To start, I pressed Ctrl + I to import my videos from my video data and started with my first clip.
I then cropped the beginning and end off of the clip, leaving me with the part of the video that I needed.
I continued to add each clip to the timeline, cutting and cropping the clips to fit into the animation.
Multiple Clips
I then repeated this process with another 4 clips, layered on top of one and other so each clip plays at the same time.
Changing Speed
To adjust the speed of a clip, right click and select “speed duration”. Then change the percentage to make the clip faster or slower.
Title
Digital Image
To start off, we imported the images we took into Lightroom and flagged the images we wanted to use for our digital image.
Once we decided on our final 4 images, we began editing them, adjusting the lighting, contrast, exposure and highlights.
For the images with a black background, we had to edit around the shoes to make the whole image black. To do this, we opened the images in Photoshop and used the Clone Stamp tool, selected a black area and drew around the feet.
I made the the digital image in photoshop. I used a screen grab from one of the videos of Michael wearing the VR, and the 5 animated scenes all at the same timeframe so the character lines up.
I then added some glitched text effect by using 2 layers behind each text. To make it better I added some blending mode features, such as, emboss and bevel, etc.
I used shapes and clipping layers to add all the images into to insure all the shapes are even.
This is the final image which represents the whole NFT film. It shows the most important scene, which is the split scene that includes the animation as the NFT exhibition is called 2lives (online and offline), it shows the real world and the virtual meta verse.
We used our storyboard to organise our shoots, to know where/what/when we were going to shoot.
We decided that Michael was going to be Model 1, which would mostly be in the start of the video, and Reuben was Model 2, who was only in the last half of the video. Matt (me) was recording everything, and Ollie was the director and manager.
We had to make a VR headset using a printed off image of a VR headset and then we taped it to some sunglasses.
Shooting
First, we went to a open green area, which we filmed most of our scenes at.
We started off with the main walking headshot video, then we recorded the drone shots of Michael wearing the VR. After I recorded the scene where Michael and Reuben meet in real life and the last scene where they are talking on a bench.
After, we went to record the scene where Reuben takes off the VR headset at a gaming setup.
We couldn’t record a drone shot of a house, as you can’t fly within 50m of houses/property.
Editing
Once we had all the recordings Michael and Reuben started to edit the video on Adobe Premier Pro. They used special effects, such as the loading… visual effect, and static sound effect, etc. They also time-mapped some clips to match the beat of the music.
This shows the half and half effect, with the timeline on the bottom half of the screen.
This is one of the special visual effects, which is used at the start of the video. Also, the timeline is zoomed out, so you can see all of the film on the timeline, and all its layers.
This is how the time-remapping was done, as seen on the left. He used key frame to change the speed of the clip at different time intervals.
For my groups NFT Film, we decided to use animation as a part of our video. I made all the aminated clips in Blender. I started off by finding low-poly art models of Sketchfab. then imported them into blender. Once in Blender I used simple animations to move the location of the scene, to give off the impression of the character walking.
This screenshot shows the timeline for the character walking. Every dot/diamond is a different movement of the character to make him walk. The character doesn’t actually move, it just walks on the spot. So I would have to animate the background. He walks on the spot as it makes it easier to only move the direction of the arms, legs etc, instead of the movement and lactation of everything. So the character and camera are stationary.
This is the scene, everything highlighted in orange is what is animated and included in the scene. I added 2 keyframes to the timeline. The first keyframe is where the buildings start, and the second is where they will end after the move and slide backwards. It slides backwards to give off the effect that the character is walking forwards. Each 2-3 second scene takes an estimated 8 hours to render.
This is the node setup for the lighting. I used a HDRI which is a spherical photo taken in real life, and the program works out where is sun is and creates the same lighting situation for inside the workspace. The orange box is the HDRI which is connected to the right two default boxes, then I added a remapping node to make the horizon of the world line up with the horizon I made in the workspace, so there aren’t photos of trees floating in the sky.
The Street Scene
Overall, the street scene is quite small. The scene is colourful which adds lots of contrast. All the scenes use depth of field to blur the background more as the character walks forward.
The left side is the object view, without the colour. Where as, the right side is the rendered, with colour.
The Farm Scene
This scene is more complex, as there is more shapes and objects. There is also larger range of colours, ranging from red to green, etc.
The Mansion Scene
This is one of my favourite scenes, as it features our main character walking outside his mansion. It is visually pleasing as uses a lot of dynamic shapes and contour.
The Beach Scene
This is one of the most colourful scenes as it uses mostly topical/beach colours. It contributes to having a diverse location for the 5 scenes.
The Space Scene
This was one of the harder scenes to make as I had to add a space helmet to him, however it is the most extreme scene as the character is in outer space.
The Zoom Out/In Animated House Scene
This animation was made to replace the original shot idea, to use a drone to zoom into a house, but we couldn’t do it due to privacy rules. So we used amination as a replacement as it fits in with the online/offline format and style.
