Overall, I think my film went well although I would change a lot of features. For example, if I had more time I would’ve filmed more for the middle section tor make it more uplifting and empowering. I would’ve also made the music more dramatic towards the end in order to make the viewer’s heart beat quicker. I would’ve also filmed on my macro lens if I had the chance to and filmed close up surroundings to show more than just me in the film and have more variety. I’d like to imagine that I linked the artist references quite well e.g. Duane Michals, KangHee Kim and Zhang Huan. I specifically like the ending scenes where I linked these artists shadowy effects to my own film and have a creepy element to it. As for the more colourful side of the film I was more inspired by Kim as their work if very bright and catches the viewer’s eye. I would’ve loved to experiment more with different movements of the camera in order to create nicer transitions although my hands were far too shaky to do this myself so I would most likely try to get other equipment to help to do this. Hopefully, I can do this next time as well as learn more about editing on Premiere Pro as I go. I learned a lo more already whilst editing this film e.g. the adjustment layer to edit all clips at the same time. I think that the overall film could’ve been executed better if I had more time so the story line could’ve show a bit better. I would’ve also edited the footage on the beat of the music if I had more footage but I couldn’t do this as I didn’t have enough clips to cuts up to do this effectively.
When I went to the large bunker at the bottom of Plemont, the weather became a damaging factor and I was worried that the rain and the wind would make the tripod fall over as well as break the camera. Although I managed to deal with the weather and if anything it added to effect of the film by making me look more exhausted resulting in a creepier look to the film. I also liked the way that the rain dripped and echoed inside of the bunker as it made my film more ominous when editing the audio although I struggled to single out this one sound as the wind was very strong.
This part of the film related to the them of freedoms and limitations the most and expressed it better than any other part. The drastic contrast between light and dark adds to the thought of oppositions. Being in the dark means lack of knowledge or being hidden from the truth whereas putting light on the situation adds meaning and truth just the same with freedoms and limitations.
My specific inspiration for these scene was Duane Michals. Duane Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour. Whether the spirit/ghost is visible in the photo or if there is a feeling of the supernatural lurking around the photo, I think Michals work represents the unsettling feeling of uncertainty. His work links to my theme of Freedoms and Limitations as there’s the idea that the angel/devil near the bed had the freedom to do what they want without consequences but as had the limitations of not having a normal human life.
My other inspiration was Zhang Huan. Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York City. He began his career as a painter and then transitioned to performance art before making a comeback to painting. He is primarily known for his performance work, but also makes photographs and sculpture. He is usually photographed by the photographer Rong Rong. Both of the artists work combined creates an inspirational flow for which I will consider incorporating into my film. In relation to Freedoms and Limitation it is clear that the photographs below connect greatly to the theme. The photography is clearly showing some people being completely trapped and chained by the society in which they live in. Whereas some of the photos show the complete exposure to the real world and freedom to explore nature and the imagination. I like the amount of depth the photos explore and the rawness; it has an unsettling element to it which I’d like to display within my own work. I also like the way the photographs are displayed as worn out photographs; it makes the viewer feel as if that they are viewing has some historical importance or that the photograph is deemed as special or one of a kind. The photograph above has also given me some inspiration for my film. I was thinking that if I wasn’t to present there beginning or the end of my film in my bedroom, I was going to use a bunker to have an element of darkness as well as to show one of the girls in my film to have a life which isn’t glamorous compared to the other character. I think the image has a lot of depth to it as the door towards the background shows the light coming through indicating that there’s a way out from the bunker which could be seen as metaphorical for a way to escape the darkness and move towards something to improve a persons life. Which all links to freedoms and limitations.
My other inspiration is Michael Chaves, specially the music video he helped Billie Eilish make called Bury A Friend and the movie The Conjuring 3. When looking at Bury A Friend, from the album “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?”, I think the concept of nightmares and horror links in nicely as well as the title pf the song quite literally linking to death; intertwining with graves, spirits and ghosts. My idea of making peoples spirits/alter self come to life makes me think of the demonic character Billie Eilish is trying to portray. I was thinking of having two main people in the film like the music video where the man on the bed is unconscious but talking whilst dreaming in this dimly lit building and Billie Eilish being the monster in his bedroom watching him, under his bed and lurking around the hallways of his building. I also think the lyrics in the song itself have a lot of meaning and would help me to move forward with the theme of Freedoms and Limitations. The freedom to express your darkest thoughts and make them come to life but the limitations of how far you can express what you’re thinking without making your ideas too dark as well as the limitations of not having full control of what your thinking or feeling.
