we decided that we didn't want to do the seven deadly sins idea. We kept the same storyboard and shot list concept but changed our idea. We wanted to make our project spooky, we also wanted to create un-easy for the audience. Our storyline now is entering the woods by showing close ups, to extreme close ups with the footage getting faster and faster then at the end we zoom out of the trees, exiting.

Equipment list

Me and my partner sat down and went through everything we would need, we realised that in Edale we would be doing lots o walking and so we decided to not over pack on items that did not seem appropriate. We checked the cameras out at the university and checked everything together and the batteries were fully charged.

This is the list of equipment we will bring to Edale:

1) PD170 Camera
2)Tri-pod
3)2x mini DV tapes
4)Climbing Harness (If rope is available)
5)Climbing rope (if available)
6)Plastic bags for rain cover
7)Warm clothing/suitable footwear/waterproofs
8)Food
9)Torch
10)Map of local area
11) Mobile (for emergencies)
12)Planning/work documents
13)Contingency money
14)Back pack to contain some items

Changing idea concepts

Whilst discussing our project we came up with a change of idea. We will keep to the same concept of, 'Emotion through trees', but instead change the various emotions to the seven deadly sins. We came up with this idea as we think our project will be too ambigious to our audience, if we choose trees that represent these sins and still use the one word sentences to describe the tree maybe the audience would understand this and see what we are trying to achieve.

SEVEN DEADLY SINS:
Wrath
Envy
Sloth
Greed
Pride
Lust
Gluttony

Shot List

As stated in the storyboard, we did not know what order we wanted our sequence in, so we created the shots we wanted in the shot list and put them in a jumbled order, then in post-production we will determine what shots we want and where to put them.

Shot List

My only concern to our shot list is that we may not have three minutes worth of footage. We have come up with an idea of prolonging each scene but this may cause our footage to look like still images. We will see what we can do in post-production to solve this matter.

Storyboard

Due to us not having a narrative we did not know what order we wanted to film our sequence in, however we knew what shots we wanted to take. Also, we didn't know what part of E-dale we was going to visit so we didn't know if we would be able to acquire some of the shots we wanted. Me and my partner created a storyboard with the shots we wanted to use and put them in a rough order for the basis of our storyboard.

Further Research

As we wanted to represent emotions, we needed to know how many emotions there is. Looking at various websites I found an interesting site that explains various emotions, it also delves into what triggers emotional arousal such as food or the weather.

http://changingminds.org/explanations/emotions/emotions.htm

This is an extremely useful website and it has helped me and my partner lots. With this website we can now be able to go and film trees knowing what we are looking for.

Project Research

We decided to choose idea 3 for our project as this is more creative and experimental. We wanted to get as much inspiration to try and interpret others work into our film. I looked at many websites on trees and how they are represented. I looked on YouTube and found a song, 'Rush the trees', it is quite inspirational, the video for the song has a lot of images of trees , each image inspired us and we wanted to interpret some of these images in our project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Deviant art shows a lot of images that are easy to access; me and my partner looked at tree emotions. We found hundreds of images of tree emotions (a lot of these had been photoshoped), we thought in post production we could interpret these effects using colour saturation and various other colour correction effects.

http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=tree+emotions%2C+tree+in

As an avid fan of lost I viewed a clip that I wanted to try and interpret in our project, this would work well with our project.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulwWolBrcbo

This extreme tilt up looking at the forest top technique is used in a lot of films and I think it works well and I have always wanted to experiment this, now this project will allow me to do this.

Third Idea

'Emotions'

For our final idea we wanted to film 'trees representing emotions'. This is a strong idea because Edale is mainly made up of vast open land and various types of trees big and small so we will have a lot to film. For our idea we wanted to film trees representing various emotions such as, strong and upright trees can be percieved as stable and secure. Leaning and withered trees can be percieved as exhausted , sad or giving up. Entwining trees or grouped trees can be percieved as frustrated, madness, anger or they could be percieved as strong reliable and safe, for this we would show one word titles next to the trees to show understanding.

This is a more creative idea but as it is a silent project we did not know if our audience would understand our meaning.

Second Idea

'Journey'

For the second idea we wanted to represent 'Journey'. We wanted to create an emotional journey represented in a physical way. We wanted to interpret concepts of the first idea, using the use of small spaces, but gradually the spaces getting bigger and more open. With this idea we also wanted to show the decay of nature through urbanisation, abandonment and over all decay of time, for example, showing buildings that have been abandoned and broke down, also the texture of trees and roots to show age. I like this idea as we will be able to collect a lot of shots. However, the only issue with this idea is we dont have a narrative, but i dont think that this will pose as a major problem.

First Idea

We reviewed, broke down and in other cases connected our mind map ideas and came up with various ideas as to what we could create for our project.

For our first idea we came up with the idea of 'Physical and emotional contrast of open and enclosed spaces'.
We thought for this idea we could film Forests to represent enclosed spaces showing claustrophobia and fear, representing all of this we would show an anonymous character cowering and writhing in-between the trees to represent his emotions.
We would also show open fields and the character dancing and smiling representing freedom and calmness.
We would also show different levels of observations, on cliff edges, in bunkers and in vast open spaces.
This idea is simple but can be effective but it may be perceived as a bit ambiguous to our audiences. I also think we won’t be able to capture people’s attention for three minutes but we did have a lot of creative ideas for this piece.

Mind Map 2

This is another mind map I created this time showing further creative values. I wanted to definatly include these ideas into our project as I think they are strong and beneficial ideas. Having researched into Edale I think these ideas will be capable. One of the ideas is 'camera angles', I thought the use of various camera angles would be extremely effective using our knowledge of long shots, tilts, pans, extreme close ups and hand held to create an effect.

Starting the project.

To begin with we teamed up in pairs, with my partner we decided to draw out a spider diagram, branching out our terminology of 'Place'. We came up with a lot of ideas and exanded off of these. We wanted to think outside the box with this project as we knew that being in Edale with limited boundaries as to what to film, a lot of pairs would have the same idea, or same images.

This is the spider diagram that we created, it's basic, but contains all the connotations of place.

PROJECT 1-Portrait of a Place.

Project 1.

We was given a project brief on Portrait of Place, asking us to shoot a 3-minute silent moving image on a place, this given place was Edale in Derbyshire.

In the project we could include;
. an exploration of a physical place.
. an exploration of a person/people within a place.
. a fictional place or characters being developed.
. a self-portrait within a place.
Any of these could be used in the style of a;
. Documentary.
. Drama/ Narrative.
. Experimental/ Poetic.