DXARTS 451 Digital Journal

Notes for editing "Lightness"

2008-04-12T13:07:00.001-07:00

Talked with David today and went over my bike film, "Lightness", scene by scene to determine what needs to be done for improvement.

Beginning shot with eyes: sightline needs to be controlled, road and lights need to be more visible and match up with where my eyes are looking

Edit out first shot of gears, use only abstract shots of wheels
Right when eyes close, use a rapid vertical wipe to change to the abstract bike shot - should be quick enough to be mainly subconscious
Prolong red face to around thirty seconds. Make fade-out longer to keep some of the red while transitioning to road shot.

Smoke shot: reshoot with vapor? use the same sort of stark black and white background but fade from one to the other with a gradient; use another light to have smoke be more 3D. Background should be textureless.
Maybe have doorway be an integral part of the scene?

Cut out some of the simple "girl on bike" shots.

For the "heavy" shot - zoom in on tire hitting pavement. slow way down, keep monochrome shots with golden hour shadow. Desaturate.

For lift off shot: zoom in tightly on hands, need just that second of the hands coming off the handlebars slowly, then blast out the shot. use reflectors to get enough light on hands.

For shaky shot: use a left to right rocking camera motion rather than in and out.

To come back down: gradually lower luminosity as she lowers her hands back to the handlebars.

Breathe in smoke, breathe out vapor?
Breathe in before letting go of handlebars, breathe out after? or visa versa?

Meditation Music, Structuralist Film

2008-04-10T02:00:00.000-07:00

Meditation music “balances the human organism through rhythmic pattern of tones, which are in harmony together”

modern age white noise – technology has audible and inaudible frequencies in the air. Need to maintain ecological balance, escape from techy sounds into friendly, meditative ones to escape from chaos and neurotic environments

sounds should be soft and soothing, organic and rich in sympathetic overtones. This influences inner organs and sympathetic nervous system.

If you pay attention, you can hear the pitch and tone of everything change as the day goes by, as seasons change – insects, birds, animals, even the pitch of your own voice.

Each hour represents a different mood and state of being. Listening to music synchronized to a certain time of day helps us to flow in harmony with our environment. Cycle of the day can also be seen as the cycle of life.

Morning should be tender, calming, refreshing – helps us to step out of sleep and enter a harmonious sleep

Evening meditation should inspire feelings of joy, confidence, satisfaction, inspiration, and calmness of moonlight.

Mantra – comes from word mantrana, which means advice or suggestion. Every word is a mantra, essentially – it’s a sound pattern that suggests the meanings inherent in it, to which our minds immediately respond

Repetition of mantras, with attention directed to the source of the sound, completely engage the mind. Not just focusing on vocal chords themselves, but on the mind – whose source is self. Thus the mantra is a suggestion of getting in touch with oneself.

Beat and speed of repetition is really important, as it changes the pace of the mind. Fast chants can be positive in the way that they exhaust the mind and heart; neither has any time to fantasize, and the breath and relaxation comes after the chant is over

http://www.sanatansociety.org/indian_music_and_mantras/sounds_of_tantra_mantras.htm

“Structuralist” films – until these avant-garde films, filmmaking was only used as a medium to reproduce reality, not reconstruct it. Ernie Gehr, perhaps most important structuralist filmmaker – “Film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation”. Does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind.
Some structuralist films: “Hapax Legomena”
“Nostalgia”
“Poetic Justice”
All destabilizing works that make you reconsider film as a medium for portraying reality.

“Paul Sharits’ T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G also has a similar effect especially in its use of sound. The word “destroy” would go unnoticed if it were used once in a sentence. However, when it is repeated over and over again our brain starts being tricked and we lose the certainty on what the word is. This is very destabilizing because we are used to understanding the words so that we can put them in the context to make a sense of the film. Although we hear the same sound, we hear many different words or phrases, most of them having violent meanings. This is very much related to the violent content of the image on the screen. We also start interpreting the image according to what we hear. It is a proof of how our perception can be easily manipulated and how this manipulation is so powerful that after a while any perception is interpreted based on what our brain remembers from the past. This becomes a metaphor for the film viewing (and hearing) experience; except that it is taken to the extreme in this case.”

http://waysofseeing.org/struct.html

Research Timeline

2008-04-07T23:52:00.000-07:00

Week 1 (April 1-5)
Meeting with Jill, Brownyn, Alexis, and Julia to determine availability for collaboration, share ideas about projects, talk about lighting techniques.