Editing and Experimenting
Whilst editing, I found myself experimenting a lot with the shadows and the black of the footage. I did this to make the footage look creepier than it usually would. I thought the effect of heightening the shadows was an important effect when it comes to the final film. The drastic contrast between light and dark adds to the thought of oppositions. Being in the dark means lack of knowledge or being hidden from the truth whereas putting light on the situation adds meaning and truth just the same with freedoms and limitations. I also put an adjustment layer to make sure the footage lined up properly when it came to the different tones being affected by the light. As for the audio I spliced it up carefully and layered the sound for a spookier effect.
darkening the shadows for a creepier affect
adding more highlights to make the face more visible
Filters
fading audio
Evaluating
Although this was by far the most difficult shoot to do, it came out the best and it was my favourite one to film. I loved the look of all the shots and how shadowed all of the bunker was. Whilst trying to find a bunker that I could actually go in it started raining and the wind started picking up. I went to a total of five bunkers until I found one that had an area that I could venture into. The slope to the bottom of Plemont was extremely steep and muddy and I nearly slipped multiple times whilst get drenched and getting pushed by the wind but I managed to get down there eventually. I tried to film with multiple cameras to get different angles of what I was doing. This turned out well mostly but some of the footage got corrupted as well as the card becoming full whilst I was in the middle of filming. But, overall, I’m very happy with the results.
I like the contrast of colours in this shoots and the way that the light was coming through the trees as well as the way it was hitting the lease as it made a cool streaking affect. I also tried to make the footage more slow to have a more cinematic affect.
I was more inspired to make the footage more colourful which was inspired by specific photographers. A photographer that explores limitations, escapism and surrealism within reality is KangHee Kim. Kim studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2014. It wasn’t until her senior year that she began using photography as a creative outlet, enjoying the freedom that came with the minimal equipment required. One of her ongoing series, Street Errands, began in 2016 and was born out of the mundane daily encounters of living in New York. “I realized, instead of waiting for miracles, I could instead create the magical moments in my imagination,” Kim says. “I construct my own form of escapism.” To create these photographs, she uses Photoshop to merge and manipulate multiple images from her travels in New York, California, Colorado, and Hawaii. Rather than preplan the scenes, Kim lets intuition guide her – creating cohesion with a uniform aesthetic and colour palette, and the returning motifs of moons, clouds, oceans, and skyscrapers.
Editing and Experimenting
I was trying to make the greens more vibrant than any other colour and I did this by using the colour wheel and singling out the colour and dulling out the other colours. Whilst editing the saturation, shadows, highlight etc, I put an adjustment layer over the entire film and then individually edited the clips if they needed to be slightly more saturated or needed more contrast. For some of the clips I used the pen tool to mask the main focus of the clip as my camera wouldn’t allow me to adjust the depth of field too much whilst I was filming. I used the pipet tool to select the colour I wanted protect from the areas that weren’t masked e.g. my skin tones would be selected and I would add more to the different tones so all of my body was selected. I only did this for some clip that were slightly more still and didn’t have as much movement otherwise the tracker wouldn’t pick up where I was moving and wouldn’t change the depth of field. I also used the more advanced RGB tool on premier to get the colours that were more and less saturated to the correct colour, in other words it’s a colour correcting tool to make sure all the clips merge together smoothly between coloured clips. I tried to get all of the clips to look as if they were taken during golden hour as some of them were taken at different times or the cloud made the lighting not as good as it should’ve been.
Evaluating
Overall, I think that these shoots went moderately well. If I could do anything differently I would have gotten more angles from further away as well as some close up shots of my surroundings. I think that would have given the viewer a wider variety of things to grasp their attention other than the main character. I like the way I’ve edited this footage as the time of day made the makes the clips look really warm toned, which was the way I wanted it but I toned the warmth down I tiny bit to fit better with the rest of the film.
I was more inspired to make the footage more colourful which was inspired by specific photographers. A photographer that explores limitations, escapism and surrealism within reality is KangHee Kim. Kim studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2014. It wasn’t until her senior year that she began using photography as a creative outlet, enjoying the freedom that came with the minimal equipment required. One of her ongoing series, Street Errands, began in 2016 and was born out of the mundane daily encounters of living in New York. “I realized, instead of waiting for miracles, I could instead create the magical moments in my imagination,” Kim says. “I construct my own form of escapism.” To create these photographs, she uses Photoshop to merge and manipulate multiple images from her travels in New York, California, Colorado, and Hawaii. Rather than preplan the scenes, Kim lets intuition guide her – creating cohesion with a uniform aesthetic and colour palette, and the returning motifs of moons, clouds, oceans, and skyscrapers.
Editing and Experimenting
I tried to get a wider angle on most of the shots but just zoomed in afterwards. Whilst editing the saturation, shadows, highlight etc, I put an adjustment layer over the entire film and then individually edited the clips if they needed to be slightly more saturated or needed more contrast. For some of the clips I used the pen tool to mask the main focus of the clip as my camera wouldn’t allow me to adjust the depth of field too much whilst I was filming. I used the pipet tool to select the colour I wanted protect from the areas that weren’t masked e.g. my skin tones would be selected and I would add more to the different tones so all of my body was selected. I only did this for some clip that were slightly more still and didn’t have as much movement otherwise the tracker wouldn’t pick up where I was moving and wouldn’t change the depth of field. I also used the more advanced RGB tool on premier to get the colours that were more and less saturated to the correct colour, in other words it’s a colour correcting tool to make sure all the clips merge together smoothly between coloured clips. I tried to get all of the clips to look as if they were taken during golden hour as some of them were taken at different times or the cloud made the lighting not as good as it should’ve been.
