My film project starts off with a series of landscapes, only a couple seconds long but they serve as the establishing shots, creating the setting of the whole narrative. I had decided after some evaluation of the shots I already had that it would be better if I included some of my house and bedroom as well, to make it more personal, so I just used my tripod and set up in the areas I planned to use.
After selecting only the video that were successful (not over or under exposed, everything in frame, not too shaky), I imported them into Lightroom and made some minor edits, mainly focusing on the making the colours similar vibrancies to the rest of the beginning landscapes, and ensuring they were all as bright and clear as each other, to make them all a cohesive set even though they weren’t filmed on the same day.
Then I exported them out into Premiere and worked on trimming them to the same length as the other clips and inserting them in-between the natural landscapes, mimicking the way the rest of the film flicks between shots of inside the home and outside in the woods. All in all, I like the way this turned out and I think it has the desired effect.
OTHERS-
Because my plan is detailed enough that I know exactly what shots I need, I’m able to film whatever I’m able to and don’t have to do it all in chronological order while making it up on the spot. Because of the natural lighting fading quite quickly at this time of year, I was only able to film bits inside the house that were more object-focused, or were directly near a light source.
After I was happy with what I saw in my camera, I moved it into Lightroom and cut down any footage that was out of focus in a way I didn’t like, or where the framing was off, or the timing. I made the same sort of minor edits to the final chosen images that I have to the rest of the videos; just small colour corrections and adjustments to brightness.
Next, I carried on with the same routine and exported them into Premiere and trimmed or spliced them into their respective chapters of them film, still just placing them either directly before or after another clip as they were planned to, or just in the general region they would be in the film if the footage for before and after hasn’t been shot yet. This is good as it gives me a better sense of what pieces I am missing and have to prioritise, and a better idea of what the film looks and sounds like as a whole.
This shot was more challenging to edit as I had to make not only a fair few corrections and adjustments to the light and tint of the image, but it was also framed slightly off so I had to crop the actual video to avoid any weird borders or off-centre clips. I figured out the easiest way for me to do this was, after editing it as much as I could in Lightroom, to export it out into Premiere as is and use the Crop tool in the Effects bar to trim it how I needed, and then (still in the video effects section) to use the Motion tool to re-frame it in the centre of the screen and eliminate any unslightly black border.
Altogether these shoots have gone pretty much the same as all the others, which is good because it maintains the same style throughout the whole film, and I’m looking forward to completing the actual filming process soon.
I separated this into two parts, as the time I had only allowed me to be able to film certain scenes, unfortunately.
SHOOT #1-
Firstly, I organised and shot all the footage I needed to create the meal scene where it’s shown how a diet gets smaller and smaller as restriction continues. For this I used food similar to my personal experience, slowly restricting more and more until there is barely anything in the plate.
To begin with I imported the footage into Lightroom and made sure it was all in focus and technically sound. Then, using the “Quick Develop” settings on the right, I lowered the temperature of the image and decreased the vibrance, along with other minor tweaks. I intended to make the food seem less interesting and appealing, in order to represent how a person suffering from an ED sees food.
After that was successful, I moved the images into Premiere with the rest of my film project. I wanted an almost stop-motion animation effect, simulating how every day and every meal feels monotonous and dull, and how diet-restriction takes all the life and joy out of daily meals. I experimented with a couple of video clip lengths and with having the videos either different lengths or the same length. In the end I went for roughly half a second long clips, similar to before with the short baby-photo montage, to keep a consistent style throughout. My intention with respects to the camera angle was to emulate a first-person view of the meal, copying how a person would look down at their own dinner plate.
In the end I like how this turned out, and if I had more time and resources I would even have tried to have more meal variations to make a longer overall scenes, but I’m still pleased with my outcome here.