Week 2 (April 6-12)
For Project 1: Watch musically-oriented films. Research meditation music, read various poems in order to get a feeling for using time dilation to describe a perfect moment. Begin sketching music for film. Meet on Thursday with Alexis to discuss music ideas. Be thinking about images to use in correspondence with music.
For Bike Film: Meet with Zack/David/Sean to discuss exactly what needs to be done to make the film perfect. Re-shoot on Saturday at the Arboretum with Brownyn & Alexis. Use camera rig for car attachment.

Week 3 (April 13-19) Progress Report
Edit bike film. Determine if extra shots are needed. Film concert on Tuesday.
Scout locations for music film images. Possibly go to the coast on Friday & Saturday with Brownyn to shoot ocean footage. Finish writing music and continue to fine-tune it. Go see the Gary Hill exhibit.

Week 4 (April 20-26)
Record music for first film. Finish gathering images. Experiment with Soundtrack Pro and Garage Band. Meet with Cody for editing help. Shoot final shots for bike film if needed. Finish editing bike film. Begin compiling sound and images for first film. Meet with Zack/David/Sean to discuss where to go from here.

Week 5 (April 27 - May 3)
Gather any additional shots for music film. Finish editing. Meet with peers to go over first cut, make additional adjustments as needed.

Week 6 (May 4 - 10) Submissions due
Be completely finished with edits by May 5. Make storyboard for narrative film. Begin preliminary shooting; continue sketching ideas, interweaving between shooting and storyboarding. Meet with peers to discuss ideas and brainstorm.

Week 7 (May 11 - 17)
Bring footage in to edit; continue developing ideas for different shots. Work by interweaving shooting and editing. Watch non-traditional narratives and non-narrative films. Research After Effects techniques that could be helpful with the project.

Week 8 (May 18 - May 24)
Meet with Zack/David/Sean to discuss progress so far. Continue shooting, bring footage into After Effects to manipulate heavily. Meet with Kjell to brainstorm ideas for sound synthesis that might work with film.

Week 9 (May 25 - May 31)
Finish shooting completely by beginning of the week. Spend entire time editing, meet with peers to go over footage and rough cuts.

Week 10 (June 1 - June 7) Project Due
Finish editing completely by June 2.

Project 2: A More Detailed Description

2008-04-07T00:54:00.000-07:00

For my "Research" blog post I spoke about a vague idea I had for my final project this quarter, and I would like to clarify some ideas I have for it.
By an "abstract narrative" I mean a non-traditional, experimental film that doesn't really tell a linear story, but more describes a process and human experience that is persistent and perpetual, but doesn't really have a beginning or an end. This film will be about social construct, and trying to constantly break it apart and find meaning inside and outside of it. I do want to have a sense of a beginning, however, before I emerge into the process. The beginning will portray being born into the world as a clean slate, and then developing rules, borders, and limitations over time that build our perceptions of the world. Then we reach a point of adolescence, where a person begins to recognize themselves in their process of learning and being, and trying to rearrange the grooves in their brains and break the barriers that they subconsciously built in themselves, and this is where the perpetual non-linear side of the "story" will take place, to portray the constant problem we all face as humans that we must continuously try to solve, though we never will.
Rough examples for how the film will go:
Starting out in a blank space. White sheet of paper, or...?
Filming a ruler, someone drawing lines and boxes, borders.
Putting certain images into boxes: i.e., a picture of a cat, in a box, write the word "cat"
Time lapse of people coming and standing in line, being served, leaving
Taking images out of context: i.e., portraying the cat in a way that it becomes a furry creature rather than a domestic object
Word "cat" becomes scribbles
Dismantling a chair, putting it back together in a different way
Rearranging domestic objects in a room in various ways

Research...