Before
After
Editing the volume fading
Adding adjustment layer and layering
Evaluating
This was one of my least successful shoots when looking at the photos but I managed to salvage a lot of the footage and make it look better than the way it was shot originally. So, overall, I think that these shoots went moderately well. If I could do anything differently I would have gotten more angles from further away as well as some close up shots of my surroundings. I think that would have given the viewer a wider variety of things to grasp their attention other than the main character. I like the way I’ve edited this footage as the time of day made the makes the clips look really warm toned, which was the way I wanted it but I toned the warmth down I tiny bit to fit better with the rest of the film.
My first attempt to film some scenes in my film went moderately well but ill definitely go back to re-film certain shots to make sure everything is properly in frame. I went during the golden hour in Corbiere to have the lighting that I think would my film look the best it can. I need to get more shots of the red ball in order to tell the story well and get some shot of the girl in the black dress also to make myself push boundaries when it comes to the flashback towards the end of the film. I will go back at around 7pm, hoping that the forecast is similar to when I went the first time. I will also go film some other shots around Corbiere e.g. the pebble beach and the lighthouse. I wanted to film here because there are certain landmarks that make the viewer feel as if they’re watching something historical. For example the crumbing arch way demonstrating that the girl in the white dress is admiring things from the past, which is the whole point of my film; the girl trying appreciate what she never had before it was gone.
I managed to salvage two slips from the shoot and paired them with some music that I thought was appropriate for the type of scenery within the film. I edited the sound by fading in and out the sound waves and did a similar thing with fading from black to the footage in the actual clips.
Second Attempt
I was more inspired to make the footage more colourful which was inspired by specific photographers. A photographer that explores limitations, escapism and surrealism within reality is KangHee Kim. Kim studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2014. It wasn’t until her senior year that she began using photography as a creative outlet, enjoying the freedom that came with the minimal equipment required. One of her ongoing series, Street Errands, began in 2016 and was born out of the mundane daily encounters of living in New York. “I realized, instead of waiting for miracles, I could instead create the magical moments in my imagination,” Kim says. “I construct my own form of escapism.” To create these photographs, she uses Photoshop to merge and manipulate multiple images from her travels in New York, California, Colorado, and Hawaii. Rather than preplan the scenes, Kim lets intuition guide her – creating cohesion with a uniform aesthetic and colour palette, and the returning motifs of moons, clouds, oceans, and skyscrapers.
Editing and Experimenting
Whilst editing the saturation, shadows, highlight etc, I put an adjustment layer over the entire film and then individually edited the clips if they needed to be slightly more saturated or needed more contrast. For some of the clips I used the pen tool to mask the main focus of the clip as my camera wouldn’t allow me to adjust the depth of field too much whilst I was filming. I used the pipet tool to select the colour I wanted protect from the areas that weren’t masked e.g. my skin tones would be selected and I would add more to the different tones so all of my body was selected. I only did this for some clip that were slightly more still and didn’t have as much movement otherwise the tracker wouldn’t pick up where I was moving and wouldn’t change the depth of field. I also used the more advanced RGB tool on premier to get the colours that were more and less saturated to the correct colour, in other words it’s a colour correcting tool to make sure all the clips merge together smoothly between coloured clips. I tried to get all of the clips to look as if they were taken during golden hour as some of them were taken at different times or the cloud made the lighting not as good as it should’ve been.
Evaluating
Overall, I think that these shoots went moderately well. If I could do anything differently I would have gotten more angles from further away as well as some close up shots of my surroundings. I think that would have given the viewer a wider variety of things to grasp their attention other than the main character. I like the way I’ve edited this footage as the time of day made the makes the clips look really warm toned, which was the way I wanted it but I toned the warmth down I tiny bit to fit better with the rest of the film.
I’ve chosen the theme of freedom as the ideas I had in mind about souls, spirits, ghosts and possibly the angel and the devil links in quite nicely. I think that the freedom to push limits and have the freedom to do things that reality prevents you from doing usually whether it’s physically or having too many responsibilities in the real world to be able to do the things we wish to do. The theme of freedom is extremely similar to the theme of limitations which is why I decided to do both. I think photographers like Duane Michals are very inspiring when it comes to the idea I want to present in the film I’m going to make. I think that being inspired by his work and recreating it to come to life will be very interesting. When looking at what I want to do for my own film I think Daune Michals’ work will link in nicely:
To explore the freedoms and limitations of the mind within reality and within our own abstract thoughts. In my film I would like to venture to the captivity of our own minds and the limitations it causes and then explore the freedoms of having no commitments or responsibilities in another reality. I want to express the freedom a lost soul may have compared to a living soul and I will show this by showing the same person in two different worlds; one in the real world with commitments and limitations of what we are able to do and another world where the person has the freedom to do what they want. Within the spiritual world I’m going to use a red ball to show guidance to represent that freedom can also have its down sides of feeling lost or not knowing what to do with the space around you. The ball will lead the ghost to where their human self would like to go if they ever got the chance and then they’ll be able to enjoy and see the beauty in the different parts of the world around them that they wouldn’t get to do if they had the chains of responsibility and guilt holding them down. The girl in the real world is somewhat meant to represent the devil as the limitations and the girl in the spiritual world where she has the freedom to go wherever she wants is meant to represent the angel. So there is a good and a bad part to the story. At the end the devil and the angel both realise that in life there are freedoms but as well limitations. They visuals will also include: A girl wearing a black dress to represent many things but mainly limitations and transition into another scene where the same girl is wearing a white dress to mainly represent freedom. The girl in the black dress will just show scenes of having a dull life and have a lack of enjoyment shown but longing for adventure and to see the more exciting parts of life e.g. the beach, nature, traffic lights and the urban parts of the island etc. The ending will show the girl in the white dress going into the room of the girl in the black dress and opening a book of sketches of the places the girl is black wanted to top to and then both of them merging into thew same person to represent the good parts of life and the bad parts and then to add a horror factor to the film I’ll make the eyes of the girl change colour and the candle going out that was lit at the start.
