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.

Final Piece

No Strings Attached from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

I enjoyed doing this project as I liked being able to experiment with different things in After Effects. I  did however find the puppet really difficult to animate as it was so different to anything I had ever done before. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to animate each limb and I realised I wouldn't be able to get in as much movement as I had hoped to.
I did like the comparison of the two screens, and I spent quite a lot of time trying to match up the puppets movements with the alert from the phone. This was intentional to show the pull technology has on our lives.
If I did it again I think I would spend more time animating the puppet, and getting it to do more movements as I think that would be a lot more interesting for the viewer. I also think I would do something different for the background of the puppet, perhaps some thing more simple that wouldn't distract from the rest of the film.

Second Screen

In contrast to my animated puppet, on my second screen I am going to have a live girl going about her daily life, and getting pulled away from what she'd doing by her phone.
I initially thought of having her physically jerk her arm up when the puppet does, like as a stronger link between the screens but I decided it was a bit too much of an 'in your face' idea and wanted to make it more subtle.
I instead just matched up the times of the puppet moving its limbs to the girl picking up her phone.

During filming I experimented with lots of different types of shots, such as point of view and wide angles.

Puppet Development

I knew that the first problem I had was that I had a very limited knowledge of After Effects, so I began watching tutorials on Lynda.com. I eventually found one that suited what I wanted to do, it taught me a technique called 'parenting' which is where you link one limb to another, making the one you want to be the 'dominant' limb the 'parent' and the other one is the 'child', so when you move the 'parent' limb the one thats connected to it moves with it.

I made a basic stick man on After Effects using shapes, and practiced making a character move in different ways, and getting used to the technique. 

I wanted to make my character look more human-like and so I did some practice drawings, adding in more joints and body segments that theoretically should make the puppet easier to move.

I wanted to incorporate some characteristics from the puppets I looked at for research but also keep it simple for me to animate, so I added the big empty eyes that seem to be a recurring feature in most Voodoo/Mexican skull puppets.

I drew each body part of my skeleton individually and then imported them to After Effects where I assembled the puppet as a whole.

Puppet Research

As our theme is humans and technology, I came up with the idea of being controlled by technology, and by extension I thought about puppets. I wanted to use this as a metaphor for how technology has a constant presence in our lives and often pulls us away from things that we're doing. For example when I'm out with friends/family or doing work, if my phone goes off I'll usually stop what I'm doing and check it.
This lead to my decision to do my dual screen with one screen showing a person going about their day, and whenever they get distracted by their phone the one of the puppet's arms or legs gets pulled up.
My first thought from this was what should me puppet look like. It needed to be relatively simple as I knew I would need to animate it but I was quite interested in the idea of voodoo dolls and Mexican skulls, so I looked at images of them as a source of inspiration.

Mexican 'Day of the Dead' puppet

Skeleton Marionette 

African Voodoo doll

Twin Screen Project Initial Idea

Initially I thought of doing something to do with constellations, and having an animation created on after effects of a specific star sign being drawn on one side and on the other side a live action film of a person to whom that star sign belongs and them doing an action that links them to their star sign.
I began looking at lots of different videos of constellations created on After Effects such as:

I found this graphically very interesting and I thought it might be something I could try out, and it also linked to the After Effects tutorials we had been given over the past few weeks, where we learned how to use shape layers and made things appear as if they were moving in across the screen. My thought was that it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to do from what we had learned and would be very visually interesting.
I soon moved on from this idea as it seemed very superficial and didn't stretch me creatively.
I began looking at examples of dual screen films and and other short films, and I came across some interesting films involving shadow puppets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrpMncSZe-I

Final Edits

Aries

'Upbeat and magnetic personality'

'Always look out for their friends with caring and generosity'

'Natural optimism'

Capricorn

'Deep, mysterious and full of intrigue'

'They live by self discipline and responsibility'

'Concerned by public standing'

Libra

'They have mastered the art of relationships'

'Lazy when getting their hands dirty and doing work themselves'

'Likely to be underachievers' 

Taurus

'Not a total social butterfly, and can be shy to strangers'

'They have a stubborn streak that can result in laziness'

'Avoids talking about their emotions'

Virgo

'They need to learn to calm down and not over analyse a situation'

'People might find them cold or detached'

'Can tire themselves out without even moving'

Photoshop

After importing my images into photoshop I was quickly able to see that I had to do quite a lot of colour editing as I had done my photoshoot over the course of an afternoon and was using the light from a window, so the sun changed over the hours I was there, which created different tones and colour hues on my subjects skin. To compensate for this I use the adjustments tab in photoshop and used the 'exposure', 'brightness', 'contrast' and 'saturation' tools to play around with the colours and make them match each image. 

I also cropped the images down to help with the framing.

I had a slight issue with the composition, as when I took the photos I was too focused on the subject and when they showed expressions to notice the framing at some points, which meant that I ended up with some odd areas in the background. 

An example of this would be in one of the photos I had cut a photo frame in half, which distracts the attention of the viewers from the main subject of the photo. 

To overcome this I used the clone tool to edit out the photo frame from the edge of the image, so it's just plain wall. I also cropped the images down to help with this.

 

I wanted to try out something that was inspired by Amy Friend, and I was thinking of trying to incorporate star signs into my work but when I did it ended up looking tacky and so I decided that it would look better without.

Final Photoshoot

Practice Photoshoot

Our astrological signs aim to speak to the individual, although they are generalisations they supposedly reflect who we are or at least parts of us. This concept of personal reflection is what helped decide the setting for this series. I wanted my subjects to be in a natural scenario rather than a controlled one; I chose a window seat at a local coffee shop, as opposed to a studio. I believe this gave these people the space to be comfortably expressive, or natural.

During the practice shoot I spent some time figuring out the most aesthetically appropriate camera settings for daylight photos. Before heading out to the location I used the opportunity of a similar set up in my room – capturing a person in the natural light from a nearby window. At first the photos were far too dark, I took a few without a particular point of focus just to work out a suitable aperture to shutter speed ratio.

Digital Stills Project Ideas and Research

For my digital skills project the theme is 'Reflection'.

I have began to look into star signs, as people often look at their horoscopes as a reflection of themselves and try to pull some kind of meaning from it.

Andrew Lundwall

Research – Andrew Lundwall/Amy Friend

These fragmented portraits of people represent the human need to connect the dots of their own personhood, a self-defining process according to their assigned star constellations. As these images show constellations overlaying the fragmented faces. This connected with my theme of astrology and urged me focus on what horoscopes mean to the individual.

Amy Friend