I was eyeing off the Novation ReMOTE 37SL, but in my effort to create a smaller desktop footprint, I’m thinking that perhaps ditching the keyboard altogether may be a good idea – it’s not like I’m actually capable of playing anyway. So I took a look around at the ZeRO. Then I spotted that there’s a new one coming out. Right now. And it’s sexy. And now I want one. Damnit.
One down and one to go. Our documentary seemed to be fairly well received, with some really helpful constructive criticism. I really appreciate being told where I’ve gone wrong, when there’s reasoning and alternative suggestions behind it. But without any time to rest, we’re on to the Narrative Project.
We’ve been handed similar restriction on time for this project: a short turnaround of six weeks and an equally brief film length – a maximum of five minutes. This is actually a far more difficult prospect for the Narrative Project however. In this time, we need to create a screenplay (or at the very least, adapt a screenplay from a text), organise actors, possibly find costumes and locate… locations.
Fortunately, we were directed to an excellent piece of software called Celtx. For anyone remotely interested in industries that require pre-production (film, 3D, AV etc), you should take a look at this software. It’s free, it’s cross-platform and it has a solid looking community behind it.
Development
Sitting on one of Sydney’s older, tin can train carriages the other day, an idea popped into my head. I was seated just inside the door to the carriage and from my vantage point, was able to look upstairs and downstairs at the other passengers.
I thought of ‘appropriating’ Hitchcock’s Psycho and using each level of the train carriage to represent a different area of Freud’s mind: the Superego, the Ego and the Id (from top to bottom). The trick here would be to get a dialogue between all levels. Using one actor, speaking a type of monologue, split by levels was probably not going to give us the arc needed to fill one of the project requirements. So I went on the hunt for a usable text.
In the meantime, I got in touch with RailCorp. There was no point pursuing the idea, if we weren’t going to be allowed to film on a carriage. I have to say, contrary to media opinion that all RailCorp/CityRail workers have been employed specifically because of their sub-human intelligence levels, they were quite helpful and surprisingly coherent for monkeys. However, it turns out that even for students, filming on RailCorp property is prohibitively expensive. Not only does it cost money to film (billed in 3hr units), but there are parking fees, electricity charges and whopping costs to have a RailCorp Safety/Liaison Officer present. I’m actually not begrudging RailCorp their right to charge these fees – I understand what must be involved with their responsibilities as a government company, but I did have my fingers crossed that we’d get some special treatment as students. Nevermind, on to the next idea…
One of my favorite writers is Dave Eggers and his quarterly short story publication, McSweeny’s, which is always stunning and wonderfully quirky.
However, after showing them to the other members of my group, with a lacklustre response, I think I’ll have to go back on the hunt for something with a bit more that we can flesh out of the story. A couple within my group want to write the story themselves, which sets of alarm bells of time wasting and bickering to me, but we’ll see how that pans out. What’s the worst that could happen…?
With the presentations held in last week’s tutorial, we had something of a respite from the weekly code editing and ‘hacking’ tasks. I probably should have been a little bit more proactive and done my own code work, but following the homework rush over the holiday ‘break’, I was feeling a little flat and took some time out. Some trolling… er research on the Internet was stressful enough for my weary head this week.
The first thing I came across, whilst not totally related to this project, was quite interesting. It seems that every other week, there is a new release of another open source (or at least freely available) software, ready to take on the established giant. Whilst I don’t put Processing in the category of multinationals like Adobe or Microsoft, it certainly does have something of a following now and there aren’t a lot of other packages that I can think of which enjoy the community following that Processing does. So it’s interesting to see Field come along (also interesting that it came from the same institution that bore Processing – MIT).
I have to say, at first glance it looks like Processing could be under siege here. Whilst each environment uses different languages (Processing is based on Java, whilst Field is based on Python), they are both designed to help you get ideas down as quickly as possible. The area that Processing falls down in here is the need to refresh the applet window every time you update the code (particularly annoying in OS X, seeing as Apple don’t believe in supporting Java fully). However, Field not only looks like it updates changes in real time, but allows you to edit certain parameters in the graphic window itself. Nerdariffic.
I can’t say I have a spare week or so to learn a new code language right now, so Field seems to have been built with lazy people like me in mind: you can run Processing inside Field! I think I’ve prattled on about this long enough, so if you’re interested, here’s the video…
In my presentation last week, I linked to Memo Akten’s ofxMSAPhysics library. It’s not really for Processing, but the traer.physics library that it’s based on is. Taking a look at the examples on the project page, the Bouncy Balls sketch looks promising. It both attracts and repels elements to one another, so if I’m able to add the silhouette of the participant as an element and choose at which time to attract and repel the other elements, this sketch could be particularly useful.
To tell the program when to attract and when to repel the elements, I need a trigger for the change. I think the simplest way to do this will be something along the lines of counting a pixel difference between frames, but I did stumble across something that could be put to interesting use: Gesture Recognition. This video shows handwriting being recognised, but I can’t think of a reason that this couldn’t also recognise body gestures as well…
I think this is something I should leave until I can see how much time I’m going to have left to actually get this work completed. It looks like something I could end up spending a lot of time playing around with, rather than getting the rest of the project underway.