Duane Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour. Whether the spirit/ghost is visible in the photo or if there is a feeling of the supernatural lurking around the photo, I think Michals work represents the unsettling feeling of uncertainty. His work links to my theme of Freedoms and Limitations as there’s the idea that the angel/devil near the bed had the freedom to do what they want without consequences but as had the limitations of not having a normal human life.
“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at . . .. We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong . . .. That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring–just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience–grief, loneliness–how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.” – Duane Michals
Francesca Woodman is best known for photographing herself. But her pictures are not self-portraits in the traditional sense. She is often nude or semi-nude and usually seen half hidden or obscured – sometimes by furniture, sometimes by slow exposures that blur her figure into a ghostly presence. These beautiful and yet unsettling images seem fleeting but also suggest a sense of timelessness. This fragility is exaggerated by the fact that the photographs are printed on a very small scale – they seem personal and intimate. She continuously explored and tested what she could do with photography. She challenged the idea that the camera fixes time and space – something that had always been seen as one of the fundamentals of photography. She playfully manipulated light, movement and photographic effects, and used carefully selected props, vintage clothing and decaying interiors to add a mysterious gothic atmosphere to the work.
Francesca Woodman, Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–1976
1975-80 Francesca Woodman 1958-1981
When looking to relate her photography to my film I the uneasiness that the audience may feel when viewing her photos will link into my film. The main theme of my project being Freedoms and Limitations links into her photography also; the movements of the people in her photos make them look as if they’re ghosts or spirits; having the freedom to move how they like without boundaries. I think when linking her work into my more personalised theme being spirits and ghost, her work also links into that also. I like the gothic atmosphere that she presents in her work which I would also like to recreate within my own film. Bringing her work to life through my film would be something I would like to create but out my twist and narrative on it. Somehow I will link her work into my idea:
To explore the freedoms and limitations of the mind within reality and within our own abstract thoughts. In my film I would like to venture to the captivity of our own minds and the limitations it causes and then explore the freedoms of having no commitments or responsibilities in another reality. I want to express the freedom a lost soul may have compared to a living soul and I will show this by showing the same person in two different worlds; one in the real world with commitments and limitations of what we are able to do and another world where the person has the freedom to do what they want. Within the spiritual world I’m going to use a red ball to show guidance to represent that freedom can also have its down sides of feeling lost or not knowing what to do with the space around you. The ball will lead the ghost to where their human self would like to go if they ever got the chance and then they’ll be able to enjoy and see the beauty in the different parts of the world around them that they wouldn’t get to do if they had the chains of responsibility and guilt holding them down. The girl in the real world is somewhat meant to represent the devil as the limitations and the girl in the spiritual world where she has the freedom to go wherever she wants is meant to represent the angel. So there is a good and a bad part to the story. At the end the devil and the angel both realise that in life there are freedoms but as well limitations. They visuals will also include: A girl wearing a black dress to represent many things but mainly limitations and transition into another scene where the same girl is wearing a white dress to mainly represent freedom. The girl in the black dress will just show scenes of having a dull life and have a lack of enjoyment shown but longing for adventure and to see the more exciting parts of life e.g. the beach, nature, traffic lights and the urban parts of the island etc. The ending will show the girl in the white dress going into the room of the girl in the black dress and opening a book of sketches of the places the girl is black wanted to top to and then both of them merging into thew same person to represent the good parts of life and the bad parts and then to add a horror factor to the film I’ll make the eyes of the girl change colour and the candle going out that was lit at the start.