2008-04-03T09:54:00.000-07:00

There was one common issue that I noticed was present throughout the class, as well as exciting opportunities that were emerging. What was consistent with almost all of the films we made was that there were usually two diverging ideas (or more) present in a film, but neither one of them was developed fully, and it seemed the director was being hesitant and not diving in completely to either one or both. However, it seems like there is a lot more chemistry inside of the class, in working with each other and figuring out exactly what kind of film each one of us wants to make. I definitely let go quite a bit and decided to make my films my own, to really get what I wanted out of each one, to kind of develop my own experience and make it more personal to my own goals.

"Making it my own" for this quarter means developing an interdisciplinary experience for every film. There are three major interests that I have, and am studying in and out of school, and they include: visual art, creative writing, and music. Film can incorporate anything, it is an extremely comprehensive medium that has many parallels to music and writing. Last quarter I noticed so many parallels to my poetry class that it was astounding, both in structure and a kind of emphasis on momentous epiphanies. This quarter, in addition to this class I am also taking a Drawing class and a Native American Art History course. As the quarter progresses, I want to involve what I learn from my other classes with the films that I make here.

Technically, I need to work on my lighting and on my camera language. It's really important that I do several shoots and take each one into the editing room to figure out what I need to alter, especially lightingwise, and to also pinpoint exactly what shots I need from what angles, and for what duration. I also need to plan out my editing so that it's not a last-minute thing and becomes a very expertly integrated part of the film. I really want to push myself with After Effects this quarter because I feel like there's so much potential for brilliant work there that I am on the brink of reaching.

So I would like to make two new films for this quarter, and a reedit of my "Lightness" bike film.

The first will keep the "UP" exhibit at the Henry close in mind, and will have music be a very important driving force in what I create. The concept in the film will be about reaching a high, coming to a moment of enlightenment, an epiphany, an instant of perfection. I plan on writing my own music to an acoustic guitar, and possibly a djembe and piano music. I want the music to be pretty simple, carried by the mood of the guitar notes and my voice, but very developed and nuanced in each part. I feel like my strongest film last quarter was my "Lightness" bike film, where it focused on just a moment of letting go, and built up really well to that point. I'm excited for the opportunity to do it again. I want to have my first cut of this film be at two minutes, and then go out and shoot again to possibly have it build up to be around 3-4 minutes.

For my "Lightness" film, I want to reshoot the inhale/exhale portion with a different background, and using an effect in After Effects to make the smoke more 3D. I also want to reshoot the portions where I'm wearing shoes and shouldn't be. And, I'd like to reshoot the moment where I let go of the handlebars, so that it's with a green background and doesn't have the white picket fence.

The last film I want to be an abstract narrative that uses powerful images as more of a driving force. I want to use After Effects heavily for this project in order to create an other-worldly mindspace that really takes us out of the real world. An idea I keep coming back to in my everyday life is the concept that humans are constantly trying to box themselves in, to create rules and restrictions for themselves to fit into, to sterilize the natural world into a clean-cut sensical textbook of an experience. The premise for this story is that it's about someone DIGGING, scraping for meaning in their life and in human existence or the existence of anything in general, trying to escape from this sterile social perception of life and delve into the experience of it.
I want to emphasize an idea of taking things apart. A few strong images I have in my head right now are:
- poking through a layer of film or tin foil, light shining through
- peeling back layers of an onion, or of skin
- drawing out squares in mid-air, trying to dissect everything into particles
-- focus on idea in science that there's always a small space between molecules... what exists in that space?
- putting everything into boxes, drawing out ruler lines
- taking the body out of context. it becomes an organic shape rather than a "human body"
I'm not sure how I'm going to do the last one though, but am interested with the idea of using dance choreographed to depict this.

