Ypres after bombardment...

After being set the task of going to an art gallery to look at the composition of work by different artists, i decided to go and have a look at the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield. After walking round the gallery, this piece particularly interested me ! Christopher Nevinson created this in 1915 which i found interesting as i do not think the composition and layout of it appears as art from that time period.

It represents the devastation brought by the 1st World War which i think is achieved by the fragmented technique used of Italian Futurists to convey an image of destruction. When i looked closer at the piece i saw that non of the houses have rooftops which makes the image fit together better and also builds on the improves the scene of destruction.

Christopher Nevinson was an official war artist and a strong advocate for futurism and glorification of war, but soon changed his mind after first hand experience of death and destruction. I assume he created this piece after he went through this experience.
The image gives a clear meaning and explanation of what is happening i think this is helped by the tones used in the painting, the positioning of the images eg. the block are all in linear positions and in tight blocks, but because of the removal of the roofs and smoke it leaves a slightly abstract feel to the image. I think the composition of this painting is very important to the atmosphere that has been created.

visual aesthetics

A shell.........
As i was thinking about what object to use, i didn't see many things that i would call visually aesthetic. However while sitting in my flatmates room i saw his collection of shells that he had been using to draw in his art project. This drew my attention due to the different patterns and textures included in the shells. The shell to the right particularly drew my attention.

The shell is a creme colour with hints of brown and i find the shadows on the objects particularly interesting.The shell swirls round witht the width decreasing in size as it curves round into the centre. I also like the way the shell resembles a lot of day to day scenes for example the image to the right is taken of a birds eye view of a stair case but you can see the similarities between the two. I think the shell appears interesting because of the variations in pattern, shade and texture on the shell. For example the shade of the shell does not maintain the same which makes the object more appealing than if it was just a plain white shade, the same applies for patterns and texture. In my opinion the shell is visually attractive due to the amount of variables within the shell.

one shot

Whispers....

We wanted to record whispers to play over the music and film to create more of a confuysion for the viewer as we had not had correct instructions on how to use the sound booths we decided that the best way to record sound would just be to use a camcorder then cut the visual out in premiere pro, these are all of our attemps of the whispering put together so we are just goin to select a small part of this to put on the film, possibly only on the beginning part of the film.

Unedited and alternative scenes

.....here are some of the scenes that didn't go quite so well and some other ideas that we tried out to see how they would work, then we chose our favourite one to edit :). The director got a little carried away and bossy as you can see :) ! so here they are.

first draft......

This is the first draft of our video, we need to add audio to it and look at changing the spped of certain parts of it !

Day 5 ......

4am ........ yes that's what time we got up at ! Or in mine and Diana's case that's what time we had to be home from Oceana to set off to Chatsworth! When we arrived we walked up to our first location of filming on the moorland where Diana and Scotty got changed into their costumes , it was freezing !! We had a couple of short run throughs while the sun came out properly, then we got filming, we decided to film at different stages of the sunrise to see which would have the best outcome. We then moved into the woods and tried filming a different scenario where the couple were running around the trees creating a playful effect and the same scenario as before to see which outcome we preferred. As Dianas arms decided to turn blue we decided to call a day and go home to get some sleep!

Day 4.....

We decided that the most successful next step would be to go to the location and find a good place to film and plan our film out before shooting the next day.We found lots of possible locations such as on stairs, in forests, and on the open moorland. The lighting was also really poor, so we decided we would shoot our film while the sun was rising, which seemed like such a good idea at the time and meant an early night for us. After a long day of walking we decided that the most successful location would be on the moorland as the sunrise would be more visible and the female could run down the moorland. We also appointed roles for the next day which were:
Diana - actress , and a very impressive one at that :)
Scotty -Actor, costumes
Kirsty- camerawoman
Me- Director, costumes

We decided that no matter how much we didn't want the film to have any obvious aspects of love, that was the way it had to be. After the confusion of the relationship between the couple the female falls over and is 'rescued' by the male. After finding our locations we had a long treck back to the car through cow fields, which Diana seemed to enjoy a bit 2 much :)! Ont he way back we made a quick stop off at Scotty's house so we could get the first bit of comfort since we've been here and his mum fed us proper food:) which i took full advantage of. It was a really successful day and we all had sooooo much fun as well

Day 3 .....

As we had our location sorted but not a really strong storyline we started to put all of our ideas together, after already deciding we wanted to create an old fashioned look we decided to base the film on a man and a woman but we wanted to stay as far away from the subject 'love' as possible and concentrating on create more of a confused and mysterious mood , we thought of having a female running through the woods looking scared and confused would create a certain amount of confusion, then if the male followed her but slowly behind it may make the viewer think about possibilities of what might be happening and the relationship of the couple. We though a whispering noise in the background would also add to the mysteriousness of the film. We then drew out a basic storyboard of what would happen then we decided to try out different alternative endings when filming.

Day 2 .......

This was a shorter meeting than the one we had on Monday,we had decided on what mood and environment we wanted to create but we couldn't decide a storyline that created this mood. We came to the conclusion that chatsworth was the best location to shoot as me and scotty live relatively local and decided chatsworth would create a better setting. We also wanted to create a pride and prejudice look.

Day 1......