From another perspective, Woodman tested the boundaries of bodily experience in her work and her work often suggests a sense of self-displacement. Often nude except for individual body parts covered with props, sometimes wearing vintage clothing, the artist is typically sited in empty or sparsely furnished, dilapidated rooms, characterised by rough surfaces, shattered mirrors and old furniture. In some images Woodman quite literally becomes one with her surroundings, with the contours of her form blurred by movement, or blending into the background, wallpaper or floor, revealing the lack of distinction of both – between figure and ground, self and world. In others she uses her physical body literally as a framework in which to create and alter her material identity. For instance, holding a sheet of glass against her flesh, squeezing her body parts against the glass and smashing her face, breasts, hips, buttocks and stomach onto the surface from various angles, Woodman distorts her physical features making them appear grotesque. Although Woodman isn’t the only inspiration that I had for my film, my other inspirations include:
I have similar inspirations to the film I did previously but the other inspirations are: Duane Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour. Whether the spirit/ghost is visible in the photo or if there is a feeling of the supernatural lurking around the photo, I think Michals work represents the unsettling feeling of uncertainty. His work links to my theme of Freedoms and Limitations as there’s the idea that the angel/devil near the bed had the freedom to do what they want without consequences but as had the limitations of not having a normal human life. My other inspiration is Michael Chaves, specially the music video he helped Billie Eilish make called Bury A Friend and the movie The Conjuring 3. When looking at Bury A Friend, from the album “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?”, I think the concept of nightmares and horror links in nicely as well as the title pf the song quite literally linking to death; intertwining with graves, spirits and ghosts. My idea of making peoples spirits/alter self come to life makes me think of the demonic character Billie Eilish is trying to portray. I was thinking of having two main people in the film like the music video where the man on the bed is unconscious but talking whilst dreaming in this dimly lit building and Billie Eilish being the monster in his bedroom watching him, under his bed and lurking around the hallways of his building. I also think the lyrics in the song itself have a lot of meaning and would help me to move forward with the theme of Freedoms and Limitations. The freedom to express your darkest thoughts and make them come to life but the limitations of how far you can express what you’re thinking without making your ideas too dark as well as the limitations of not having full control of what your thinking or feeling.
THEME: Spirits/Souls/Angel/Devil (Freedoms and Limitations)
INTENTIONS: To explore the freedoms and limitations of the mind within reality and within our own abstract thoughts. In my film I would like to venture to the captivity of our own minds and the limitations it causes and then explore the freedoms of having no commitments or responsibilities in another reality. I want to express the freedom a lost soul may have compared to a living soul and I will show this by showing the same person in two different worlds; one in the real world with commitments and limitations of what we are able to do and another world where the person has the freedom to do what they want. Within the spiritual world I’m going to use a red ball to show guidance to represent that freedom can also have its down sides of feeling lost or not knowing what to do with the space around you. The ball will lead the ghost to where their human self would like to go if they ever got the chance and then they’ll be able to enjoy and see the beauty in the different parts of the world around them that they wouldn’t get to do if they had the chains of responsibility and guilt holding them down. The girl in the real world is somewhat meant to represent the devil as the limitations and the girl in the spiritual world where she has the freedom to go wherever she wants is meant to represent the angel. So there is a good and a bad part to the story. At the end the devil and the angel both realise that in life there are freedoms but as well limitations.
TECHNIQUES: Tripods, personal perspective, specific editing to put my point across, transitioning from different scenes by using objects and shades which are similar to each other. Using Premier to add specific cuts to the individual clips.
VISUALS: A girl wearing a black dress to represent many things but mainly limitations and transition into another scene where the same girl is wearing a white dress to mainly represent freedom. The girl in the black dress will just show scenes of having a dull life and have a lack of enjoyment shown but longing for adventure and to see the more exciting parts of life e.g. the beach, nature, traffic lights and the urban parts of the island etc. The ending will show the girl in the white dress going into the room of the girl in the black dress and opening a book of sketches of the places the girl is black wanted to top to and then both of them merging into thew same person to represent the good parts of life and the bad parts and then to add a horror factor to the film I’ll make the eyes of the girl change colour and the candle going out that was lit at the start.
SOUND: I’ll add in my own sounds of things like: waves, trees in the wind, the lighter turning on etc to make sure the sound is clear. I will also add music in the background which I haven’t decided yet but I will make the music quieter and louder in certain places, where appropriate to do so. I will also overlap sounds to make the more dramatic affects and add sounds like birds to represent tranquility.
INSPIRATION: I have similar inspirations to the film I did previously but the other inspirations are: Duane Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour. Whether the spirit/ghost is visible in the photo or if there is a feeling of the supernatural lurking around the photo, I think Michals work represents the unsettling feeling of uncertainty. His work links to my theme of Freedoms and Limitations as there’s the idea that the angel/devil near the bed had the freedom to do what they want without consequences but as had the limitations of not having a normal human life. My other inspiration is Michael Chaves, specially the music video he helped Billie Eilish make called Bury A Friend and the movie The Conjuring 3. When looking at Bury A Friend, from the album “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?”, I think the concept of nightmares and horror links in nicely as well as the title pf the song quite literally linking to death; intertwining with graves, spirits and ghosts. My idea of making peoples spirits/alter self come to life makes me think of the demonic character Billie Eilish is trying to portray. I was thinking of having two main people in the film like the music video where the man on the bed is unconscious but talking whilst dreaming in this dimly lit building and Billie Eilish being the monster in his bedroom watching him, under his bed and lurking around the hallways of his building. I also think the lyrics in the song itself have a lot of meaning and would help me to move forward with the theme of Freedoms and Limitations. The freedom to express your darkest thoughts and make them come to life but the limitations of how far you can express what you’re thinking without making your ideas too dark as well as the limitations of not having full control of what your thinking or feeling.