So for the first month of the quarter I want to focus on making another really high-quality film for the Henry. This weekend I am going to start writing music and to search for an ideal location. When I was in Mexico for Spring Break there was one room in the house I was staying at where I kept finding myself in, having these surreal experiences where I felt completely out of my body but deep inside my head. It was a high-ceiling, airy space, with big open windows and old, broken wood furniture. I want to scope out another space like this to be a place where a person can meditate inside of their own mind.

By next week I'd like to start filming this space and to get a good feel for shots I want to use, how long it's going to be, so that I can write my music accordingly. I also want to reshoot my bike shots during this time.

By the third week I'd like to be finished shooting for both my first film and Lightness film and be working the whole week on editing.

Color scheme

2008-02-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

Shot ideas

2008-02-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

Touching the bark of a tree, imprints like fingers pressing on skin

Depicting the mystery and secret personality of houses

What they mean for who you are, your social status, your upkeep of life

Curiosity of trees, what strange creatures they really are

Human sadness from distance from nature

Breathing on your own, being a living organism on this planet

All shots extremely organic, main colors green brown and grey with any blues or reds contrasting greatly

Time lapses

2008-02-25T18:50:00.000-08:00

The spirit catches you, and then you fall...

2008-02-25T18:19:00.000-08:00

trees, yes.

human confusion.

The mystery of houses,
what status they connotate,
their personality

the curious,
innocent nature of plants

jumping,
who will catch you?

sun worshipers

See the world...
from another perspective...
and then you fall

UP

2008-02-13T22:32:00.001-08:00

2 minute film, start with a reaction, end with an action - must be a "chain reaction".

I definitely see the parallels between the reading "Lightness" and the idea of "up" for this film. My favorite quote from that reading that I'd like to keep in mind for all my films, but particularly this one, is:

"Wherever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space... not escaping, I mean I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with different logic and fresh methods of cognition and verification."

I want to depict someone coming to the realization that things in their life needs to change, and watch as their view changes from one perspective to another, and why.
Here are a few scene shots that I've come up with:

-To begin, the reaction is just going to be the moment of recognition in someone's eyes. Kind of a falling back, a slow blink, with a close-up on just their eyes, no mouth.
-The road flying by from underneath a person, looking up at the horizon, back down at the road
- Someone riding down a hill on a bicycle, arms out, flying
- Releasing balloons
- Climbing a tree, looking down at the world from that perspective
- Lying down, back on the ground, looking at the world from that perspective
- Smoke billowing up

I want a key part of this film to be audio. I'm going to record my own music, using a djembe, didgeridoo, guitar and bass, and my own voice.

More on UP...

2008-02-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

Slow motion
CLOSE UP shots
Extremely far away shots
Time reversal
Time speed-up
Still shots with minimal movement to indicate that they're footage

Idea of everyday having a set schedule and a million things you have to do, scheduling it one after another. I want to film getting out of this, gaining a different perspective on it, changing feel and getting inspiration.

Starting shot:
Bike on its side on the street, wheel is the only thing turning. Silence except for the sound of the wheel. Spilled groceries everywhere.
Time reversed- groceries crawling up back into the back, bike goes upright, person back on the bicycle.

Someone getting up out of the bed - maybe just forward time.

Ending shot:
Me riding down a hill, side shot - my arms are out, I close my eyes, and...

Slowed down shot of me falling back onto my bed. Taken from third film from last quarter, but shot all the way through so you can feel the fall, feel the reverberation.

Barf

2008-01-17T14:23:00.000-08:00

- Usage of stills, zooming in and panning through them
- Layering multiple images, fitting text in between them
- Simple piano song playing in the background
- Idea that these people come from many backgrounds, are extremely different: end title sequence (start movie) with something happening to make them all equal, a situation of emergency in which everyone becomes the same
- Physically drawing out the scenes and images to use, panning through them
- Animating the text specifically so it moves and undulates with what's going on around them
- Go into a busy restaurant and record the sounds, conversations
- Animate so that it appears like a child is drawing out the scene
- Sounds from battlestar galactica scene, and beginning scene of waking life?

Childhood images

2008-01-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

A Single Line

2008-01-15T12:25:00.000-08:00

For the animation portion of my film, I want to use a single line that morphs into different scenes, traveling through the lives of the childhoods of several different characters.

