Final Piece - Wait, What?

Analogue scratch film animation from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

An experimental film inspired by people with ADD and ADHD. Using archive footage of an office scene I wanted to almost recreate the scenario with how someone with ADD or ADHD would be viewing the situation. I wanted the camera to be the eyes of the viewer, so that they can see into the scene as if they were present - they are looking through the eyes of someone with ADD or ADHD. I deliberately chose a stereotypically boring segment of footage as that is when distractions and lack of focus most obviously occur, with the person losing track of what is being spoken about and thinking about something else and making their surroundings more interesting with their imagination. I used colour, bleach and scratching to show this.
I also used sound to reflect what was going on, using a variety of office sounds and adding someone whistling so depict the way the persons thoughts are in the clouds and they're thinking about other things.
The title 'Wait, What?' I chose because it is what I find myself saying in like 60% of conversations when I realise I haven't been listening to what someone has been saying to me for a solid 5 minutes. Hopefully it will strike a familiar chord with others as well, as it's such a relatable ADD/ADHD phrase,  or some variety there upon.

Soundscape and Final Export

For my sound piece I spent quite a lot of time deliberating what kind of sounds I would want in my piece. I took a lot of inspiration from the other artists work that I've referenced and built up my idea from there. I knew very early on that I wanted to make a soundscape and not have music, as I felt it would suit my work best. That being said I did add whistling to the piece as I felt like it added a distracted and 'in your own world' sort of feeling, which I felt was an important feeling to be giving out for this piece specifically. I found my sounds from online archives and spent a lot of time sifting through different sound files and testing out which ones worked well together.

I aimed for there to be a certain level of background noise that was pretty consistent throughout, so that there wasn't actual silence at any point as with ADD and ADHD it's really difficult to get your brain to calm down and stop making noise. I wanted sounds from both environments, so there are some office noises mixed in with sounds from projectors. I shifted the arrangement of the sound files multiple times to test out which orders they sounded best in and where I needed to remove or add sound.

Once I was satisfied with my sound piece I exported it, but when I added it to my film I didn't like it, it was louder in parts that I thought and some bits just didn't work with the film. So, I went back into Audition and re-edited. 

Before I did this bit, I imported my film into premiere. I initially had to make a digital copy of my film so that I could hand it in properly to my tutors, but this did then enable me to add sound so it worked out pretty well.

I used a DSLR camera and tripod and set up in front of the screen that I was projecting on. I was then able to film my analogue piece and import it into Premiere where I cut the beginning and end where there was just blank screen. I used the motion effect to adjust the framing as the camera had been at a slighting off centre angle, and so I was able to rotate it just a little to line up horizontally.

Then once I had added the sound, I lined it up and then I was ready to export.

Creation of Final Piece

For my final piece I wanted to work much further into the film than I did for my initial experiment. I felt with that piece there was a lot of decorative work that I did, which partially I wanted but I found that it was a bit too much for the piece and made it look like it lacked in any deeper meaning. I thought a lot more carefully about my next piece and what I wanted to draw and include on it.

The major decision I made was regarding the scratching out of the people in the film. I did this for like 80% of the scenes. I made this creative choice because I felt that removing the one thing that you're supposed to be focusing on would be an accurate way of depicting ADHD and ADD within the film.

To do the scratching I used an etching tool commonly used for plastic etching for prints. This enabled me to easily scratch into the film emulsion repeatedly frame by frame. The designs that I drew I thought about in relation to my base topic and whether the represented what I wanted. I knew that last time I did too much decorative work but at the same time I didn't want to lose that completely. The elaborate designs were an aim to help visualise the distractions of ADHD and ADD and so I wanted to keep some of those elements in my work. I ended up just toning down the jazzy designs and just keeping a few to help with the vibe of the piece.

Something I felt was quite important this time around was editing the footage. For my initial experiment I didn't cut the footage at all and I just grabbed a massive chunk and worked with what was on it. This time I was more picky. I sifted through loads of the footage and added different parts throughout. I still wanted the base storyline to be there so it kind of made sense but I wanted it to me much more erratic and to jump around a bit through the piece, to show to the mercurial nature that often shows up in ADHD and ADD. 

I used a splicer to cut bits of footage together and a light-box so I could see what I was doing and what the film was looking like so far.

I then began doing testers on my film, because I knew that this time I wanted to do more than just scratch into it. I looked into using bleach for my film and found that it could have some interesting effects, and decided that this was something I wanted to incorporate into my film. By using bleach, this would add to the distortion and eccentric tone of the film creating a sense of agitation and restlessness that I wanted to show. I did several testers of bleach on film as I had never used it for something like this before and knew I should try it out before putting it on my final film.