dreary scenery (dulling filter)
kicking a rock which then transitions into a red ball which is used a lot to change the scene further on in the film
other actions being shown such as the girl in the black dress drawing in her book of places she wishes to go to but the viewer doesn’t see the person’s face and only seeing their actions and their silhouette
entrance to the bunker that the girl is in shows scenery of a graveyard
she walks through and looks behind her and the bunker has vanished
Ghost-like figure of a girl in a white dress standing in a graveyard
Goes on a journey trying to look the reason for their freedoms and lack of limitations
On the way they see the beauty in the world around them – rain, darkness, moonlight/sunlight, sand, streetlights etc whilst walking in a direction that is directed by a feather/ball/something that was in the bedroom/bunker at the beginning
ends up getting to the beginning scenery although the red ball is trying to direct the girl elsewhere
Sees the sketch book that the girl in the black dress was drawing in and sees the places she visited and herself in the drawing
stands near the girl in the black dress
the girl in the black dress looks back at the girl and then they both see that they’re the same person
flashbacks to the different scenery and sees the girl in the black dress in the background of all of the shots that the viewer may not have seen before giving the audience a shock factor.
(intense music starts playing with a long pause with the camera zooming in), they look up and look possessed
In my next project I’m studying the theme of Freedoms and Limitations in which I will be delving in to the idea of spirits/souls and possibly heaven and hell/ the devil and angels. I’ve chosen this theme of freedom as the ideas I had in mind links in quite nicely. I think that the freedom to push limits and have the freedom to do things that reality prevents you from doing usually whether it’s physically or having too many responsibilities in the real world to be able to do the things we wish to do. The theme of freedom is extremely similar to the theme of limitations which is why I decided to do both. I think photographers like Duane Michals are very inspiring when it comes to the idea I want to present in the film I’m going to make. I think that being inspired by his work and recreating it to come to life will be very interesting. I will most likely be making a film as I feel like a have particular strengths in that area compared to if I made a phonebook. Although I have been inspired by a lot of photographers as well as film makers and even music videos such as the song Bury a Friend by Billie Eilish, as the demonic occurrences are similar to the theme I want to portray with in my film, which was actually created by a film director called Michael Chaves who also made The Conjuring 3. I like the idea of surrealism and dreams from my last project as I find the Surrealist movement extremely inspiring for the ideas I come up with although this time I want to stray away from that idea slightly in order to not repeat myself.
The contrast of the two inspirations for my project have a lot of similarities, as you can see above both photos have someone lurking near someones bed, creating an uncomfortable feeling of something ominous and inhuman.
Inspirations
Duane Michals
Duane Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour. Whether the spirit/ghost is visible in the photo or if there is a feeling of the supernatural lurking around the photo, I think Michals work represents the unsettling feeling of uncertainty. His work links to my theme of Freedoms and Limitations as there’s the idea that the angel/devil near the bed had the freedom to do what they want without consequences but as had the limitations of not having a normal human life.
“The best part of us is not what we see, it’s what we feel. We are what we feel. We are not what we look at . . .. We’re not our eyeballs, we’re our mind. People believe their eyeballs and they’re totally wrong . . .. That’s why I consider most photographs extremely boring–just like Muzak, inoffensive, charming, another waterfall, another sunset. This time, colors have been added to protect the innocent. It’s just boring. But that whole arena of one’s experience–grief, loneliness–how do you photograph lust? I mean, how do you deal with these things? This is what you are, not what you see. It’s all sitting up here. I could do all my work sitting in my room. I don’t have to go anywhere.” – Duane Michals
Michael Chaves
My other inspiration is Michael Chaves, specially the music video he helped Billie Eilish make called Bury A Friend and the movie The Conjuring 3. When looking at Bury A Friend, from the album “When We All Fall Asleep Where Do We Go?”, I think the concept of nightmares and horror links in nicely as well as the title pf the song quite literally linking to death; intertwining with graves, spirits and ghosts. My idea of making peoples spirits/alter self come to life makes me think of the demonic character Billie Eilish is trying to portray. I was thinking of having two main people in the film like the music video where the man on the bed is unconscious but talking whilst dreaming in this dimly lit building and Billie Eilish being the monster in his bedroom watching him, under his bed and lurking around the hallways of his building. I also think the lyrics in the song itself have a lot of meaning and would help me to move forward with the theme of Freedoms and Limitations. The freedom to express your darkest thoughts and make them come to life but the limitations of how far you can express what you’re thinking without making your ideas too dark as well as the limitations of not having full control of what your thinking or feeling.
“When we made ‘bury a friend’, the whole album clicked in my head. I immediately knew what it was going to be about, what the visuals were going to be, and everything in terms of how I wanted it to be perceived. It inspired what the is about. ‘Bury a Friend’ is literally from the perspective of the monster under my bed. If you put yourself in that mindset, what is this creature doing or feeling? I also confess that I’m this monster, because I’m my own worst enemy. I might be the monster under your bed, too?”
Rong Rong
Zhang Huan is a Chinese artist based in Shanghai and New York City. He began his career as a painter and then transitioned to performance art before making a comeback to painting. He is primarily known for his performance work, but also makes photographs and sculpture. He is usually photographed by the photographer Rong Rong. Both of the artists work combined creates an inspirational flow for which I will consider incorporating into my film. In relation to Freedoms and Limitation it is clear that the photographs below connect greatly to the theme.
