FIELDS FRAMES RESEARCH

FIELDS & FRAMES
EXPERIMENTAL FILM



After doing further research, I began to look at examples of experimental media to better my ideas and conceptual designs for the piece. That I wanted from this was to explore different techniques, ways, I could communicate my project to the audience and perhaps for me to learn some new tricks!

I came across this particular art film that is an experimental short film called 'Colouring Love.'  This short film is a political digital art by Nino Fournier about the Anonymous workers who died -and die - at work in horrible conditions.

It drew me in with its overlay and vibrancy of warm and cool colours and its psychedelic use of editing to compliment the scenes of romanticism in the short film. Giving off connotations of love lost and paused in time or perhaps colours in which could symbolise life and death, two ends of the spectrum that meet together in natural harmony. This may not be accurate to its purpose and design but naturally invoked other meanings to me, which then inspired me to create!

It gave me the motivation to work with more video effects in premiere pro and After Effects. Such as exploring mirroring, horizontal reflection, zoom, colour distortion, overlay and multiplying etc...

And so with my first experimentation was to be a continuation or a follow up of this piece done so in my own style. focusing on the

My intentions for the piece was to draw you in by the familiarity of faces. I did this, instead of using less known people as this possibly would've had a stronger backing to my art film in terms of visual strength in this film.But,  I wanted the audience to relate to people they can identify with, To get the audience as a whole to sympathise with the people visually and more intimately, celebrities seemed to fill the gap of communicating these emotions to the viewers on a large scale and in some way, strengthen the feeling  allowing them to share the moment with them. As we often can feel more when those closest to us are hurt or in pain and this for me was the best way of conveying this point.

More importantly, this was my chance to explore my skills in post-production and elevate my understanding of art film!

VFX

VFX INTRO SEQUENCE

For this units professional toolkit we were tasked to;

 Plan and deliver a title sequence for a major film or television series. A title sequence is a delicate balance between text and audio visual aesthetics.  One could argue that the function of a title sequence, as being a sequence of titles, is paramount.  However, a title sequence is often a component of the narrative body and form of the film, and must flow between scenes or adequately play on the excitement/trepidation of an audience – a gateway into the temporal space generated within that particular narrative construct.  

For my idea, I began looking at some of the most well-known film intro sequences such as: 

Vertigo (1958)

Superbad (2007)

Pulp Fiction (1994)

North by Northwest (1959)

Rocky(1976)

Gold finger(1964)

To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

Psycho (1960)

The breakfast club (1985)

Monty python holy grail (end outro)

This gave me ideas of what kind of intro I’d like to do and consider the visual aspects of what I’ll be creating in adobe after effects. The length of the piece was set to be 30 secs long (minimum) but for personal achievements, I wanted to create a piece that had a length of a minute long. Throughout the workshops, we began to work on text in AE with animation manipulation then moving on we began learning how to animate objects in AE and creating behavioural patterns for them to follow, movement and bringing figures designed by us to life by animating them and also puppeteering characters to life.

My first idea came after doing a little bit of digging around on YouTube and came up with an idea that could work with the intro for ‘Interview with a Vampire.’ (1994) by Neil Jordan.  Using glitch effects and cutaways, using imagery and also film graded overlays to give an eerie effect to the intro sequence. as well as some colour filters, too to imitate blood and redness to symbolise it as a whole.

 As much as I did like this piece and the idea itself i did not go ahead with completing the intro sequence (adding in the credits.) It was however not what the requirements of the assessment were looking for. As the imagery used was done using free stock imagery and upon discussing the idea further with my tutor I realised that it had to be constructed more so in my own design as opposed to using stock videos found online.

So, I went back to the drawing board and pondered on what I could do next and eventually came to my second idea which was creating an intro sequence for Austin Powers influenced by the 'Catch me if you can.' intro sequence.

The whole piece was done in After effects using rotations, enlargements, slow motion, rapid-fire shots to bring the piece together. The text itself had been taken from a font formatting website online and using it I added in the credits and title in. Much of the coloured imagery you see, such as the colour flashing background was done by me but the pictures of the male sex symbol, the peace sign and the silhouette figures were taken off stock imagery. The whole process took a day to complete and was exported in H.261 at the highest possible quality through media encoder. Estimated a minute long. 

I am quite happy with its overall, although I do wish to have amended some points that didn't seem to correspond with the timings set and I didn't have the original saved data, unfortunately, I had made the mistake of not saving my efforts in AE before exporting the finished piece, leaving the editing rooms in Uni. Adding to this, some of the imagery used had become blocky and not so much in detail which I think ruined the element of this piece a little! Despite all this what I could do with my own potential skills has given me more confidence to try and perfect those area skills.

  

VFX WORKSHOP

PROFESSIONAL TOOLKIT


Okay, so today we were brought back into the visual effects suites in uni and were reintroduced to Adobe After Effects. It has been a while since I last did a project on After Effects. However, we (the group) managed to get back into the swing of things as we began warming up and refreshing our memories on tools, skills and shortcuts.

The main point of this workshop was to introduce us to the next unit for our term 2 professional toolkit. The brief is as follows;


It is your task to plan and deliver a title sequence for a major film or television series. A title sequence is a delicate balance between text and audiovisual aesthetics. One could argue that the function of a title sequence, as being a sequence of titles, is paramount. However, a title sequence is often a component of the narrative body and form of the film and must flow between scenes or adequately play on the excitement/trepidation of an audience – a gateway into the temporal space generated within that particular narrative construct. The work must fulfil particular aims:

1. The sequence must display a relevance to the program you choose.

2. The sequence must demonstrate an ambitious departure from the original title sequence.

3. You must construct all of the assets.

So, now we were debriefed we began with our first lesson into AE by creating and using text.

This was to show us how to animate text and manipulate and use appropriate font families, in order to create our piece. The final result of that day will be uploaded soon as currently, I am adding music to give it a finishing touch.