I began by using a paintbrush to just lightly brush some of the bleach over the film to see what happened. It slowly began to take away layers of the emulsion on the film and reveal different tones such as purples, greens and yellows. I liked this effect a lot but it took quite a lot of time to get to this stage, and so I tried out some other methods.

I wanted to see what would happen if I just submerged the film in the bleach. This experiment quickly revealed how corrosive bleach actually is, as within seconds the whole segment had been dissolved from the film and there was no image left at all. The scratches were still there, but barely visible.

I tried using a cotton bud, just to see if there was a different texture than using a paintbrush and there was. I liked this technique quite a lot, the stripes looked good and it was a lot easier to get the effect I wanted quicker with the cotton bud. I thought this would probably be a good method to use for my final film.

I decided to try the submersion technique again, but this time to remove the film a lot faster. I quickly lifted the film from the container and removed the excess bleach with a towel and I got this effect. This was my favourite so far, I loved how it sort of faded away and had this fuzzy texture to it. I thought this would work perfectly in my film and add to the idea of zoning out of conversations and losing focus.

I also tested out the effect a sponge would have. I did like the effect but it was similar to the submersing, in that while the final effect was interesting it could be easier achieved using the submersion method.

Final 360 Film

Shoot and Edit

On our shoot day we took all the equipment we had booked out round to Nicole's house and began to set up in her Grandads studio.
We made sure the Go Pro rig was charged and had SD cards in and ready to go, and formatted them before we began. We attached the rig to a light stand and placed it in the center of the room. As for the room itself, it was well lit and needed very little doing to it. There were already really interesting objects in all corners, we simply laid out his sketchbooks so they were in view and that was it.
One of my favourite parts of the room was that the ceiling had loads of items hanging from it as well which was really great for us because of course, it's 360 so people can look everywhere.

Once we had imported our footage we had to colour grade it. As it was all filmed on the same camera at the same time we luckily didn't have to correct much of it, it was more of a making sure the lighting was okay, and that it looked good. We ended up have the doorway slightly over exposed but when we lowered the brightness then the rest of the room became too dark. We decided that the room was the most important part to have well lit so we kept the doorway a bit too bright in exchange for having the room well lit.

When we made our quick stitch, it worked quite well already and didn't need loads doing to it. There were however, a few bad stitch lines and so we used masking to fix them. We placed the mask points over those areas that were overlapping poorly and most of the time they got better. There was one stitch line however that was not very good and no matter what we did we couldn't get it to line up properly which was very frustrating.

We also used control points to help, and ours were all green from the start so there wasn't a lot for us to do. 

For our sound we had recorded Nicole's Grandad talking about the items in the room. The idea behind this was that it would direct the viewers gaze to areas around the room, so the could drag the camera around with it. 

We recorded a lot more of him talking than we needed and so we spent a lot of time cutting up the sound and making it run smoothly from one clip to the next. I had been holding a shot gun mic to record him, but on occasion he had moved away from the mic to quickly and so that section of the sound was quieter, so I had to play around with the volume of various clips so that the sound all matched up.

Research and Idea

For research I looked at really wide variety of 360 films on youtube. I found this rollercoaster film which I thought was great at first because one the one hand you can look at the view, and where the rollercoaster is going to go next, and on the other hand you can look the other direction, towards all the people who are screaming as they go over the drops.
I did find however that the movement was a bit too much and made me feel quite motion sick as I watched it so I decided that that wasn't something I wanted to incorporate into my piece if I could avoid it.



This next one I really liked because of how simple it was, and easy to execute. What made it interesting was the content. This is something I'm going to draw on in my own piece. When I first saw this film I thought it was CGI but the people who posted it have confirmed in the comments section that is is not digitally engineered.
It's got beautiful lighting and is really simple and minimalistic in its design (for want of a better word), as in its literally just grassland and sky. Plus elephants. Which is a pretty big part of it.



We were working in pairs for this project, and with my partner Nicole we came up with the idea of doing an observational 360 film.
We began running through various locations that we could use to shoot at, and Nicole suggested her Grandads art studio that he has at the back of his house. Talking it over and hearing about all the eccentric objects he stored in there was enough for us to decide that this would be a great place to make our film.
We would booked out the 360 equipment to take to Nicole's grandads house and set up in his studio. We would then let the camera run and add sound later on.

VFX Final Intro

compressed hobbit intro from Chloe Debonnaire on Vimeo.

(no audio)