Week 6 

This week I continued developing my concept on the poster. Seting up a complex code provided by google using IPython Notebook called Google deep dream – a visualiser which utilises googles neural networks. I ran tested out a few different different lines of code to experiment with some visual effects in order distort the image from its original form.

Here is the original and its variations

original

1st variation

2nd variation

3rd variation

Deep dream is a step by step process there are two steps to the process, the smaller steps are called iterations and after 10 iterations the images achieves the larger step, an octave. Examples 1 and 2 are both at the final stage of the process at 3 octaves and 9 iterations, by stoping the process earlier you are able to effectively lessen the distortions if desired. The 3rd example is an exception to the rule as it loops the process on itself capturing and zooming the image and thus exaggerating and building on the previous distortions. This process has the ability to loop infinitely although the more times you run the full process the less discernible the original image becomes. Looking at the 3rd example from the amount of zoom in the image I only ran the whole process twice and as you can see it uses the same code sequence as the 1st variation and already the distortions have become a lot more prominent.

The 2nd variation one is probably my favourite, although not as psychadelic as the others I thought it was a nice balance as it offered an expressionist painting like style whilst still creating a nice level of distortion. It was a little less visually intense and offered more design space to fit the additional poster text.

I also worked on developing the text for the title

We decided to use this films title as our text

From the title I spent a while attempting to illustrate the word “documentary” in the same style as “fear and loathing”

To do this I copied as many letter forms as I could and substituted the rest by creating a unique brush in photoshop and writing the extra letters repeatedly until I came up with a version was similar to the original text.

This is the final result I created,

Although its not perfect I do believe that I did achieve a pretty decent imitation of the original letterforms.

Week 7 

This week I coordinated with the other members of the group about working on finalising  the poster. We shared our designs and gave feedback on each version.

This was my final version

F&l poster monv3

It looks a little less juicy on the computer because the colours are in CMYK colour profile and ready to print.

Im pretty happy with the end result, I framed the image within a film frame to give it a bit more of a documentary/film theme without having dramatically altering the image by inserting film paraphernalia. Given more time I would have played with the film frame a little more and tired to get it to look a little more realistic and to blend a little better with the image. I also added some effects onto it to give it a bit more of a film grain look.

After some feedback and liaising with the group we decided to go with Ajeet’s version of the poster due to some fantastic sketch work which resembled the original art in fear and loathing by Ralph Steadman.

I also collaborated with Marta to help brainstorm ideas for wall projections during the seminar. I showed her deep dream which she loved and we played around with some effects on more frames, heres another few examples.

As the images were just stills we wanted to involved a bit more movement so I pointed her in the direction of this video

The video is a sequence from fear and loathing in which Someone has run every frame through deep dream. There are very few  high quality deep dream videos out on the web at the moment and this kind of project would take more technical code ability than I had whilst also being extremely time consuming and require a high spec computer, so luckily enough someone had already done it!

Other wise I offered to create some kind of slow transition Gif or video in which you can watch the image transform and distort
like this or similar

View post on imgur.com

Week 8 

The week of our seminar I met up with Ajeet on Monday to print out the poster and stick it up around RMIT. We decided that we would mainly target building 9 as that would be our target audience however we also stuck them up around common areas in the RMIT city campus.

I also met with Marta to book lighting equipment with the techs and we continued to discuss what would be projected, She decided to create a video which blended the deep dream fear and loathing sequence with a crazy visualiser which Ajeet showed us from the program WinAMP.

After admiring the lighting from the previous group I thought it would also be a good idea to spice it up a bit and use some interesting lighting for our seminar, I pitched the idea to Marta and she liked it so I took it upon myself to design and setup the lights.

Continuing with the theme of ear and loathing I wanted to use a blend of blues and reds to give a candy style took to the stage and speakers. I used frames from the film like as my inspiration here they are,

I noticed that even the title uses a similar effect.

Learning from last week I thought that using red heads might be a bit overkill even with diffusion paper and I also didn’t want the lights to be too visually imposing on the stage.  I booked 1 LED, 1 Kino, a dedo kit, C stands and a gel kit. I aimed to use a similar setup to the 3 point lighting setup although I realised that I also wanted to incorporate some unconventional lighting angles and would have to use a few more lights to supplement the three a I would be lighting 4 subjects.

I used the kino with a red gel as my key light, the Led with a double blue gel as a fill and two dedo’s with multiple layers of gel as backlights.  I did not have time to actually practise the setup before hand and on the day getting the lights ups with the short timeframe was pretty crazy and so I got very little time to tinker or play with the setup. I found that there I ran out of gel as I would have to double or triple them up to achieve a actual saturation of that particular colour also one of the Dedo’s also did not work but due to a lack of gels it did not end up impacting the setup. Overall I was happy with the result on the day as the lights mixed with one another to create some interesting colours and shadows.