This is what the scene looks in blender. The greyed out screenshots are the view in shader view, where as the coloured view is the rendered view, which is what it looks like when it is finished.
The camera is animated with 3 keyframes, both for location and rotation. It ends still to let the clouds move in, which allows for a clean transition from this clip to another, using a white fade transition. Overall, this clip took 12 hours to fully render 120 frames in blender.
Overall, this scene is good as it ends with a clean transition, of the clouds covering the screen. The camera is mostly smooth which follows the exponential curve, which allows for fluid movement.
On Wednesday the 29th of September we took part in an embroidery workshop with Yulia Makeyeva, an emerging multi-disciplinary artist who grew up in Russia and is now based in Jersey. Yulia has a background in art history, silversmithing and jewellery making, however turned her full attention to art in 2019. She likes to use photography to help her observe textures, patterns and shapes in everyday objects – she uses these observations to create artwork that is unique and unexpected. Yulia experiments with different mediums in her artwork, using sewing, painting, drawing and photography to create dynamic pieces with storylines and meanings. She has an interest in concepts of memory, responsibility, stereotypes, borders, boundaries and multiculturalism, and is also working on a range of projects involving historical research.
A statement from Yulia reads ‘I like to push the boundaries of the ordinary. Exploring the capabilities of materials, I learn through making. I draw inspiration from my home, family and surroundings – any texture, object, light movement, story, music, etc. can become a starting point. At a research stage, before making a decision, I play with the idea in my head and with the material in my hands, tactility is very important. Actual making process comes further, usually in the form of labour-intensive contemplative repetition. What do I want to say with my art? I want to reveal a different angle and engage the viewer into an active dialogue with the world around.’
Her Work;
Inspiration
During our embroidery workshop, we did some further research into our project by looking through various collections of embroidered work in books around the class. In one of these books we discovered this piece by Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh called ‘The Bugs and the Lovers’, created from a series of drawings they made together in 2005. Two pink roses are the main focus of their piece, with various insects dotted around the watercolour flowers which symbolize the stereotypes of romanticism, women being delicate and frail. It is difficult to see from the image, however sewn into the painting is an outline of a couple making love, with emphasis on the woman’s face and body – there is obvious irony in Amer’s subject matter choice. The pink colour of the flowers and the symbolic metaphors for a woman’s innocence and fragility are juxtaposed by the explicit embroidery that overlaps, it creates the impression of women being comfortable within themselves in a society that still views them as weak and naive. This piece links to our idea on showing the representation of women as it evolves through the different waves of feminism, when deciding what to sew for my embroidered piece I took inspiration from the flowers and pink tones.
Ghada Amer & Reza Farkhondeh | The bugs and the lovers | 2008
Experimenting with text
During this workshop, we were given the task to create a piece of embroidery inspired by our NFT Community project – taking inspiration also from ‘The Bugs and the Lovers’, I wanted to create a piece with a soft colour palette of pink and white to represent innocence and purity, some stereotypical qualities of women. We had a range of materials to work with, the main being some large fabric panels from the People Make Jersey exhibition which were placed on tables around the room for us to use in our pieces. I had the idea to cut out different words and phrases that linked with the idea of women’s rights and feminism, such as ‘who risked her life’ and ‘house workers’. I wanted to sew these phrases onto a piece of fabric that linked to Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh’s work, using the motif of flowers for fragility. After gathering all of my words, fabrics and threads I decided to lay them all out in an order that created a story – I came up with the verse ‘woman; forced hope. her sacrifice, gratitude.’ The meaning I wish to be interpreted from these words is one of justice and fighting – the forced hope of generations of women fighting for the same thing year after year, the sacrifices made by suffragettes and other freedom fighters, the gratitude we feel for those who have fought for us in the past; women.
The words I cut out from the exhibition panels and the fabric I planned on using.My verse set out on the fabric I planned to use for my piece.
Final Embroidery Piece
The aim of our workshop was to combine traditional methods of making art (analogue), such as embroidery and stitching with digital media like photography to create a short stop animation movie as a GIF. My GIF above was created on Adobe Photoshop using these steps –
1. Create layer for each image 2. Window > timeline 3. Select > Create Frame Animation 4. Drop Menu > Make frames from Layers 5. Timeline > select Forever 6. File > Export > Save for Web Legacy > reduce image size to 720 x 720 pixels
My GIF shows the process of my embroidery, however it also tells a story of repetition – hinting at the years of constant fighting for equality through the 19th and 20th century. The overlapping images the come together one by one create a dynamic animation conveying ideas of the same thing happening (or not happening) over and over again. Furthermore, as each new word or phrase is sewn on it gives the impression of time moving forwards, more and more women standing up for what they believe in and fighting for the rights they deserve. I wanted to convey a sense of irony also in my piece, using colours like pink to juxtapose the hard hitting message within my text. The motif of flowers that also features hints towards the stereotypes of women, the metaphor of a flower is often used to describe a women to make her seem feeble and weak – the opposite to the women described in my verse. Additionally, I wanted to use different coloured cotton and thread to sew the words on to the fabric -I began by using a thick red wool to sew in the word ‘forced’, again irony as I had to force the needle through the two fabrics to sew them together, but also symbolic of the struggles and pain that past and present activists have to go through, representing passion/blood//danger. Other materials I used to sew into my piece were thin threads of cotton in different shades of pink, showing repetition and symbolism of women throughout. The flimsiness of the cotton also adds to the idea of a stereotypical woman’s place, doing jobs around the house that do not require strength or muscle – all creating a pun towards the representation of women throughout history.
