Studio Shoot Synopsis

Synopsis:

We are taking inspiration from the photo ‘Untitled’ by Hannah Starkey (1997) looking at self-identity and mental health. The way the girl in this photo is holding the moth reflecting on it has inspired us to look into animal instincts, therefore bringing to mind the Freudian theory of the Id, Ego and Super Ego. We will start by having our actor/actress walk into the set which will have two sides to it. One evidentially good and one bad and the element that splits the two in half is the Mirror centered in the set about the size of a doorway. The character enters the good side seeming distressed for an unspecified reason. They walk past the mirror which is represented by an empty frame, at first it is just a reflection of the space and them. Then as they go to walk away they see a figure out the corner of their eye in the mirror. They will double back and go examine this figure which will be actor/actress 2. This figure is the Id but it begins calmly with them reflecting the movements of the character as if still a mirror. Then the Id will slowly get more distressed and begin to act out not exactly copying what the character is doing anymore. Then the character begins to realize this is no longer a reflection of their true self and will begin to fight back with the Id and control it. Things around the set slowly get more broken as the reality of the piece becomes broken. The fight is broken up by the two characters moving away from the mirror into their own space. Eventually the main good character decides to solve this problem by turning the mirror around so that they can be alone for a moment. When calm and alone they go back to the mirror and turn it back round again but just as they do this the Id lashes out and pulls them through the mirror to the broken side of the set. The Id then moves to the good side and walks away out of shot. The piece ends with what initially started as the good character in a heap on the floor in the broken side of the set.

Studio Shoot Initial Photos and Idea

We were given these photos to serve as a source of inspiration for our idea, and we spent a lot of time drawing different aspects from each of them that we liked before we narrowed it down to final one that we decided to use.

'Blind Twins' Jane Evelyn Atwood

This piece we really liked because of the duality of it. The relationship between the two women is that of twins, and they seem to be taking some kind of comfort from one another and the contact they're sharing. Their costumes also seem to be mirroring each others.

'Kind and Queen' 1970 Diane Arbus

We found this one the least inspirational, although we liked the framing and both the subjects have an interesting vibe - they're both wearing clothes consistent with royalty on top of normal every day outfits which is an interesting contrast.

Untitled' 1962 by Ralph Eugene Meatyard

Most of all on this on we enjoyed the lighting of the photo. We thought it was really clever, and the way one child, older than the other one is looking into the room while the other hides in a dark corner, could be representative of the mind. Like an older version of yourself looking back at your childishness of previous years. But from this one we mostly drew the idea of using windows and doors as more dynamic ways of creating light.

'Untitled' 1997 by Hannah Starkey 

This was the image we chose as our main source of inspiration. We loved the woman's interaction with her reflection. We also found it really interesting how you view most of her environment through the mirror. There is a weird sort of connection between the woman and her reflection, like she's gazing through some kind of window, as if they're two separate people.

We used this photo as our primary source whilst stilling drawing on different aspects of the others. We thought about using 'identity' as our main theme, and wanted to incorporate mirrors into our film. We briefly thought about looking into mental health but that's quite an overdone theme (although still important) and we decided to look at it a bit differently. Of course, mirrors are often scene as vain or narcissistic and as a sign of obsession with physical appearance but we wanted to stay away from that, as it is a bit of an overused cliché.

From the other images we used as reference for our lighting ideas, as they used quite dramatic lighting and the misé en scene in the framing was also something that we wanted to incorporate into our piece.

With our idea of identity, we began to look into the idea of animal instincts, and the sort of base urges that most people suppress. Using Freud's psychological theory of the Id, Ego and Superego, we began to explore this idea.

The Superego is the higher level of our minds, and is based on morals and judgements, and our sense of right and wrong. The ego is the middle level where you recognise more primal urges and find civilised ways to achieve them - such as the need to eat, drink, reproduce, or respond to situations with violence. The Id is the level of our mind that represents the most basic part of our personality and thinks only of what we need and that we need it now. It is more primal and is purely thinking of survival, and functions on instinct. 

We had already decided we wanted to use mirrors in our piece, but the idea of the Id, Ego and Superego led to the notion of us using the reflection as a sort of alter-ego. Which is to say that we came up with the plan of having someone looking into a mirror and seeing the Id looking back at them. Like there is an alternate version of themselves inside the mirror being reflected back. We decided it would overcomplicate matters if we tried to incorporate all three parts of the Id, Ego and Superego, and narrowed it down to just the opposite two, and developed it from there.

Final Piece

'Talk'


DSC 3761 Sub 05 from nicole harman-smith on Vimeo.