The photography is clearly showing some people being completely trapped and chained by the society in which they live in. Whereas some of the photos show the complete exposure to the real world and freedom to explore nature and the imagination. I like the amount of depth the photos explore and the rawness; it has an unsettling element to it which I’d like to display within my own work. I also like the way the photographs are displayed as worn out photographs; it makes the viewer feel as if that they are viewing has some historical importance or that the photograph is deemed as special or one of a kind. The photograph above has also given me some inspiration for my film. I was thinking that if I wasn’t to present there beginning or the end of my film in my bedroom, I was going to use a bunker to have an element of darkness as well as to show one of the girls in my film to have a life which isn’t glamorous compared to the other character. I think the image has a lot of depth to it as the door towards the background shows the light coming through indicating that there’s a way out from the bunker which could be seen as metaphorical for a way to escape the darkness and move towards something to improve a persons life.
“Rong Rong belongs to the famous generation of artists that represents the birth of experiment art in China. After the Yuan Mingyuan was shut down by the authorities in the early 90’s, different artists of this avant-garde art community scattered to different parts of Beijing. Rong Rong belonged to the core of a group which settles in the ‘East Village’. Today the ‘East Village is better known as Da Shanzi or 798 Factory Art District and is considered to be the most dynamic art zone in China. Rong Rong is known for documenting the unique life-style of the East Village community with famous landmark performances such as Zhang Huan’s ‘12 Square Meters Head’ (1994). Rong Rong’s photographs are an autobiography of a certain lifestyle as well as landscape of Beijing. Images of dilapidated buildings, bleak walls, rubble and dust are a metaphor of the collapse and reconstruction of a modern identity and state of mind. The parallel between architectural and human transformations carries a lyrical sentiment which highlights and distinguishes Rong Rong’s work as a landmark in Chinese contemporary photography.”
Freedom – “The power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants”
I’ve chosen the theme of freedom as the ideas I had in mind about souls, spirits, ghosts and possibly the angel and the devil links in quite nicely. I think that the freedom to push limits and have the freedom to do things that reality prevents you from doing usually whether it’s physically or having too many responsibilities in the real world to be able to do the things we wish to do. The theme of freedom is extremely similar to the theme of limitations which is why I decided to do both. I think photographers like Duane Michals are very inspiring when it comes to the idea I want to present in the film I’m going to make. I think that being inspired by his work and recreating it to come to life will be very interesting.
“Freedom is the right to choose” – Archibald MacLeish
The quote above was originally expressed in a political context, this phrase could also sum up many of the fundamental ideas that have inspired artists. For Fauves it was the right to paint in whatever colours they chose. For Cubists, the choice was how to depict form and space. In Marcel Duchamp’s “Readymades” he chose ordinary objects to be transformed into pieces of artwork. Artists and designers relish the freedom to explore ideas and express their own personality in their work. Van Gogh is perhaps the archetypal “romantic artist”, who chose to take his own path, expressing with brushstrokes, colour and energy his unique vision of the world. Mondrian’s highly disciplined paintings were governed by the wish to condense experience down into its simplest expression.
As for other freedoms we come across in life like; freedom of speech, singing, running, freedom to express and imagine all come together to make what life is – along with the limitations of course. As well as the freedom to move, to travel, to dance and to have fun has inspired many artists. Sydney Carline and Peter Lanyon explore the soaring freedom of flight. Francis Alys and Tania Kovats explore more conceptual possibilities of travel. Dance inspired Degas and Matisse. Music inspired Paul Klee and Romare Bearden. No artist has been more playful than Picasso, who would insert clues, such as letter “JOU” (inferring “play” in French), into his Cubist paintings and collages.
Michals first made significant, creative strides in the field of photography during the 1960s. In an era heavily influenced by photojournalism, Michals manipulated the medium to communicate narratives. The sequences, for which he is widely known, appropriate cinema’s frame-by-frame format. Michals has also incorporated text as a key component in his works. I like the way that Michals presents his work as dark and ominous as that’s the way I like to go about presenting my work also. I like the theme of black white where shadow and light appears to be a lot more dramatic than it would be if the photograph or film was in colour.
Other occurrences that happened in the 1960s was the new materials and ideas fuelled a revolution of possibilities. Synthetic materials such as plastic could be used to create forms with great freedom. Verner Panton’s cantilevered S shaped chair was playful, brightly coloured and inspired by popular culture, echoing the sense of fun and liberation that was a characteristic of the 1960s design. Art crossed into design, for instance Bridget Riley’s Op Art paintings inspiring the design of miniskirts, and commercial design crossed into art, for Warhol and other Pop Artists. Musicians such as the Doors and the Beatles drew on multiple influences from literature and art.