These posts will serve as a record for my group contribution to our seminar series – Fear and Loathing in Documentary.

Week 2 – This week I worked with the group brainstorming potential themes/titles for our seminar. Our working title was – The wolf, The crossroad and reaching grandma’s house. Although it is a little lengthy we felt it stuck with the angle we wanted to take with the seminar, which is focusing on how a documentary creator navigates the challenges that are thrown at them and particularly how they balance commercial and personal interests.

Week 3  – Helped brainstorming a new name for the seminar as the previous one was too long and too ambiguous to an audience that wasn’t aware of the topics. I thought that ideally should fit these qualities.

-attention grabbing e.g. spin on a title of a documentary
– gives the audience an idea of the topic (documentary)
– Adds to the theme (epic adventure)

– gives an Idea of the focus (commercial v personal interests)

in the end we came up with our current title – Fear and loathing in documentary, which is a spin on a title ,albeit not a documentary. It also perhaps gives an idea of the focus of the seminar (navigating the challenges of documentary makes). It does not however fulfil all the criteria, but realistically it would be very tricky to tick all those boxes within in a single title.

We also divided into sub groups, I ended up helping the poster and promotional material.

Week 4 – Seeing as I hadn’t actually watched the film this week I would view it so I could get a stronger idea of what kind of direction to take with the poster. After viewing the film I feel more confident in the title of our seminar as it gives us a very strong aesthetic direction for the seminar which I believe will be a lot of fun to play around with. Here are some notes I took on the visual style

– Dutch tilt, nothing is straight,

– strong diagonal compositions

– psychedelic colour sets

– warping distortion

– blood, drugs

– surreal aspects

– iconic imagery, desert

also met with my sub group to discuss what we wanted for the poster, we decide we would each come up with a mock up for next weeks class. Also drew some very basic ideas for the mock ups in class, we were thinking of two major options firstly something like this

simple because the image is so iconic

I also wanted to experiment with something similar to this

except warping the faces of the guests, although this would require some high quality photos of the guests as well as their permission to distort their faces and post them in public places.

Week 5 – complied some inspirational material (posters, fan art, frames from the film) on drive with my sub group.

Found a font called ‘Bat Country’ online which is a homage to the film and uses the same style, I decided to include it within my mockup as the word ‘documentary’ simply to test it out. I actually think it looks quite bad on the poster, its letter forms are too thin and it just looks a bit too messy.

before I go into more detail here is my mockup

Not all too happy with it in general but it is only a mock up.

I used a frame from the film which I though had a nice formal composition, it also had enough negative space for the text to be inserted.

I love the title lettering of “fear and loathing” I took it from this image

In our group meeting this week we decided that we all really like this lettering and that we would use something similar in our own poster.

I did also really like the colour scheme of this poster, the strong reds and purple sky could be very eye-catching.

Not sure at all about the font at the bottom, I couldn’t quite seem to get it on the right perspective plane to match with the hood of the car, also I defiantly think the font needs to be changed.

What I am a fan of is minimal text, I think our poster should primarily be visually appealing rather than informative, so I think that simply having the date and the location could be enough.

In this weeks meeting with the group we shared feedback on each others designs, discussed potential copyright issues and divided up some more tasks for the next week.

We decided to create some new mockups, I am going to look into where and how we can print the posters and Adjeet is going to experiment with Gonzo sketches and try and replicate the lettering of the title text for the word ‘documentary’ so the title is more uniform.

We also discussed potentially having two poster designs, one to catch attention and then going back later and replacing the poster with another that is more informative.

I have structured my final post within a loose chronological order

Beginning the semester / Blog posts

It occurred to me quite early in the semester that this class was going to be exploring more than just the basic production processes of cinema. Although we ran through these elements such as shot size, framing, camera movement etc. They acted as a bouncing board to push me to think on another level about how these elements combined with one another and what effect they created. I began reflecting and rationalising my practical decisions giving myself a greater understanding of concepts like spatiality and pacing.

Through the group exercises I also started to apply a similar line of critical thought to my own methodology. I came to understand the value in being able to adapt your style of communication to suit your role as I reflected specifically on the effect of roles and the challenges of directing.

A little further on in the semester I began to understand that these concepts of spatiality and pacing should be motivated by a set of underlying guidelines or frameworks that would be formed by either emotional, theoretical or thematic values of the scene.

Scene analyses

I conducted a few scene deconstructions, namely the barber shop scene in Gran Torino and the diner scene from Taxi Driver. When doing these I attempted to break down the camera setups and movements of each scene by mapping them out and analysing them. I did not however properly connect these choices to the theory or motivation in my analysis of the barber shop scene in week 2. I was perhaps a bit more rigours in my analysis of the Taxi Driver scene as I attempted to draw these connections of the shot choices with the motives of the characters as well as the overall style of the film.

