Evaluation and Final Piece

Technology rules? from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

I found this unit really engaging as the topic was an idea I came up with, so I found it an enjoyable topic to investigate. I find the idea that corporations and the government have access to all of our online data not only possible but likely. I suppose in a way I have a bit of the heart of a conspiracy theorist in that way, although I don't worry enough about it to stop using social media and various other technological methods of communication.
I think my group ended up working really well together, as we all were very interested in the topic and came up with really 'out there' ideas about what sort of things our data might be being used for and ways to interpret this. We did struggle with the fact that all three of us are very unorganised characters, which meant that sometimes we really had to take a step back and think 'hang on, this is important and we need to get it done by this time' because otherwise we would never have completed anything. Once we had done that we were able to get on with the project and complete our paperwork and everything else we needed to do.
We had a few hiccups along the way where we lost footage, due to misplacing hard drives which ended up being really annoying as we then had to re-shoot a lot of the footage. I think that if we had used that footage we would have ended up with a very different film although whether that would be for the better or not is hard to say.
As it is I actually rather liked our final outcome although there were perhaps a few things in the edit that could have been neatened up. I really enjoyed doing the sound for this project, and after just completing our sound projects I was now more familiar with Audition and so I could create a soundscape with more ease than I would have otherwise.
All in all, I think our project went better than I hoped it would, although if I did it again, I would probably edit it slightly differently.

Sound

I found this film on vimeo that I thought the sounds were really interesting for. The whole soundtrack is done using sounds recorded from analogue cameras, and made into music.

Digital Analogue from NORTH OF X on Vimeo.

For our experimental film my group decided we didn't want to have music in our piece, so I looked into lots of different sounds I could use to make a soundscape.
We were thinking we could find loads of technological sounds to incorporate into the track, such as phones ringing, printers, cars etc. We also thought having voices on the radio and static would make a really interesting addition to it, and would represent phone calls and people communicating over long distances.

I began initially by searching for various sound effects on free websites such as 'Sound fx' to use, and adding them all to a folder in Audition.
I then began to sifting through the sounds and picking the ones I thought would work well together and adding them to my mixed track session.

At first I found it difficult to find a pace for the track that accurately matched what I wanted the audience to hear, I wanted them to get a sense of the pace of the film and sort of the rhythm of the clips. To do this I watched the edit several times and began to build a pattern of where there were lulls in activity and tried to adapt the soundscape to that.

I had some sounds as base layers that were mostly just meant as background noise, although instead of just having one or two background layers through the whole thing I cut up a lot of them and spaced them through it. I then began adding in the other layers and clips. It took a long time to get right just because of the length and the amount of layers, and to stop it from becoming repetitive I also had to make sure that I had large resources of sounds to draw from.

Filming & Editing

For our experimental film we used a large variety of different cameras as we wanted to our film to have different layers and tones to it that combining material from multiple lenses could give us. It also gave us more freedom as to where and when we were able to film. For example, some of the footage was filmed on my phone, as it is something I carry around everywhere with me and meant that I could film where ever I was. Other parts were filmed on DSLR as Dan and Ivan both have their own cameras and they were able to film sections whenever we needed it, or if we wanted to add something to the footage we already had. Ivan also hired out a fish eye lens which we used to get a more unique perspective on various aspects of what we were filming.

We spent a lot of time on our edit, as our film is mostly montage so the sequence of the clips was very important. We cut between clips in a way that showed each bit was connected to the following part of the film, and we parts of the narrative we had filmed we interspersed throughout the length of the film.

We wanted to get quite a lot of variance in our colours, and the fish eye lens that we used for some of the footage captured some really vibrant tones and shades that really made the films more aesthetically pleasing. For example the blue of the late evening sky in this clip I really liked, and it's one of my favourite frames.

Experimental Film Idea Development

My initial thoughts on this project were about entangling someone in a literal web, to represent the way technology pulls at our lives. What I was thinking of doing was using the studios to film a figure silhouetted in a room with all the strings coming off of him and attaching to computer monitors with code on them. We were thinking of cutting sequences of montage into it, and the sections with the figure itself would have a bit of a Bill Viola feel to them.