SHOOT #2-
I have several repeated shots over the course of my whole film project, and one of the main ones is an extreme close up of my eyes opening, as if waking up. This varies through the different chapters reflecting the different situations of life. I only took the ones for chapter two on this shoot however, which is where I am meant to look distressed and scared, as it is nearing the end of the chapter and the whole life has been taken over by this ED.
There were two parts where this shot was necessary. The first, my eyes needed to already be open, to symbolise sleep deprivation, and it only needed to be brief; maybe a few seconds long in the middle of the chapter. For this I simply kept the camera recording and tried out looking in a few other directions as well as straight forward, in case it gave a better final effect. Once in Lightroom, I just adjusted the exposure and contrast a bit, to correct the shadows and the yellow tone from my light and balance it out.
Once I had finished editing it in Lightroom, I played around with a few different edits in the film itself. To start with, I had it in my plan that the eyes close-up would play before the final scene in the woods, on its own. However after having done that I realised I could use my skills learnt with cutting and splicing clips together and actually have it play in-between bits of the last shot, to make it more interesting and vary the editing style slightly, as it could have all been fairly similar otherwise. I started out by having each clip play for a couple seconds overlapping each other, but nearing the end of the forest video, where I am getting closer and closer to the screen/camera lens, I make the clips shorter and more frequent, to increase tension and add a sense of suspense to the narrative. I stuck with this version in the end, because I feel like it’s far more engaging and aesthetically pleasing than simply having two videos plays after each other; it also pushes me to evaluate my original plan and stretches my knowledge of Premiere.
Finally, I know I need to do a lot more shooting inside the house setting, but I’m finding my storyboard plan very effective and helpful when constructing the overall narrative and I’m glad with the way the film is coming together so far. The next step for me is to continue and hopefully complete all the actual filming and move on to editing it all together and recording the voiceover section.
I chose to go into a nearby patch of woods that I used to walk through a lot as a child with my family, and although it was raining fairly heavily I carried on, as I thought it would help to build an atmosphere and make for interesting background noise. I had planned to take some ambient noise off the internet and use it in these parts, but my camera picked the sounds up so well I didn’t need to in the end.
I didn’t take an extraordinary amount of footage, because due to my planning I knew exactly what I needed and where it had to go in the film. I took several landscape videos, using my tripod, for the establishing shots at the beginning, then moved onto the few scenes where I was actually in the frame. These were the ending scenes from chapters one and two, and although chapter three also ends with videos me in the woods, it’s more extended than the others and I thought it would be easier to film if the weather was better, so I set it up for another time.
After selecting the correct video clips, I imported them into Lightroom and edited them slightly, only changing the vibrance to the strength I saw with my own eyes, as I know the camera tends to fade the colours a bit. This was simple as the images were all taken at the same time of day and so the lighting was all the same and I didn’t have to adjust the exposure.
Then I moved the edited clips into Premier and shortened them to the specific sections I wanted, before placing them in the right place in the chapters; because they’re both the ending scenes of the chapters I know exactly where they need to be placed.
The scene above (the end scene of chapter one) features me sitting by a tree, hearing a noise from behind and then running down the path, which is almost tunnel-like in the way it is surrounded by the trees’ branches. I used this location to represent the title of the chapter and the metaphor of a person’s mental health declining being like “going down a rabbit hole”. The main subject, me, is slightly out of focus/blurry and the natural lighting mixed with the camera exposure at the end of the “tunnel” means that the white clothes become very bright at the end. This was done on purpose to illustrate how the mind loses focus when in a state of ill health and that important things often become difficult to see clearly.
I know I still need to add a couple of landscape scenes of the outside of my house, in my room and the bathroom, as well as possibly a view of the sea to show the natural environment of Jersey, but I think the landscape clips I have already work very well and can easily be re-arranged when necessary without losing any of the atmosphere they create. I’m also very happy with the way the rain and birds and other ambient sounds were recorded by the camera and is so clear in the final footage.