Editing

We had to sort through a lot of different clips before we even got around to importing because while we had filmed at the same time, we couldn't start the cameras at exactly the same time. In addition to this some of the cameras carried on rolling while others were stopped and started and so there were different amounts of clips and they were different lengths. This made sorting through them very time consuming.
Once we had sorted the clips, we began with importing our piece into premiere. When importing our piece we had to triple the width of the 1920x1080 standard screen size so that we could fit all three pieces side by side to edit.
We knew we would be exporting them at the end as three separate files, but we needed them side by side to edit them accurately and ensure they matched up.
We also had to go through each clip and match them up, as it was essential they were in sync, and trim them to exactly the same length.

Our piece, though it had all been filmed at the same time, in the same place, still had some irregularities between the shots. This would have been due to different angles and spaced out lighting, which we noticed too late after our shoot.
Colour grading the two shots with the actors was relatively simple as they were on the same background, just a few meters apart, however it was trickier to get the right tones for the middle screen as it was using a different background and was also lying down flat.

Nicole used After Effects to figure out how to make our texts come up on screen, and she spent a lot of time getting the shape right and learning how to make the items move and add text. I helped her with finding the colours and fonts to make it look more legitimate.

We decided that it would be a good idea at the end of the woman's video to have it glitch to black as the others fade to black. This would be to symbolise how we are using old technologies less and less and the eventually won't exist. One of the hardest things to do these days is match up formats so that you can watch things. What I mean by this is for example, I have a lot of old videos at home, but no VCR to play them of off because my dad chucked it out to make room for a DVD player. Old tech is going out of style, and as our piece is partly about the relationship between new and old tech we wanted a way to show this. 

To do this we decided that having the man keep trying to contact the woman with his iPhone and technological pieces and the woman have a delayed response and trying to reply with something old fashioned the the man didn't understand. She continues to try to keep in touch but eventually her screen begins to glitch and fail, and turns off. This is the end of the piece.

To accomplish this I needed to learn how to create a glitch in premiere.

I looked on youtube to find different tutorials on how to make glitches. This was the first one I found that I liked.

It seemed very simple at first, copying layers and changing them to 100% blue, red or green, and then changing the opacity. I didn't get much further than this however as for reasons unknown I couldn't get the settings to remain fixed. As time was of the essence I decided to have another quick browse of the other youtube videos to see if I could find something else that might work.

I quickly found another video, and this one I liked the effect of even more. 

This tutorial involved creating and adjustment layer and adding wave form effects and changing it to the noise version. I could then mess around with how big the waves were vertically or horizontally, and see what looked best. I didn't want it to be too comical to look at, we wanted it to genuinely looking like it was bugging out, and so the waves weren't too in your face but were there just enough to be like 'ooh what was that?'

Before adding it straight to our final piece, I began to practice on one of my own holiday videos, and just spent some time experimenting with how I could place the adjustment layer, splitting it up and adding it in different places.

This is an example of what it would look like in the film. I really liked the effect and so did Nicole and we thought it would get across the point of the old technology fading away and falling out of use.

However we began to run into some problems when we tried to add the effect onto our final piece.

The file was already enormous as we wanted relatively decent quality and it was also 3 times the size of a regular screen.

This meant that when we added the adjustment layer and then tried to export it, the file came up with the finishing time estimation of about 9 hours. We understandably couldn't wait that long and for now had to hold back on adding the glitch to the end of the piece, but hopefully we'll be able to work on it and come up with a solution.

Final Shoot

After our first shoot was completed there were multiple things that needed fixing and improving upon in our next one.

To begin with, it had been a long time since we had used DSLR's when we took them out for the first shoot, and we wasted valuable time trying to remember where all the controls were and what all the right settings were for shooting in a studio. This time around we were able to set up the cameras a lot more quickly. We also changed the positioning of the table where the objects lay and incorporated the use of the step ladder which made it a lot easier when trying to film our birds eye view as we could place the camera further back and still keep it high up. 

We also spent a lot more time making sure we had as few shadows as possible in the shots this time, and to do this we were able to move the birds eye view camera further back to prevent this. This meant that instead of being positioned in front of the lights like last time we were able to pull it back a bit more, so it was less in the way of the lights and so the only shadows that were cast were from the actors themselves.

This did then raise another issue of the shadows of the actors on the white background, so we used softbox lighting which really helped.

This time around we decided to incorporate more actions into our film. 

When the actors arrived we talked them through our prepared list of actions we wanted to take place, and where we wanted them to place the items. Item placement was quite an important aspect of our work, and we worked hard to ensure that our shot was relatively balanced and we fit everything into the frame as much as possible. We made a conscious decision to leave the old fashioned phone in the frame through the whole piece as a nice little bit of consistency and a reminder that we still use some old fashioned technologies today. 