We soon realised that our ideas for the studio sequence wouldn't portray quite what we wanted it to, and decided to try something else.

We started thinking about online personas, and our digital representations on the web such as our facebook profiles, twitter accounts, emails, the data thats recorded on websites that we visit that's sold on to third parties and then similar product are advertised to us.

This is a browser attachment that allows you to view the amount of websites that are viewing your information from the page that you're on at that particular moment.

We also decided to keep data diaries to see how much we used our phones in a day.

 

We decided that the medium we wanted to use would primarily be montage, but we knew that we'd need some sort of - not quite narrative but something like that - to string together the main body of the films so that it made sense. To do this we decided we would film someone waking up and the first thing they do is check their phone. So many people these days (myself included) use their phone as an alarm clock. This means that its on all night, and is the first thing you check when you wake up.

Experimental Film Research

For my research I browsed lots of experimental and mainstream films on vimeo, I found a couple that helped give me inspiration for some of our shots such as this one called 'Streets'

STREETS - NEW YORK CITY from Tim Sessler on Vimeo.

This film helped give me ideas for possible shots we could use in our film, as I really liked the angles used, and the lighting is really visually nice. I thought the night time shots used colour in a really interesting way, and I loved the deep blues of the night sky.
I also thought the use of slo-mo was really well done, as it enabled you to observe the movements of the birds and the water etc. with increased detail.
The focus is amazing, the amount of detail captured in every part of the frame is stunning and it really imbues the viewer with a feeling of wonder when observing the film. I'd like to try some of these techniques out for our own film, such as the shots at night time with the blue sky or maybe the slo-mo.

ART & SPACE: Portrait of an Art Journey from Duncan Ward on Vimeo.

This film I thought was interesting as I really liked the choppy clips of road at the start, and I thought the transitions into following shots worked really well with the fade out, although I'm not normally a fan of fade outs. I think it works in this piece because of the style of the film, but if I tried to incorporate it into our one it would probably seem very out of place in relation to our theme and the rest of the film.
I get that with this film it's intentionally black and white and really fuzzy, which I think works well for it (it makes me think of cloudy rainy weather) but it's not something I am intending on incorporating into our own experimental film as I don't think it's suitable for what we are thinking of doing. I suppose it could be quite an interesting idea to make parts of my film black and white but it's not really what we want to go for I don't think. But it works well for this piece.

Soundscape and Evaluation

Overall I am relatively happy with how my soundscape turned out. I think if I did it again I would make it longer, and there would be more of an arc within the piece. I designed this particular work so that it could be seen as what the character is hearing, but also what I imagined it would feel like. I was drawing on the idea of being trapped and tormented, and unable to get away from suffering. Initially I was unsure on what I should use as my focus in the piece, but the scratching of nails I really liked. I was unsure as to how it would fit in with the rest of the piece but I think it worked pretty well in the end.
I do however think I could have found something better to use for the idea of chains, as the items I used I didn't sound as great as I wanted them to in comparison with real chains.
I really enjoyed learning how to use Audition on this project as it is something I've never used before, and I while at first I found it tricky to get the hang of, after I had mastered the basic controls it became a lot easier to figure things out and experiment with what I could do.
Also I found recording my own sounds a very engaging process. I loved getting more hands on in the project, and found the task of looking for items that could make sounds to suit what I wanted challenging and yet also rewarding when I found the right item.
If I did it again I would spend loads more time testing out different objects and seeing what kinds of sounds they made, this would have given me more variety and I would have been able to try out more ideas when I was putting my soundscape together.

Editing on Audition

To begin with, I imported all my sounds into Audition and began sorting through them.

I knew that I wanted a few recordings that I could use as the base of my soundscape and build it up from there. I had deliberately recorded some sounds for around a minute or so, to give myself room to cut and edit and have those pieces as part of the background.

I then began to cut different sound together. I found it very difficult at first to find a rhythm to the work, maybe because it was something I'm very unfamiliar with, and it took me some time to get a foundation to my soundscape. Eventually I managed to do this, with a combination of long drawn out sounds and shorter interspersed ones, and from this point I was able to begin to build up my soundscape to something with more depth.