Searching the Discourse forum on the Processing site yielded some interesting results for the RSS feed section of my project. Not only have people been adding RSS feeds into sketches for some time, but there are also people working on feeds to work with the Twitter andlast.fm API, much like my header on this page. This is an interesting idea, because particularly with last.fm, there is a lot more information that can be drawn from than simply headings: statistics; artist bios; relationships between users etc are all stored on last.fm.
Clearly, there’s a lot of information out there that will be useful for my project. Now I’ve just got to start experimenting with it.
6am is far too early to be getting out of bed and taking photos. Well, for a lazy student that is. There are a bunch of people out and about at that time of the morning – some are taking their ridiculous looking dogs for a walk, and others are dressed up in a business suit and probably just about to begin their 14hr day. Sounds like a laugh a minute. But I digress…
I was out of my bed at this ungodly hour to snap a few potential locations for my photo shoot. After spotting some excellent Flickr photos from the Greek riots in 2008 (see the ‘Inspiration’ section below), I decided that long shadows + Dutch tilt + black and white = awesome. So that narrowed my times of shooting down to either early morning or late afternoon. Lighting would be great, but is likely to become and issue as power will be difficult to find (something that definitely needs some more thought put into it).
Deciding that morning would be a quieter time to be wandering the streets and taking photos, I did just that: snapping off some of King St and other locations, off the main drag…
The second location, on Knight St looking back at the city was initially the shot I found most interesting, so I attempted a (very) quick composite by layering the same shot over itself, but taken at different shutter speeds. Then using masks in Photoshop, I chose which area of each image to use for the composite…
Even though it’s clearly a rushed mock-up, I do like the surreal look of the image. The unnatural way that light sits together in the image reminds me of Gregory Crewsdon’s photography (minus the budget).
On reflection however, I think the King St images were more successful. There is more movement, and excitement in the framing. And being closer to my house, there’s potential for getting power on the shoot (still a somewhat difficult prospect though)…
Inspiration
Teacher Dude’s BBQ has some really great stuff posted up on Flickr. Not just photos, but some excellent activist posters as well. Definitely worth a look. The following pictures all come from Teacher Dude’s photostream and were the style inspiration I mentioned earlier in this post (all photos are credited through their link)…
The staging of photos is a strange concept of its own. Gregory Crewdson, whom I mentioned earlier, is one of the best known photographers for doing just this. I’m in two minds about his images. On the one hand they are starkly beautiful and surreal, with clear inspiration borrowed from David Lynch, which can never be a bad thing. But on the other hand, they are so overly manufactured, that it’s difficult to feel much for them, other than be stunned by the budget behind the shot…
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled, 2001.
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (North by Northwest), 2004.
Gregory Crewdson, Untitled from the series Beneath the Roses, 2005.
There are definitely elements of these photos that I really do love: the lighting and the smoke are used to wonderful effect. I think my goal here is to combine the precision of Crewdson’s work with the immediacy of a moment snapped in the middle of a riot.
Hmm, maybe I’m setting my standards a little bit high?
Things have been getting far too serious around this blog for a while now – I haven’t had a whole bunch of time to post anything outside uni work. So as a break from all of that, here is some comic relief.
I spotted this on Scott Hansen’s blog today and it cracked me up. I can’t think up a more appropriate adjective for this guy than ‘douchebag’. Enjoy…
The first coneptual project we have faced in Digital Composite this year has been creatively titled, the Molzianiă Aardvark Project. It is one of the most open briefs I have come across and essentially allows each student to respond to the title of the brief in any way they see fit. Molzianiă Aardvark is of course an entirely made-up term and the only restrictions upon us are technical output: a final high quality, colour correct image at 300dpi A4.
We have however had a quite subtle hint with what direction we could choose to take this project: we are also required to hand in one A4 Media Release. This suggests to me that what we are really doing with this project is, like the title, creating an entity or occurance. Between the image and the Release, we need to take something imaginary and make it appear a reality.
After our lecture on John Heartfield, I have really started to think more carefully about where I’m taking my work. Like my concept for Multimedia Authoring, my initial response to this brief is to make a political statement, no matter how subtle. I’m starting to feel more and more that university should be an environment that I take full advantage of, particularly with the opportunity of making work with meaning behind it. This is not always going to be the case once I begin doing paid work: there aren’t many corporate companies that would appreciate their latest design pointing out the dark side of Capitalism, for instance.
So now that my inner Angry Leftie is making its way out of the shadows, I picked up the latest copy of Adbusters. I used to read this magazine quite a bit when I was younger, but lost interest at some point. Whilst many of the articles are great, I do get the feeling that they are expressed from something of an elitist point of view. Like student protesters yelling about the latest political indignation: they’re making a lot of noise, but when it comes down to it, would they actually change their lifestyle for their cause? Probably not. But in the end, we’re all quite similar in that sense, we’re protective of our status quo.
Where am I heading with this? The front cover of the March/April Adbusters shows a lone figure in mid stride, running from what you assume to be some kind of protest, because of their clothing. They are wearing an almost paramilitary outfit, with smoke billowing around behind them.