Research task

The point which I see marked the start of applying the theoretical frameworks into my work and writing was completing the research question on montage and decoupage. I must stress that I believe this task was crucial to building and broadening my understanding of the class. I found these readings were invaluable because given the nature of the class it was a challenge to find academic sources which held significance with the practical aspects of the class. The readings on montage gave me a strong understanding of both Sergei Eisenstein and Andre Bazin’s theoretical framework of montage as well as supplying their historical context and underlying philosophical approach to the term. The reading on decoupage assisted me to understand and grasp the concept of decoupage through the historical context of the term and thus gain a better understanding on the subject matter of the course. I later also came to reflect upon both terms coming to the realisation that they historically they have, at points shared a similar conceptual definitions meaning they were both vital terms in relation to understanding the class.

My Method posts

The idea for my final project originated out of a film Robin had shown me for during TV-2 called The Five Obstructions by Lars Von Trier. I saw the impressive results that Jorgen Leth had producer and so I wanted to replicate the process by replacing myself in the for Leth in nan effort to see what results I would produce. In working towards this goal I produced 7 ‘My method of working’ posts which you can find here:

1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5 – 6 – 7

At the start of these posts I attempted to formulate my project by first giving short analyses of each of the 5 obstructions in the film by examining how the various constraints had effected Leth’s reinterpretation. I tried to investigate the definition and function of a constraint to understand if or how it differs from a free decision and if they could or should share the same aims to reinforce the underlying motivations of a scene.

Nearing the end of the working method posts I started balancing the pros and cons of which scene I should choose to use in my final project if it should be the short film The Perfect Human that Leth used in The Five Obstructions or if it should be a different scene, and if so what qualities it should have.

Project pitch

It was around this time that I had developed the pitch of my final project, whilst I had not decided on what scene to use I had defined other aspects of my project by setting the parameters for my work.

I have decided to include my 30 word description of my project here as it serves to outline the core goals of the project which have remained the same despite the adjustments.

“Investigating my own sense of coverage by applying multiple sets of constraints to a single scene in an effort to push myself to rethink the scene with a fresh or experimental approach.”

Week 7 exercise

At a similar time I had completed my week 7 exercise to re-shoot one of the scripts that we had used previously in class. My basic premise was to have the tone of the scene to build tension to a climatic end point. In my planning and reflection I demonstrated how I planned to integrate and execute these motives using elements of mis-en-scene. Given the short time frame to complete the task I was quite satisfied with the end result with the exception of a mic issue which distorted most of the dialogue.

Final Project

Continuing to work on finding a suitable scene I completed this task from an exercise that Robin set me which comprised of a scene description coupled with a constraint. Although I misinterpreted the description of the task I found planning and making the task helpful as it challenged me to search for a creative solution to the constraint.

Reflecting and discussing this task with Robin also helped re-navigate what kind of scene would be suitable for my final project. I had been flirting with the idea of using a non-narrative scene or a scene without a dramatic base, however we came to the conclusion that such a scene would be diverting too far from the focus of the class.

First Obstruction

I began work on the first component of the final project which I called ‘first obstruction’ which consisted of a brief scene description about a couple having an argument over the phone. The constraints for the first obstruction involved not being able to show the female character and not to show the male character driving.

I found the biggest challenge of this component was the planning because I knew that this script would also be used in the other components. Script writing was not my forte and so I briefly considered using a found scene with similar content. Once I pitched the idea to my actor however the cogs were in motion and together we workshopped a basic story by creating detailed character notes. We were able to sketch an outline of the conversation filled with a backstory of previous lead up events for the chracters. I then grouped the actors together and we set about working through the scene using impromptu lines, after a few takes I was able to draw out a working script. In hindsight although I never planned on using this method of planning I’m glad I did because it pushed me to experience a different approach constructing a scene thus achieving the goals of my final project in an unexpected way. I have now gained more confidence with this methodology and I know the challenges and benefits that it brings.

The shooting process of the first obstruction went quite smoothly I had added a few formal devices of proximity and lighting to reinforce the characters emotional tones. Unfortunately during editing I had to compromise these somewhat as I encountered timing issues which were due to the fact that the male actor did not have anyone feeding him the females lines on set meaning he had to gauge the timings by himself.

Second Obstruction

I name the next component of my project the ‘second obstruction’. The brief was to only show the female character and  to create two alternate endings for the scene. The constraints I was tasked with were to use a feminine aesthetic/female perspective, only use closeups and to use a tripod where necessary.  The constraint of using a feminine aesthetic/female perspective phased me at first in the planning stage as I felt unsure of how to approach it. I came to realise that I was over complicating it and that perhaps it was more about what not to present in the scene i.e. eroticising or objectifying the female, rather than a concept I had to inflict upon it.