I didn't want the piece to be overloaded with effects, I knew with what I was trying to convey I would need a certain rawness to the sound. The effects I did use were pitch and I also experimented with echo. I decided the echo sounded to false with the rest of my sounds, but the pitch enabled me to add different dimensions to the piece that otherwise wouldn't have been there. I also tried our overlaying the sounds so it moved smoothly from section to section, and it sounded more pleasing to the ear.

Sound

To decide what sort of sounds I wanted to use in my soundscape, I spent some time looking at my painting and imagining what sort of sounds you would hear. I thought about just having screams in the background but I thought that would be too sort of in your face, so I thought about more subtle things I could use.

In my mind I view the character in the chair as somehow having been corrupted, the way thats he's screaming while the light falls on him. I suppose another way of looking at it would be that he's a person of light with dark falling on him and he's screaming because of that. Either way I got vibes of wrongdoing from this guy, and so I wanted to show this in my work.

I was able to record the sound of rain one afternoon, you can only hear it faintly, but that combined with the faint sounds of birds represents something of what perhaps the Pope used to be, it's a fresh, hopeful, renewing sound, and in my piece it will be very suppressed in the background and difficult to distinguish.

I wanted to get the sound of chains somewhere in the piece as I could imagine the man somehow being trapped, and unable to escape his torment, so I used a ring that I have with three parts, that's quite heavy and I was able to get from it a sound that was similar to that of chains clinking.

I did want something similar to screaming - but not. I wanted to add something that would tie the piece together and just give it that edge, making it eerie and uncomfortable to listen to. I didn't have anything of my own that would make the noise I desired, so using a sound effects website called 'Sounddogs' I downloaded a free sound effect off nails on a chalkboard. This sounded perfect for what I wanted.

Recording Sounds

For my soundscape I wanted to try out several ways of recording sound.
Myself, Connor and Nicole booked out the sound studio one afternoon so we could record some sounds for our projects. We had previously been inducted however it had been a week or so since then, and we struggled to know exactly how to use the equipment.
We spent lot of time going through the manuals that were in the room and trying out different ways to get the computers to do what we wanted, in the end spending so much time trying to figure everything out that we used up our entire session! I am still glad we booked it out though, as it was a way to learn valuable information on how everything works, and when we use the room again we won't have to hang around trying to figure it out.

After we ended up not recording anything, I decided to take out a Roland R05 to record my sounds on. This small handheld device was easy to carry around to different areas with me, and was really easy to learn how to use. I had never used one before so I found it a really unique experience, I was listening to things from a whole new perspective which I enjoyed and got to experiment with different items I found to see what sounds they made, and if I could use them.

Soundscape Painting

For my soundscape project, I have chosen to use the Francis Bacon's 'Study after Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent'.

Bacon's painting is a distorted version of Diego Velasquez's 'Portrait of Innocent X'. The streaks I saw as light are supposedly drapes or curtains of some kind, however I prefer my interpretation as it makes for a more intriguing idea - why would a Pope be screaming in the presence of light? Unless the streaks are in fact, not light, but streaks of dark. I personally think that the notion the Pope has perhaps been corrupted, and now cannot bear to be in the presence of light is far more captivating. Bacon's trademark box in the painting adds to the Popes suffering, in that he's also trapped, and it also sort of looks like his chair/throne is fading away around him symbolising perhaps a loss of power.

Another point to think about is that the only feature of his face that is in focus is the screaming mouth. His eyes, nose etc. are all blurred out, and you'd think in a portrait showing pain that you'd want a lot of focus on the eyes. That way, you could empathise more with the subject and relate to them, but Bacon's intentional removal of those features could indicate that perhaps he doesn't want us to feel compassion for the subject, although I must say that I still find it hard to not pity him at all.

I chose this painting as it's the one that stood out to me the most. I think that there is so much material to draw on from within this piece that I could do a lot of different things with, meaning I would have a several paths to choose from with my soundscape. 

The streaks of light shining through the painting, contrast strongly with the obvious torment of the Pope, and could symbolise multiple things such which I will explore when I do my soundscape.