My group decided to think of some ideas individually over the weekend and meet up on the monday to discuss our ideas. We started off by watchin some of the videos we had previously watched on www.single-shot.co.uk for some inspiration. I liked one particular video on there called Dark Glass by Clio Barnard due to the mystery of it, i didn't particularly like the visual aspects of the film but i liked the audio of the woman talking.

We then researched the definition of single shot to make sure we didn't break any of the rules! We also looked on you-tube for one shot films which seemed to be more useful than the single shot site.
We researched into lots of different possibilties such as the possibilty of using stairs as we all liked the idea of using different levels as we had limited movement of the camera.We all ended upwith a pretty similar idea of what we wanted the film to consist of, we all wanted to creat a mysterious mood, possibilty an old fashioned setting to make the viewer think about the possibilities of what might be happening. We decided that a good location for this would be a recreational area and took advantage of the fact that Scotty could drive and decided we would film some where like clumber park or chatsworth house.We decided to leave it there and once again develop our ideas over the next few days individually.

One shot film...

During the seminar we watched some examples of a one shot film on www.single-shot.com which gave us an idea of what we would be doing. We were then put into groups to do a one shot film during the 2 hour slot that we had. My group consisted of me , Diana, Scotty and Kirsty. We had the option of basing the film on ' the meeting' or 'irritation' we decided to base ours on irritation as we thought it was a more interesting starting point. We wrote down some ideas but as we only had a short amount of time we decided to just go and film. After nearly illegally filming in Tesco, and me and Scotty leaving Kirsty and Diana to take the blame we had to scrap our original idea and think of something else. I It was also a nice change to work in a different group and we decided to keep our group for our coursework assignment. I thought our final outcome was successful but if we had more time i think we could have done a better job of it as we only had a limited area to stay in because of our time restriction and once again most people came up with a similar idea involving a park bench.

narrative module

Pixilation was the first part to our narrative module. For this task we got put into groups of 4. I was in a group with Beth, Gemma and Diana :)! we watched some pixilations for inspirations , such as a number of adverts including the Guinness advert and the secret adventures of tom thumb. After hours of thought showering we just decided to try things out to see what worked , and what didn't. Our film eventually ended up being based on levels and stairs , which did work well but we could have done with a bigger area to do it as the shots are a tad too close up.After taking all the shots we all edited them differently in photoshop. I decided to cut the first section of our shots out as i did not feel it linked with the rest of the film.I tried lots of different ideas in photoshop starting with a blue washout, old fashioned styled look but eventually decided to make my shots more abstract as i felt it suited the mood of the video, so i inverted my images also raising the levels of contrast and brightness.














If i was to do another pixilation film i think i would put more of a story to the film and stay away from using people in it,working with something different , as most of the groups had a pretty similar idea.

pixilation

This not the finish video for my pixilation, i need to add text to the film and work on fading out the ending of the music.
The storyline of the film was based on the idea of the affects of alcohol, such as falling down the stairs, which is also the reason why i decided to invert my images, and also to create a nightlife look to the film. The quality of the film on here isnt as good as i had to compress my image so that the file would fit on here , i decided to add titles to my pixilation and fade the music out at the end so here's the finished piece!

The language of new media.....

The language of new media
Chapter 1
What is new media?

In this chapter lev manovich identifies different aspects of media looking at where media converts into new media , exploring the understanding and aspects of new media stating that there is a fine line between the two as a identical image can be categorized differently, for example “photographs which are put on a CD-ROM and require a computer to view them are considered to be new media; the same photographs printed as a book are not.” A conclusion is drawn that new media does not have an exact definition linked to it.
The chapter discusses developments throughout time within media technology from the 1800s to present day, identifying changes in photographs, illustrations, graphics, audio, radio, television, movies, computers, computer software, interactive games, the internet, digital composing and animation. While discussing these factors he tries to distinguish which of these factors are new media and which are media. He does this by discussing differences between media and new media.
He also discusses the relationship between social factors and how new media reflects social logic, relating it to the idea that “new media technology acts as the most perfect realization of the utopia of an ideal society composed from unique individuals.”
After initially being put off the book by the amount of technical vocabulary being used, I came to have a greater understanding of new media. I would recommend the book to anyone studying a media course or anyone who has a general interest in the subject.

Whiteboard animation.....

This is some white board animation work we did during freshers week , i really enjoyed doin this. The brief was we had a tree and we had to get the box to the other side of the tree .... we decided to turn our box into a rocket and have the rocket going under the tree.Our group was overall happy with the results of our animation :)

Pinhole camera......

This is the image i produced using the pin hole camera , i think this works quite well, i especially like the pattern that has been created by the floor paving. This was my 3rd attempt as i did 2 other images but they were not as successful . i dont think i exposed the pinhole for long enough, after we captured the images we developed them, then scanned them into the computer to modify them in photoshop, i inverted mine which enhanced the image as it brought out stronger elements in the photo !

Freshers week....

heyyyy, just a brief recap of my first 3 weeks at ntu, freshers week was tiring and now have a slight case of freshers flu, apart from that everything else is great really enjoyin the course , and other social aspects! did some whiteboard animations in the first week and pin hole camera which i really enjoy, i especially enjoyed the whiteboard animation and working in a group ! Were creating an animation t the moment in groups , our is a day in the life of a student which we had fun producing , this week were putting them onto the computers and editing them which im looking forward to......