A key part of my film is the idea of three “chapters”: life before an eating disorder, life during it, and then the (slow) process of recovery. I chose to achieve this by making title cards, similar to those used in silent movies to indicate speech, and named them all in connection to the “Alice in Wonderland” books, which I drew inspiration from when writing the piece of text for the voiceover and used imagery from in the film itself.
I started by going into Photoshop and choosing what colour background to have for each card. In the end I went with variations of the colour blue, starting with a dark blue and ending with a pale blue for chapter three. Blue is linked to sadness and is often used metaphorically to represent depression, but it is also the colour of the sky, and so freedom, serenity and is generally considered a calming colour. I used a JPEG I found online to create to border effect similar to those in black and white movies, and once the cards were complete I saved them as singular images and put them into the film project in Premier.
Since I don’t have much actual footage at this point, I just put them in order and cut them to the length I want them on screen: just a couple seconds long enough to read the title, I didn’t want them to distract the viewer from the actual film. Because I’m using the first title card to begin the whole film, it introduces the idea of the three chapters very early on, and so the viewer isn’t surprised when these title cards appear through the rest of the film and isn’t taken out of the narrative too much.
FINISHED TITLE CARDS-
ARCHIVAL IMAGERY SHOOT (#1)-
For my first shoot, I stayed at home and went through archival imagery (baby photos) with the plan to find some key ones I liked and film them for a couple seconds each, then cut them down to whatever length I decided in Premier. I used a piece of white fabric as the background to eliminate distractions and focus completely on the image in the centre. I thought about choosing only landscape images to fit better in the film, but then decided it didn’t matter so long as I actually filmed them with the camera in landscape.
my images in Adobe Lightroom
I took roughly 40 short videoclips, then imported them all into Adobe Lightroom for selection and editing before putting them into the film. Firstly I had to eliminate any that were immediately too blurry or just didn’t fit with the others in the way I expected them to, which narrowed it down to 21 clips. From there I made some minor edits, mainly increasing the exposure to hide creases in the fabric background and to make them all the same level of brightness.
After importing the images into Adobe Premier, the program I am going to be creating my film in, I played around with a few different editing ideas before settling on having five of my favourite images for 1 second and the others for half a second inbetween, simulating the concept of a flash of memories while growing up, with the core memories for longer. These included an ultrasound of me as a foetus, my first birthday, a close up of me as an infant and my mother, me with my brother and my first day in school uniform. I chose these and ordered chronologically them to represent the passing of time. It took some time to have them in an order I felt was right and to edit them all the same length of time, but my previous knowledge of how Premier works helped a lot to achieve the effect I wanted. Overall, I like the way it turned out and I feel like my selection process whittled the images down to the right length for the film, which I’m happy about.
I went through a couple of ideas for how to plan my film project and ended up using a table format to colour code the three chapters of the film and with the space to write any personal notes about audio or camera techniques.
Numbering the scenes/shots helped a lot with the soundscape part of the film, as I was able to match up specific scenes to parts of the voiceover text easily. Below is a copy of the voiceover text before I printed it out; I printed it because I find it easier to annotate it physically and visualise how it matches up to the film shots one-by-one. Printing it out also made it easier to edit any particular lines of words if I had to.
There is a reoccurring theme of “Alice in Wonderland/Alice Through the Looking Glass”-type imagery and metaphors throughout both the voiceover and in the film itself. This is because, as a child, those books were some of my favourites and I read them again and again, and still sometimes re-read them now. I found that the idea of following a talking white rabbit down into a world where nothing makes sense but is all just accepted as fact and “the way things are”, as well as the idea of going through a “looking-glass” (aka a mirror) into a world where everything is equally as utterly incomprehensible relates a lot to going through an eating disorder. ED’s are often incomprehensible to people who haven’t experienced them, and the little rituals and routines that you fall into when suffering form and ED can feel like complete nonsense once you get healthy again, like restrictions on certain foods and other diet habits. Additionally, the idea of falling down a rabbit hole and not being able to get out is applicable not only to suffering form an eating disorder, but any mental health struggle in general. Often EDs are developed by people suffering from other mental health disorders or those who are in a difficult personal situation, so the metaphor can be applied to many other situations other than simply teenage eating disorders. I made sure to only write enough to make up the allotted 5 minutes of screen time, and although it was quite difficult to write due to the personal and painful nature of the topic, I am happy with the finished outcome.
