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Overall, I don’t think this project was my best work, as I wasn’t very happy with the images that I produced as they didn’t demonstrate what I am capable of. Taking still life images was new to me which is why I think my images didn’t come out very strong. I did enjoy recreating the work of Mary Ellen Bartley which was later on in the project where I had a better understanding of how to arrange the objects to make them look appealing and draw the viewer in.

Romanticism:

I feel my romanticism project had a one strong photoshoot that linked well to the theme of romanticism, on the other hand I had one weaker photoshoot which only had a few images linking back to romanticism. I enjoyed exploring the beauty in rural landscapes.

Anthropocene:

This is one of my favourite projects that I have completed. I took inspiration from David Maisel project ‘The Mining Project’ as I felt they best related to the theme of Anthropocene. I took my images of Ronez Quarry as it shows that the landscape has and still is being drastically changed. The images I took at Ronez are stronger than the ones I took at Sorel Point as you get a birds eye view of the quarry. However, it was quite frustrating that I wasn’t able to get the view of the quarry I wanted due to restrictions. If I had a drone, I would of been

able to get better shots of the quarry.

Femininity:

For my femininity shoot, I used Justine Kurland’s ‘Girl Book’ project as inspiration. I was happy with how my images came out as they linked strongly to Kurland’s project and the theme of femininity. However my final outcomes could of been better if I had more than one model in my images.

Overall, In think the film turned out better than we thought. Through out the process of making the film we though of more ideas that would improve our film. The main focus of out film was the letter from World War Two, I think we presented the letter well as it is displayed across the images and we had someone read it out,

The process of making the film was quite long as we had to learn how to use new soft wear such as Adobe Audition and Adobe Premier Pro. I don’t think making a film would be my first choice to present my personal study as it was such a long process.

Link to film:

Dearest Patricia

Megan was in charge of the editing process of the film as I was editing the sound. “The process for editing the film and putting the clips in order so they could tell a story took quite a long time. I had never used Adobe Premier Pro before so it was a challenge to get to know the basics of editing. However, once I understood how the app worked, it became easier”. We started off by selecting our best clips and images that we wanted to feature in our film. When selecting the images, we considered the composition, mise-en-scene, lighting, focus, and stability of the image. Before putting the still images into the Adobe Premier Pro Megan had to size them in Lightroom Classic to fit the film size that Premiere requires. Once we had both agreed on the order we wanted the clips and images, Megan edited the lighting and colour. Some of the clips were shaky because they weren’t filmed on a tripod. To fix this Megan had to use a tool called ‘warp stabiliser’ which analysed the video and made it more stable. When doing this, Megan had to be careful with how much was on the clip, because too much would cause an unrealistic movement.

She then moved onto putting the letter we chose from the Jersey Archives over the film which was a challenging process.

Megan chose the starting point and marked it, then the finishing point on the ‘positioning’ section. She selected this for the amount of time I wanted the image on the screen, the shorter it was on the faster it would scroll so she lengthened the clip to make it scroll slower. We had someone read the letter out so Megan had to have the letter scroll at reading pace.

Once she had got the speed right, and the first two pages of the letter that we chose in, she moved onto fading each clip into each other. Megan chose to do this after inserting the letter because the fades could effect how the opacity is presented. She used the basic fade by enlarging the clip, marking two points, and dragging the fade down.

To get the Title of the film Megan used Photoshop. She cropped the letter to get ‘Dearest Patricia’ and then added it in to Premier. Once it was in Premier she could blend it in, she did this by putting Blend Mode as ‘Multiply’ which removed the yellow background. Finally she used ‘dip to white/ black’ to fade it in and out.

For the end credits Megan used one of Premier’s premade designs to credit who directed, filmed sound, edited clips, sound and who was the voice of the letter.

Still Images: We wanted to make sure we had a variety of images in our film such as colour images and black and white images to represent the change from the past to the present. When editing the still images, Megan made sure to give the black and white images a lot of depth as the letter is going to be scrolling over the images, so they needed to have a lot of darks and lights to stay distinct. She used Adobe Lightroom Classic to edit these.

Editing the video:

When editing the videos, Megan changed the setting to ‘colour’ to enable her to get the basic editing tools to edit the colour and light.

She mainly focused on the ‘Basic correction’ to achieve this.

I used a mixture of the sounds we collected at Elizabeth Castle and also sounds that were collected by Sam, an audio producer.

When choosing what sounds I wanted to include in the multitrack, I had to look at what images were going to be presented so the sound matched. For example, for the image of the sea I used a sound effect provided by Sam of seagulls. Before I added the sounds to the multitrack, I edited them individually on the ‘waveform’. This is where I was able to cut down the sound, ‘clean’ it up and add effects such as echo.

I had to filter each sound to make sure they were ‘clean’. This involved removing and eliminating the background noises which I was able to do by using the ‘parametric equaliser’. Once I had edited each sound, I added them in to to the multitrack.

Still Images:

We searched through the Jersey Archives Catalogue to find an appropriate poem/ letter from the Second World War to feature in our film. Originally, we weren’t going to use any archival material because we wanted to base our film off factual history, however we decided that we wanted to make a cinematic film. We thought including information about the war form a letter would be a more creative and cinematic way of showing how Elizabeth castle was involved in the war.

We chose a letter written from Elina Hellyer, née Teele, to Patricia from her aunt of ‘Rockwood’, Mont Cochon. The letter contains news of the liberation of Jersey, the family and life under the German Occupation. We accessed the letter on the Jersey Heritage website.

We visited the Société Jersiaise archives to have a look at what archival materials they had of Elizabeth Castle.

The Société Jersiaise photographic archives mission is to produce and facilitate research on the Island’s history. They achieve this by working with local and international heritage partners. The Société holds extensive bibliographic, cartographic, photographic and research collections. These collections show us our heritage and are valued by the Jersey community.

We also visited Capital House to see an exhibition called no place like home which displayed a range of artists work.

No Place Like Home exhibition

We also, visited the exhibition at Capital House called ‘No Place Like Home’ which had a range of work by various artists from all over the world on what they viewed as ‘home.’

One artists work that I was drawn to was Harriet Mena Hill Aylesbury Estate Fragments. It was made up of pieces of concrete that are from the demolished housing estate Aylesbury in South East London. She was moved by the residents stories and wanted to document them.

Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director multi media artist. Marker is most known for his film La Jetée, a French science fiction short film. La Jetée tells the story of the post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.

La Jetée isn’t like a stereotypical film, it consists entirely of still black and white images, the addition of sound, music and voice overs gives the film a cinematic feel. The cleaver and though out use of the still images and sounds makes the film interesting and helps the viewers connect with the storyline.

The storyline is about a man who travels in and out of time in an experiment to try and discover the fate and the solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world during the aftermath of WW3. The experiment results in him getting caught up in a past events that are recreated on an airport viewing pier.

For our film we don’t want to include too much factual history, but instead include archival history produced by previous Jersey Islanders.

We are going to use a letter written from Elina Hellyer, née Teele, to Patricia from her aunt of ‘Rockwood’, Mont Cochon. The letter contains news of the liberation of Jersey, the family and life under the German Occupation. We accessed the letter on the Jersey Heritage website.

The letter is six pages long so we will only use certain parts of the letter that link best to the war and what possibly when on at Elizabeth Castle. In our film we will put writing across the screen, and images of the actual letter in a low opacity over our film. We also might get someone to read the letter out and have it in the background.

Visual Mood board

Story Board