We met the artist Liam Nunn and he taught us about how to do digital animation in Adobe After Effects. Before to create our small video we had to practiced moving a square. We took a look at how keyframes are placedand we exprienced. We had the opportunity to create a short animation of 5-10 seconds, thanks to the little character Liam Nunn had already created. In the whole 5-10 seconds animation we could make the character do funny face expressions, put stickers that disappeared after a few seconds, change the colours and make every part of her face move.
Storyboard
We were ask to develop our group project into a storyboard so that it will provides us a clear plan ahead of what we wish to make onour 30 sec film. We had to included details of individual scenes in our storyboard like shot sizes, the mise-en-scene, the location, props, people, lighting, sound etc.
Storyboard
The term storyboard is used to visually explain and stage a story. This term is used in the world of advertising, cinema and animation. It allows you to cut a temporal sequence or sequence plane by synthesizing the main keyframes and planes that compose it.
Our storyboard
Here is our storyboard, with my group have drawn how our 30 sec video will develop. Then what our project is about feminization decided to cut our video into three parts. Three parts for three different decades on the history of feminism. In group had decided that it could be rather interesting if we link the three decades with doors. Basically every time the model opens a door it opens the door to a better future it was a metaphor. But because of some technical problems we did not involve the doors. We still managed to find another idea to get the messages across in a better and simpler way and it’s what we did in the video.
For our NFT shoot video we want to represent feminism in each decade. We choose those feminist artists because their work express the same way we want to demonstrate our statement. Will use this artist in the same order.
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman wanted to expose the image of women in society and the media. For this she experienced with photography and cinema. The artist’s goal was to create a more critical viewing, She involves her art to show social criticism hoping to sensitize subsequent generations of viewers. She began by painting in a super-realistic style in an art school in the aftermath of American feminism and in the 70s Sherman turned to photography in order to expand his exploration of women’s roles in society. Sherman sought to question the seductive and often oppressive influence of women in the media. Turning the camera on herself in an extensive fantasy Hollywood role-playing game, fashion, mass advertising, and “girl next door” roles and poses, Sherman finally drew her audience’s attention to the powerful machines and makeup behind the countless images circulating in an ever-public and “hip” culture. Sexual desire and domination, the creation of self-identity are hidden behind Sherman’s vast series of self-portraits in various forms. Sherman’s work is central to the era of intense consumerism and image proliferation in the late 20th century.
Clare Rae
In her photographic practice, Clare Rae explores ideas of performance and gesture to interrogate and subvert dominant modes of representation. Her work is informed by feminist theory, and presents an alternate and often awkward experience of the female body. Known for her engagement with domestic and institutional spaces, Rae’s work has recently been captured and exhibited in locations such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Monash University, the Abbotsford Convent, Sutton Project Space and the Substation, Melbourne.
Lissa Rivera
Lissa Rivera challenge the standard, expected norms of what identity and gender are in the medias. Lissa Rivera’s photographie is reliant to her personal history, she always felt unconmfortable by the expectations that were put on her to be feminine in a certain way. She feels that part of your identity had to do with what you see: by looking at pictures, movies or even videos online. People to adapt themselves to culture. Her photographies are a way to feel like home. She takes pictures of her partner BJ. Together they explore identity in relionships. Bj being an art historian, Lissa Rivera’s photographies are inpired of art history. In these collection Rivera takes pictures of the vulnerability and emotions of her partner she find beauty in it.
A storyboard is a graphic organizer that consists of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualising a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence.
NFT STORYBOARD
Our idea is to show how women’s fashion has changed throughout multiple different decades (70s, 80s, 90, 2000s, and 2020s). In order to achieve this we will use one of our friends as a model and have her walk across two points in front of the camera wearing the outfits from each decade. During our editing process, we will then merge the footage together so that the final piece cuts between the different outfits as the model walks across the camera.
For our NFT group project, we are focusing on Jersey as an environmentally friendly community. We are going to use a model who will travel around Jersey on an Evie Bike and buy locally and ethically sourced food. This will show Jersey as environmentally friendly as a lot of Jersey produce is grown or found locally, which reduces a lot of pollution from shipping food in from abroad. We will us music in the background of our video to create an upbeat mood and take shots at a high/low angle to create interest for the viewer.