This struck me as not only a powerful image, but one that is entirely open to interpretation. Who’s side is this person on? Are they fighting with us or against us? Most Australians would assume this person is something akin to a terrorist. We have very little understanding of violent struggles in our country and therefore cannot understand this kind of fighting. But what if this person was in fact in the midst of a battle for us? What if, unlike the angry students, they were putting everything they had on the line for a cause they saw as much greater than themselves and that we would all benefit from their struggle? This is the direction I plan to take the Molzianiă Aardvark Project.
Work
The first two projects for Digital Composite, completed in class, were focused on giving us marketable, ‘real world’ skills. Repairing an old photograph and cleaning up a beauty shot of Pamela Anderson were both good exercises for getting stronger Photoshop skills. However, they were both solely training exercises and there was no real concept involved. It will be interesting to try and put these skills to use for the Molzianiă Aardvark Project.
At this stage though, i’m still unsure about how I will use digital editing for this project. I think it will be far easier to create an image similar to the Adbusters cover ‘in camera’. Perhaps compositing additional images into the photograph could be used. My instinct is to add some kind of logo, or banner for the group and insert that in post, perhaps along the lines of the 12 Monkeys logo. This idea could be carried across to the final portfolio project for the semester, where I need to put together a group of work. This may be logos, or posters that build upon the imaginary group.
Inspiration
A book that I auspiciously purchased in 2007, The Design of Dissent is a pretty powerful collection of activist design. There’s a lot of ‘anti’ in there: anti-war; anti-government; anti-Capitalism… but I think some of the imagery is still quite positive. And much of it flips the propaganda style on it’s head really effectively.
I’m unsure if this will be of any use for the activist photo, but if I do decide to use graphics in the image or the final project, this will be an incredibly rich resource.
I really didn’t expect to spend so much time fine tuning my animation over the past week or so. In the end, I think the movement I attempted was too complex and the many keyframes I added early on made the later stages more difficult than they otherwise would have been.
It is these later stages that you’re really able to breathe some life into the character, so in the end my little golden man looks a bit floaty and doesn’t appear to have the mass that I would have liked. However, I have to say that I really learnt a lot by going through this process from start to finish. Although I definitely made some mistakes this time around, I have a better understanding of how to start any similar projects, and avoid many troubles in the future.
Work
So here is the little bugger. Like a crazed wooden life drawing doll:
In case it’s not as obvious as I hope, he’s a skateboarder. Because we couldn’t use props for this animation, he’s hovering just above the ground and stays in one spot (it would be a Hanna Barbera-esque animation, where the background whizzes by the cycling character).
I would have liked to add some more bounce and overlap in the animation, but it started becoming far too complex amongst all the keyframes, so I ended up letting it go as it is.
Even with all my complaints about the animation, it has come together reasonably well in the end. I wouldn’t mind having another shot at it, but starting afresh at some point. But for now, I need some sleep.
I’ve found that film-making can be a difficult process. Not for the massive technological, financial and sanity issues, but because you need to work well with others. I’ve long known that I’m something of a control freak and like things done my way, so I consciously tried to sit back and let others get involved as much as possible for this project.
The problem with that is it’s a little like teaching someone to drive a car. Everyone needs to learn and often has their own way of doing things, but if you feel as though you’re heading for a tree, you want to grab the wheel, yelling and screaming: “this is how you’re supposed to do it!” But I digress…
We each had plans to go away during the ‘break’ (something of a misnomer, considering our workload), so we split the workable footage up into four themes and each did a rough edit over the week:
Background of the Bus Museum
Introduction of each person and their role at the Museum
Why each person is interested in buses
The future of the Museum
We spotted very early on that this documentary would be more focused on the people themselves, rather than the issues facing the museum. Over the space of a maximum 5 minutes, there was no way we could really explore a complex problem and besides, the Museum volunteers are just far more interesting.
Once we returned from the ‘break’ and put all the sections together, they needed a seriously large pair of scissors taken to them to get us under the 5 minute mark. The biggest problem we faced however, was getting the HD and regular footage to play nicely together. It was a nightmare. Final Cut has some pretty convoluted menu and window systems going on and it doesn’t take much to make the entire sequence flip out and you not notice until it’s too late.
We did of course, get there in the end. The documentary shoot is finally done. So without any further ado, here it is:
Development
So what have I learned from this process? How to beat Final Cut into submission would be high on the list. It’s one of those programs that you find there’s 100 ways to do everything. Some of them aren’t pretty, but if they get the job done, then it’s worth a go.
Another would be paying more attention to the planning process. Pre-production is underestimated all the time. It was to our own detriment that we didn’t decide on clear roles for each person within the group at the beginning, as it resulting in a lot of looking at each other blankly and shrugging. I think if we all knew what we were responsible for, we would be much more likely to dig in and get it done.
Finally, I did actually learn to let go a little bit. Working within a group is pretty trying at times, but that’s probably more a reflection on how I like to work, rather than the members of my group, or the project in general. Here’s hoping I can get it together even more for the next one…
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