Limitations – “A limiting rule or circumstance; a restriction”
As for limitations, I think the idea of barriers and unable to have the freedom to do what you want easily links into the theme of freedom also. The idea that humans aren’t able to do to limitless things even if they wanted to gives me a lot of inspiration. The limits that people face everyday intrigues me to think how much you can push the limits. For example people 200 years ago thought it would be impossible to fly around the world but now it is completely normal to think about hoe planes to fly across the sky as well as phones being able to find out limitless information whenever we need to. The inventions that people have created in the last 100 years have been incredible and may be limitless.
A photographer that explores limitations, escapism and surrealism within reality is KangHee Kim. Kim studied painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, graduating in 2014. It wasn’t until her senior year that she began using photography as a creative outlet, enjoying the freedom that came with the minimal equipment required. One of her ongoing series, Street Errands, began in 2016 and was born out of the mundane daily encounters of living in New York. “I realized, instead of waiting for miracles, I could instead create the magical moments in my imagination,” Kim says. “I construct my own form of escapism.” To create these photographs, she uses Photoshop to merge and manipulate multiple images from her travels in New York, California, Colorado, and Hawaii. Rather than preplan the scenes, Kim lets intuition guide her – creating cohesion with a uniform aesthetic and colour palette, and the returning motifs of moons, clouds, oceans, and skyscrapers.
Marti is another photographer who springs to mind when thinking about freedoms and limitations. Jenna Rose Marti is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin based digital artist and photographer. She works within installation and digital photography to explore themes of identity, religion, memory, and escapism. Though her work, she creates a sense of escapism in order to find comfort in the unfamiliar while revealing the discomfort in the familiar. The surreal nature of her work creates a sense of fantasy that exists within the familiarity of the physical world, and seeks the balance of the good and the evil in life. She pulls from her own experience with religion, personal relationships with people, and other worldly experiences to create this dialogue.
Alberto Giacometti – freedom to explore and experiment
Giacometti was the great enthusiast of plaster and one of the artists working in Paris in the 20th century. He worked away at it with his knife, often subjecting it to so much pressure that it finally crumbled away, forming the rubbish observed by Genet. When he was happy with it, he painted it. The original Women of Venice exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1956 were plaster figures with black and brown lines etched on to their faces and bodies, making them resemble the women in his paintings.
Now the Giacometti Foundation in Paris has found new methods of restoring his plaster sculptures, many of which were damaged by being broken apart and covered in orange shellac to be cast in bronze. The Women of Venice, whose painted surfaces have been revealed, can once again be exhibited as they were at the Biennale, rather than as bronzes. And they will make their first appearance at a major retrospective opening at Tate Modern in London next month. This will be Giacometti’s first Tate show since a retrospective in 1965, when the sculptor worked away in a basement, perfecting the works that he was never quite prepared to declare finished. It will be his first major exhibition in London for a decade.
The Bone Chair – Joris Laarman
Art, photography and film can be shown in many different forms and one form that intrigued me when it comes to thinking about limitations and freedoms was the Bone Chair:
“My fascination with the digital era really took off when I saw an animation in a documentary about German Professor Claus Mattheck. To me this was not just an animation of an optimized engine mount, but a visualization of how the industrial era in general is transforming into the digital era. Industrial times and modernist pioneers were all about assembly and standardized parts in a geometric form language dictated by the limitations of industrial machines. In our digital era, however, we are no longer bound by these limitations. With digital design and fabrication tools we can create smarter customized forms that are much more complex. But it is also true that throughout design history, designers have striven to make objects inspired by nature: from Art Nouveau, driven by innovations in materials like cast iron, to Streamline, driven by innovations in materials like aluminum, and the organic design of the 1960s, driven by innovations in plastics and plywood. But our digital age makes it possible to not just use nature as a stylistic reference, but to actually use the underlying principles to generate shapes just like an evolutionary process.”
While trees have the ability to add material where strength is needed, bones have the ability to take away material where it is not. With this knowledge, German engineer Professor Lothar Harzheim, together with the International Development Centre Adam Opel, developed a dynamic digital tool that copies these ways of constructing, and used it to optimise car parts. This software mimics quite precisely the way evolution constructs. For me, this opened up an entire world of possibilities that we can only begin to imagine.
The design of the Bone Chair actually began back in 1998, when Adam Opel, a German General Motors subsidiary, developed new imaging and simulation software with the intention to create a more efficient engine mount. The purpose of the engine mount design software was to fix specific elements in place while providing optimum strength, using a minimum of materials. This is done by creating a virtual three-dimensional model and simulating the application of stress to specific points on the design. Then the algorithm takes away all of the material that isn’t necessarily needed, without weakening the part. What most amazed Laarman about this process is that it uses the very same principle that evolution does in living organisms. Bones in particular are highly efficient in growing internal structures to achieve an optimal weight-strength ratio as they constantly add and remove material in response to stresses from their environment. The software designed by Adam Opel replicates the same process: repeated generations of the simulation add material where strength is needed, and chip away material everywhere it is not, creating a design that achieves maximum strength with a minimum amount of material. When Laarman was asked to participate in the Smart Deco exhibition initiated by Droog and Barry Friedman, his proposal was to create an entire chair by using this algorithm as a high tech digital sculpting tool. If Mother Nature wanted to create a chair, it would probably look something like the results he would get.