I think for the conversational audio part, it'll be of multiple adults talking about their childhood in different ways. The animation won't directly represent what they're talking about, and will generally be giving a happy, upbeat vibe while what the conversation describes won't always be so bright...

I'm going to experiment using audio from different films also, that incorporate dialogue that speaks about childhood. I have one that I want to use from the TV series Battlestar Galactica, when Starbuck is in a hospital on Caprica, and the doctor talks about the x-rays he took showing scars of how each of her fingers was broken in the exact same place. This will eliminate the camera use and allow me to use a pretty dramatic dialogue that's already been recorded.

Make a film without a camera?

2008-01-12T22:48:00.000-08:00

Make a film without a camera about Ariadne’s childhood. Hint: animation, or...?

At first I was completely bewildered as to how I'd make a film without a camera. Isn't that the most basic instrument? Then I realized that the computer would largely be my tool for this project, kind of locking the entire film process in the post-production phase. It feels like something endless, infinite... yet I'm comfortable with it.

I'm not too keen on the idea of using a mythical greek goddess as the main character to my plot. I'm hoping to change it to something more general, like the childhood of a character I make up myself, or of multiple characters.

I would really like text and audio to play major parts in this film, as well as animation. I feel like sound plays as big of a role as you want it to, and can largely set the tone and tell the story if you want it to. I'd like to craft this movie into a collage, of sounds, songs, still photographs, previously recorded footage, animation techniques, and possibly physically manipulated film. I read about an avant-garde director named Stan Brackage who imprinted butterfly wings onto film to create his movie, and am very inspired to research the possibilities of techniques like this.

The scene I'm inspired to start out with is in a crowded place, with the garbled murmur of indiscernible conversations blending into one. I don't think I even want the images to directly represent what actions are taking place in the story, but to maybe represent sound frequencies or something of the like. Then I want to zoom in with the audio on specific conversations, describing events of the lives of people involved, depicting the personalities and character of each.

This project will take me getting pretty familiar with Adobe After Effects. I've worked with the project some, but have done further research for resources to help me. One is the catalyst webpage:

http://catalyst.washington.edu/help/video/aftereffects/index.html

And have placed a hold to pick up "Creative After Effects 7: workflow techniques for animation, visual effects and motion graphics".

Alternative History Rethought...

2007-11-28T18:06:00.000-08:00

As I continue to try and film, I increasingly feel like the theme of my movie might be too melodramatic. I've been filming scene ideas for another storyline, which takes on the idea of creating an opposite world where we operate the most basic parts of our lives completely differently.
A couple different scene ideas:

Beginning with the idea of someone being born and automatically put into a box.
Switch to sitting in a classroom, all the way up to college, and then have a line of people come out to receive their diplomas, all with boxes on their heads, each receiving an "educated" stamp on their box-forehead.
A family sits in the living room, watching TV. There's a box around the TV, boxes on all of their heads.
Someone sits down, takes off the box, and starts to cut it apart, and put it back together in a different way.

The world turns topsy-turvy.

Sounds work completely different. As someone walks down the stairs, it sounds like splashing water. Dropping the keys on the counter, it makes the sound of breaking glass, etc.
People eat with the table upside-down. They also eat with their hands.
Everyone takes showers outside in the rain.
Plucking the guitar strings, each one makes the sound of a woman's voice.
Instead of everyone sitting down in the living room to watch TV, they hang up a different painting everyday in the same spot on the wall and observe it.

The person who originally took apart the box reverts back to it. Instead of trying to make a completely different shape, the person tries to make something completely different out of the box. They paint it, cut holes in it, and parts to it, but the original box shape remains the basis.

I'm having a harder time developing this subject to what I want it to be. With parts of it, I feel I have the same problem as with my haikus - they all point to an interesting concept, but don't delve farther than that. I think the overall storyline has a lot of depth and meaning to it, but its individual parts still need to be developed...