I am planning to create a piece of work showing the different “chapters” of a person’s journey through self-hatred, suffering and self-harm into self-love and recovery, specifically relating to an eating disorder, but also with links to general mental health issues and childhood. I will be using myself as the subject of the film, as I have only used other people in my photography in the past and I want to push myself beyond my usual boundaries. I know it will be a difficult subject to explore, considering a lot will be based on my own experience and I’ll be drawing on personal parts of my life, but I think it will also help me and maybe others on the path to recovery. Currently I am planning on having the final outcome be a film, made up of moving images, as I know I can incorporate the different elements of sound and images together in a film. I am also planning to include a voiceover of a text, written by myself, to make the film more personal and emotional. The voiceover will relate to the three “chapters” as they progress, and may also correspond directly with some of the images.
How does this link to the theme of love+rebellion? It explores the idea of self-love and self-acceptance and a journey of rebellion against societal pressure/norms, others’ opinions, as well as rebellion against the self. I am interpreting it in a way that develops a person’s own course to self-love, linking it to the sub-themes of mental health, ED, and personal/psychological recovery.
I have researched in depth three different artists, taken inspiration from their work in different ways, and am planning to incorporate them all into my personal study:
Sophie Calle: black and white, perspective, cinematic framing of the image/video
Francesca Woodman: perception of self, self-portrait, body image, absurd/surreal
Laia Abril: subject of eating disorders and recovery
Modernism and post modernism can be considered two aspects of the same movement, as the second was a direct response of the first. They were a reaction to the age of enlightenment, which was a social, artistic and psychological shift away from religion and God and towards science, reason, and logic. The enlightenment featured two key beliefs: the belief in human nature, and the belief that humanity can progress through scientific methods. Both movements were a rejection of Realism and the Victorian era, and marked a move towards the abstract: truth without reality.
MODERNISM-
Modernism describes a series of cultural movements in the late 19th and 20th century, characterised by a change of thought about the importance of intellect in life. It showed an increase in science, technology and experimentation, and it was an attempt to free humanity in all ways: philosophy, politics, architecture and art as well. This movement and it’s characteristics were mirrored in music, literature and architecture as well.
KEY WORKS-
Claude Monet – Impressionism
Paul Gauguin – Post Impressionism
Henri Matisse – Fauvism
Georges Braque – Cubism
Raoul Hausmann – Dadaism
Salvador Dali – Surrealism
Jackson Pollock – Abstract Expressionism
It was caused by the increase of freedom that artists were experiencing during the end of the 19th century, due to the decline of strictly commissioned portraits. Modernism rejected the most traditional and conservative artistic values in favour of abstraction, experimentation and almost Utopian ideals of what human society should be.
SUB-MOVEMENTS ASSOCIATED (in painting)-
Impressionism: 1860s, featured mainly scenes of everyday life, focused on capturing the light patterns seen in nature using quick brush-strokes and bright colours (often pastels) which was quite a radical technique at this point in time.
Post-Impressionism: 1880s-1905, started as a reaction against the Impressionists’ use of natural colours, these works were brighter and more vibrant, expressing emotions through simplified colours and shapes.
Fauvism: 1900s, featured bold brushstrokes, vibrant and unnatural colours, and a complete break from conventional methods of painting, although this movement didn’t last very long.
Cubism: 1910s-1920s, a revolutionary method of showing reality through abstract and fragmented shapes and lines, wanting to show objects as they really are and not how the artists perceives them to be.