We had several practice run throughs of the piece before we began rolling to help the actors become familiar with the order of things. Once they began to get the hang of it, we started to film.

We did several takes, the first one or two we still had to edit where we were placing the items as the actors of course cannot see what is in the frame. We had place masking tape around the edge but it was only helpful in regards to what wouldn't be seen on camera, not how an item would look when it was in the frame.

 Once they got the hang of that we played around with timings, and how long each segment should last. We did multiple takes of different lengths, seeing what would work best.

Practice Shoot

The practicality of our shoot required a lot of thought. We were going to have three screens, and so we would need to shoot three pieces but with all of the timings of placing pieces in the middles to be synced up. We were initially thinking of filming each section individually and mapping out the timings separately and adding them together in post but we felt that this would massively over complicated everything and would be extremely time consuming.

As a solution to this we thought of filming everything at once, with three different cameras. We spoke to our tutor and to some technicians about the feasibility of matching up our footage if it was filmed on three different cameras and discovered that as long as the cameras were all the same and the settings on each one matched up, the footage should fit together seamlessly.

This would mean that we would be able to set up three cameras side by side and film everything real time so as long as we matched the beginnings of each piece, they should sync up perfectly.  

We booked out a studio and three cameras and tripods for an afternoon and evening, and spent the afternoon setting up before the actors arrived. The actors we used were two close friends of mine who have had experience working in student projects before and were eager to help out.

Myself and Nicole each bought in our props and set up the studio, using the white background and studios lights to create our shots. We asked the actors to come in black clothing, and kept the backgrounds to all the shots white to keep a nice monochrome balance to the work and making the colours of the props stand out more.

We had some trouble initially as one of the shots was required to be a birds eye view. This meant that one of the cameras had to be tilted  downwards as far as it would go and much closer to the props than the other cameras had to be to the actors. The camera, in fact, had to be positioned in front of the lights. This presented a whole lot of new problems with regards to shadows on the background, as all the individual frames were very closely aligned. We had to test out a lot of different lighting positions before we managed to find one that worked.

Before we even began filming, we ran through what would be happening in the piece several times to help the actors become familiar with what they needed to be doing.

We began by just going through the piece in sections, and repeating those and then fitting them together, allowing the actors to get used to what was happening, before eventually beginning to film.

We did several takes through the evening, so we would have a lot of material to work with. Due to already have rehearsed with the actors earlier, we managed to get through the filming relatively quickly as the whole piece is a couple of minutes long without any cuts, so all we had to do was run through it a couple of times and edit minor issues as they arose such as where the props were place in the frame and the like.

We also noticed afterwards that we had had some issues with framing. While before we began to film we set up each shot carefully, because it was all done in one take we sometimes forgot about checking the framing before we began to shoot again. 

When we looked back on the footage is it very obvious to us that we needed to raise the male actors camera up, as at times we cut of the top of his head, and also push the camera forward so the frame was closer to the top half of his torso so it matched the female actors shot.

We also didn't take into consideration the creases on the white sheet we used as the background which ruined the aesthetic of the piece.

Synopsis

Synopsis

Our installation piece will portray connections and networks through communication between people and focus on the idea that in the modern age, although society has many platforms of communication, people still find it difficult to connect and communicate with each other.

We will be portraying this theme through moving image, our installation will consist of three screens in a row, side by side. The right hand screen will show a male subject in his own space trying to reach out and communicate to the female subject in the far left hand screen, also in her own space. Both the right and left hand screens will alternate between low key and high key lighting to switch the viewers focus on which screen they are looking at and to show who's trying to contact who in that moment. The middle screen will be portraying the sense of separation and distance between them.

The piece will begin with the attempts of communication being made. This will be seen in the middle screen by showing an open white space with a table where each of the subjects, on either side, will leave objects for each other; the screen will also be displaying text. The objects will portray older forms of communication and will include notes and letters, telephones, a laptop, TV,  Radio and other forms of music, books and other random objects. The text will portray newer forms of communications and also appear within the middle screen and will overlay the moving image. Each of the subjects will be seen sending text messages which when sent will show up on the middle screen, showing that they have been undelivered. Along with text messages- webpages, tweets, hashtags, status’, failed phone calls and stand alone text will also show up in the centre screen. Throughout the piece, subjects will then continue reaching into the middle, leaving objects to try and talk to each other, however, neither receives each others messages or objects of communication that have been left for one another. The middle screen eventually fill up with text and objects as it goes on. The piece will end with the male subject finally picking up a phone call from the girl, only for the sound to be distorted, her screen will start to glitch to enforce the breakdown and lack of their connection and her screen will then go black.