I've been filming scenes for both ideas, and plan on taking the one I don't use for the 3rd project, developing it, and using it as footage for my fourth film.

Alternative History

2007-11-25T22:33:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about assignment three continuously since it was assigned and rented a camera this weekend to do some sketch recording. I've got several scenes I've been experimenting with and am centralizing the story around reversing bad experiences with intimacy, depression and phases of self-inflicted withdrawal.
I'd like to delve deep into this one, turning it into almost a repentance, and fiddle a lot more with various concepts of symbolism and allusion.
A few different shots I have planned out:

- someone repeatedly taking pills, showing a daily routine. I want to reverse the footage so that the person is spitting them out, until a sink fills entirely with pills, and I shoot them spilling out onto the floor.

- a woman is sitting on a chair, and a person begins cutting off her clothes with scissors. Her sweater, her blouse, her bra, until she's naked

- a man's hands reaching up around a woman's body, starting at her hips and going up around her stomach. There will be a trail of black, dirty smudges from where he put his hands, using soot or some kind of residue.

- a woman pulling an orange or an apple from her skirt, cutting it up, distributing the slices to faceless people until she has nothing left

- the woman is standing under an umbrella, crying, and lifts up the umbrella to look up under the rain, and the raindrops blend in with the tears to make them indistinguishable

- glass filling with liquid, over and over again being dranken, and filling up again

- blurred shots and in and out blackness, walking up stairs, suddenly in another spot

- woman cleansing herself, water pouring over her, down her face and body

- she's crying, and a man kisses her tear

- she wears cut up clothes all sewed up

- she takes a whole apple/orange and eats it to herself

Haven't experimented with sound yet, have mostly brainstormed about video shots... so that's the next step.

Mi Haiku

2007-10-30T00:36:00.000-07:00

Exploring outside will be essential for this project. The notoriously dismal weather of Seattle will be perfect for a dreary poem.
The spontaneity of this project will be really, really fun to explore with. I think it's all about going out and finding a perfect moment to film, and I have some ideas about what to search for.
When reading some of the haikus, I gained strong recollections of moments when I would just stop and tilt my head for a second, thinking, "huh." Just really admiring the affectionately ironic parts of life, or a sudden recognition of beauty in an ordinary moment.
I like the idea of a spiderweb that appears in a corner eave one day, in all of its complexity and obvious time-consuming effort, and then getting destroyed by something in a second (perhaps by my stick):

spiderweb all night to make
a second and
it's torn by my stick

and another on an incessant dripping from a leaky faucet - how lazy we can be when all it would take was a minute's time to fix

drip drip of the sink
one turn of the wrench
it'd be fixed

Assignment 2: History and Structure of Haiku

2007-10-27T14:32:00.000-07:00

Doing some research on haiku, I've found that the common definition includes a few factors. The setup for film haiku will be quite different, of course, but it'll be interesting to allude to the formal written structure of a haiku.
First is the basic format of syllables:

7
5
7

The next is that it includes a season word, or reference to the natural world, a nature sketch in words.
Commas, hyphens, elipses, and implied breaks are important between each line.
They can be as short as an individual 7-5-7 "renga", or be sets of up to 100.
The purpose of a short haiku is to be short, exasperated: can be said in one breath, expresses a moment's sponteneity. An

"intimate sharing of an ordinary moment".

Where all of life is summed up in those few seconds of words. Haiku is largely connected to Eastern philosophy and Buddhism, the goal of enlightenment... It has a very suggestive nature. D.T. Suzuki, an important person in the spread of haiku to the western world, explained the purpose of its ambiguity:

"When something is too fully expressed, there's no room for suggestion."

One of the original haiku writers was a painter, seen clearly in his ways of purposefully arranging scenes in words.
In Japanese, the original language of haiku, the 7-5-7 syllabic pattern is comparable to rhyme in the English language. Some writers have translated Japanese haiku into English by discarding the 7-5-7 pattern and illustrating the idea through rhyme instead.