Dadaism: this started form a group, formed in response to the atrocities committed in the First World War, it intended to tear down traditional art rules and create a new form of art that would be recognised around the world; it was political, satirical and often completely nonsensical, as well as being firmly anti-war.
Surrealism: was largely influenced by the Dada group in the wake of the First World War, features strange and often disturbing juxtaposition of dreams, the unconscious, altered reality, and generally unconventional imagery. The term “surrealism” was created by celebrated photographer Andre Breton, who described it like this:
“pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation.”
–Surrealist Manifesto (1924)
Abstract Expressionism: inspired partly by surrealism, the abstract expressionists intended to express emotion through the abstract forms and shapes found in their art. The movement as a whole is defined as:
“the term applied to new forms of abstract art developed by American painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often characterised by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity”
The term “post-modernism” describes the period after the modernist movement, in the 1960s and 1970s. It can be described as:
“…a dismissal of the rigidity of Modernism in favor of an “anything goes” approach to subject matter, processes and material.”
history.com
Essentially, it was a counter-reaction to the Modernist movement, which attempted to critique the ideas of truth, reality, and an idealistic Utopian human society. While modernism based itself on reason and idealism, post-modernism focused more on scepticism and a distrust of so-called logical reasoning. It questioned the idea that “there are universal certainties or truths”, and often challenged the boundaries of art by mixing various medias and artistic styles together in an anti-authoritarian way.
KEY WORKS-
Andy Warhol
Cindy Sherman
Damien Hirst
Jasper Johns
Barbara Kruger
Andy Warhol
Georg Baselitz
Roy Lichtenstein
In the beginning of this era, technology began to seep into every part of life; TVs, microchips and computers were dominating society, and the invention of the Internet led to the vast distribution of knowledge all over the globe. This was reflected in the art world, where various artists played on the idea of commercial mass-production devaluing traditional art, and often incorporated themes of the new-found technology within their artwork.
ARTISTS ASSOCIATED-
Cindy Sherman- American photographer whose work is mainly comprised of self-portraits in various different imagined roles, often commenting on gender stereotypes
Andy Warhol- leading artist of the Pop-art movement, was famous for working with pop culture icons as well as the most mundane and ordinary objects, became iconic for “blurring the lines between fine art and mainstream aesthetics”
Jasper Johns- American painter/printmaker, associated with abstract expressionism and often depicts the US flag and other related subjects
Georg Baselitz- German painter and sculptor, known for his expressive and colourful paintings, many of which are upside down
Barbara Kruger- conceptual artist well-known for her collages of black and white photographs with bold statements in red over the top
Roy Lichtenstein- pop artist influenced by the comic book style, was a leading figure in art during the 1960s and whose work was often created through parody
This art movement started around 1910 and by the end of World War 1, it became the standard in many commercial fields in the US, including design, advertising, and journalism.
KEY CHARACTERISTICS-
Straight photography engages more with the technicalities of the camera and it’s ability to produce highly detailed and focused images. The term usually refers to photographs that aren’t manipulated in the darkroom/digital process, nor in the actual taking of the image (like pictorialism was). It focuses mainly of showing the subject “as the camera sees it”. Straight photography, or realism, laid the foundation for many later photographic movements and art styles: documentary, street, photojournalism, also having an impact on Abstract photography.
“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees”
–Paul Strand
KEY WORKS-
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Frederick Evans
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
Paul Strand
ARTISTS ASSOCIATED-
Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand were pioneers of straight photography in New York and the US.
Paul Strand was documenting the world by the 1930s, using art to raise awareness for social issues, including documenting the everyday life of migrant workers during the Great Depression. In 1936, he joined the Photo League, whose primary aim was to educate more photographers about more progressive causes.
Lazlo Moholy-Nagy used “pure” photography to emphasise the structure of an image. He looked at the world through the camera-lens, experimenting with documentation and using the lens as a framing device for what he saw. His use of unorthodox viewpoints and unusual printing techniques made him a champion of linking photography and art with the industrial world.