Many contemporary poets have tried their hand at writing haiku; however, many of them do so in a largely uninformed manner, straying from the highly nuanced and complex nature of the art of haiku. In order to be effective, I see, it's important to become familiar with at least some of the history and prose of haikus, and try to understand its power in complexity.

I've checked out a book from Jack Kerouac, the "On the Road" author I loved and learned while haiku researching was a major Beat haiku artist at the head of the "haiku movement" that hit full-on in the early 60s. I like the take he took on haiku, making it his own, taking advantage of its spontaneous nature that implied depth within a perfect simplicity. He tossed out the 7-5-7 syllable format, saying western haiku didn't need it, just three lines that "say a great deal". I find that most of the haikus I fumbled through seemed to be overly symbolistic, esoteric... like they were trying too hard, and were far too vague. Kerouac's haikus are beautifully simple and convey a universal feeling, free of the triteness my cynicism seems to pick out easily in many other haiku. He said specifically that haiku ought to be:
"Very simple, and free of all poetic trickery."

Here are some of my favorites:

Useless, useless,
the heavy rain
Driving into the sea.

Missing a kick
at the icebox door
It closed anyway.

Evening coming --
the office girl
Unloosing her scarf.

Some other ones I found online:

The bottoms of my shoes
are clean
from walking in the rain.

Glow worm
sleeping on this flower -
your light's on.

Snap your finger
stop the world -
rain falls harder.

All day long
wearing a hat
that wasn't on my head.

Progress Report: Light and Shadow

2007-10-11T01:42:00.000-07:00

ASSIGNMENT 1 : Light & Shadow

Create a 90 second, in-camera edited, silent B/W experimental study of "light and shadow." Must feature an experimental optical in-camera effect such as camera obscura, heat distortion, split-screen using mirrors, glass mattes, etc. 12 day project completion cycle.

This assignment should be interesting, to say the least. Its completely basic, eliminating sound, color, or even a necessary storyline - but the optical effect is kind of throwing me off.

To brainstorm I began by looking through my entire house for any objects that were reflective, refractive, or translucent. I kept my eye out for items in particular that had interesting textures, had concave and convex shaping, or were multi-faceted and complex. This yielded a whole variety of objects: glass bowls, cups and jars, steel pots and pans, spoons, knives, glass cooking pans, CDs, cd cases, a disposable paint tray, mirrors, water bottles, jewlery, a sequin pillow, wax paper, and seran wrap. I also scrounged up light sources: a swivel lamp, a flashlight, a lighter, or bulbs installed around the house. Then I experimented with the different objects and lighting, seeing what sort of reflections I was able to make, what kind of light patterns, or how I could distort the overall image. I didn't have a video camera at the time, but wanted to see the product through a camera lens, documented in a way I could publish online, so I took still photos of the creations. Here are some of the more interesting of the images I came up with:

This came from holding up the disposable paint tray (which was translucent, and had a bubbly texture) in front of a fluorescent light bulb, moving the tray back and forth, slowing down the shutter speed, and capturing motion in the picture. The next few are from the same technique, using different motion patterns.

I also used the video recording function on my camera for this one; I can't post it on here unfortunately, but it looked aweome, like there was electricity sparking and circling all around the lightbulb.

This is the moving reflection of the bottom of a frying pan.

I filled up a glass pan with water and got some pretty neat effects (above). When I shot from underneath the pan looking up, I got some of the coolest distortion I've seen yet (below).

It's unfortunate that I can't post the videos I recorded on here, because those ended up being fascinating; one I took was of a moving light refracting off a crystal doorknob, another was the world through the same water-filled pan as the last picture, but you could see the rippling and various distorting as the water moved in front of the scene.

Other ideas I want to explore:
Using tin foil. Placing the video camera on a tripod, setting up a piece of glass in front of it, and tracing objects within the scene with black paint to give a simultaneous 2-D and 3-D feel. Using multiple mirrors to reflect an image several times within the shot.

Using distortion through water was one of the most promising finds I discovered from this experimenting. I want to see how I can incorporate the interesting light patterns and motions I created with a watery-distorted effect.

Next step: renting cameras for Thursday and Monday.