“The photogram, or camera-less record of forms produced by light, which embodies the unique nature of the photographic process, is the real key to photography.”
-Laszlo Moholy-Nagy
GROUP f/64-
This was a collective of American West Coast photographers in the 1930s who believed in what they called “pure” photography. Edward Weston was a central figure in the development of this type of straight photography in Western USA, and formed the group with Ansel Adams, Willard Van Dyke, Imogen Cunningham, Dorothea Lange and Sonya Noskowiak, the most influential of these photographers being Ansel Adams, who is renowned for his striking landscape images. Weston described the camera as something that “should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself.” The name of their informal group, f/64, is a reference to the aperture setting which allows sharp focus and good depth of field, relating to their photography style of bold texture, light and form.
MORE KEY WORKS-
Ansel Adams
Alfre Stieglitz
Paul Strand
Ansel Adams
METHODS/TECHNIQUES/PROCESSES-
Straight photography, or realism, appears not to feature much photo-manipulation in the same way Pictorialism did, but rather the most common darkroom techniques to enhance the appearance of the images in the least invasive way possible. Their photographs featured a lot of sharp focus, bold forms and textures, high amounts of detail and strong contrast; evident in the work of Ansel Adams in the US national parks. Generally they were opposed to cropping images as it altered it from what the camera originally saw to a more edited version in line with the photographer’s personal opinion, which went against their main beliefs.
Pictorialism was strongest between 1885 to 1915. It emerged as a response to the growth of amateur photography and the commercialism of photography due to the rise of Kodak’s more affordable handheld cameras. It criticised the wider use of the “point-and-shoot” method that rose as a result, believing it to undermine the more traditional craftsman-like role of the photographer.
KEY CHARACTERISTICS-
Its main purpose was to classify photography as an art form and separate it from the type of photography used for scientific or documentary purposes. It focused on “the beauty of subject matter and the perfection of composition rather than the documentation of the world as it is.” Often the results are dreamlike, romaticised, idyllic, and make references to classical paintings.
KEY WORKS-
Julia Margaret Cameron
Hal Morey
Fred Holland Day
Clarence H White
ARTISTS ASSOCIATED-
Henry Peach Robinson: gave pictorialism its name in his book “Pictorial Effect in Photography” (1869)
Alfred Stieglitz: American artist who gathered a group of artists to promote photography as an art-form, called the “Photo-Secession” group
Clarence H White: teacher and leading pictorialist, created elegant and natural portraits of his friends and family, established the Clarence H White school of photography in 1914- the first educational institution to teach photography as an art-form
Alvin Langdon Coburn: experimentalist photographer, inspired by Japanese ink paintings, the first photographer to take completely abstract images
Julia Margaret Cameron: mid-19th century photographer, possibly one of the first to use photography as a fine art, overall a very important contributor to early pictorialism
MORE KEY WORKS-
Alfred Stieglitz
Elias Goldensky
Robert Demachy
Alvin Langdon Coburn
METHODS/TECHNIQUES/PROCESSES-
In the dark room development stage the images were often tampered with to imitate other, more accepted work of art, like paintings, using different solutions or pigments to mimic brushstrokes, or leaving them to over-develop or under-develop for a chiaroscuro effect. Pictorialists also often experimented with different paper types and chemical processes to create different effects, a few of which are described below:
cyanotype: resulted in deep blue tones and made by covering the photographic paper with light-sensitive iron salts
gum bichromate: made by coating the paper in gum arabic, potassium bichromate, and one of the artist’s chosen pigments, then leaving it to develop in the light; this was one of pictorialists’ favourite techniques
platinum print: a two step process, this starts by exposing paper sensitized with iron salts to a negative, then chemically developing it and replacing the iron salts with platinum, allowing for a wide range of tones
carbon print: made by coating tissue paper with potassium bichromate, carbon black pigment, and gelatin; provides great detail and so became one of the most commercially-available development methods