Having learnt after shooting the first obstruction, I realised that timing the lines might be an issue and so I also made some accommodations to counteract those issues. Similar to the first obstruction I had devised some additional formal devices to play around with such as alternating between the camera looking at the character and using her point of view. I also planned a series of compositions which aimed to keep a sense of movement within the frame. When reflecting on the planning process I did realise that I had unintentionally mirrored the action from the previous obstruction, although this may have been a subconscious choice I felt that perhaps I should have challenged myself further by enforcing a different sequence of movement upon the scene.

The shooting and editing process went along smoothly I was satisfied with most of the lighting and framing of the shots, although I did pick up a few mic issues on some of the tracking shots I was able to mask them to a passable standard. Some of the formal devices I added specifically the alternation of perspectives I did not follow through with as I felt they would have required further cues in the action to properly implement. The second obstruction marked the end (so far) of the filming I did for the class.

Editing task

My next task was an editing exercise to create a shorter single sequence which combined the two previous obstructions into a single conversation. I was set to create two versions of this sequence, one which favoured the formal properties of each obstruction and another which favoured the dialogue of the conversation. Reflecting on this task I managed to shorten the sequence considerably but I felt that could not achieve the goal of 2:30 without sacrificing the logical progression or visual continuity of the scene. Despite creating both versions from scratch they turned out to be remarkably similar, I think this was because the method in which I had filmed each obstruction had not allowed for multiple avenues of continuity.

My most recent edit you can find here is slightly more polished and just a smidgen shorter than the previous edits. I attempted to colour grade the film in an effort to create more defined spaces for each character as well as balance the lighting in a few shots that had a poor balance between subject and their background.

My screener is here. As I said in my reflection I think In this case I over did the grading when trying to find the balance with the lamp shot resulting in a grainy reddishness.

Next Obstruction

The next obstruction which Robin has given to me is to film the whole sequence, the constraints are : Only three motion picture shots allowed.  The rest: all stills.  no sync dialogue; voice over only.  The voice over can be a narrator and/or maybe fragments of their exchange.

I have yet to plan this obstruction but stay tuned for the next instalment.

Final reflection

In retrospect of my final project I think that mis-managed my progress or perhaps mis-judged the amount of work involved when I set my goals. Although I am satisfied with the amount of work I have put towards to project but I feel that I am just scratching the surface of what I initially set out to do. The work I have now, the sequence of combined conversations, is what I would regard as the original scene to use as a basis to test different set of constraints upon. Using this line of thought I would consider the real ‘first obstruction’ to be the next obstruction that I am about to create.

I think I extrapolated the brief of the project a bit too far, creating such a deep backstory for the characters was informative process but perhaps unnecessary. By taking up the challenge of creating an original script the scene I ended up adding more ‘story’ than the scene needed. The scene could have benefitted had I distilled it down to its basic premise – a couple have an argument over the phone. Distilling it might have also meant that I could have progressed further with the path of the project. Another key observation that I think I will consider in my future work is looking inwards rather than outwards so to speak. Quite often when given a constraint I would look to other sources to try and find references to assist my interpretation when in some cases the best thing to do would be to search for that within myself.

With all that said I think that the in process of working through these tasks to get to this point in the project still helped me to achieve the goals that I initially set for the project. Not only were my conceptions of coverage were challenged but my methodology was challenged. In hindsight I weighted the goals of my project too much on the conceptual side and I did not fully consider the benefits I could gain from practically working through this project in how it would change my methodology.

This class gave me the tools and assistance to gain a deeper understanding of coverage, an ability which I strive to develop further in my future work.

Misc posts

Here are a few posts which failed to work their way into one of the headings above but which I believe still deserve a mention.

I reflect on my concept of the term ‘pure cinema‘.

Thoughts on the legacies of television exhibition in relation to repetition and variation on repetition.

Acting performance reflection and reflection on acting emotions.

I will update video links soon as they are currently exporting.

Here is my screener.

I chose to just grab a snippet from the argument of my latest edit and I chose this particular selection because I thought it worked quite well on its own. I did however make the amateur mistake of not giving myself enough time to check the final product. I spent perhaps too long toiling around with the colour correction on my clunky laptop. I was trying to use some secondary correction to balance the female characters face in the shot with the lamp because I felt the lamp was too bright and was dominating the shot. I ended up using a few masks and I think my main mistake was trying to restore red back into the shadows and midtones which became desaturated when I boosted them. When I actually put it on the server and checked it it looked very different to what it did on my laptop. The compression seemed to really boost the reddishness and grain in the mask making it very noticeable, unfortunately by the time it was all exported I didn’t have enough time to correct it before heading off to work. Amateur mistake, lesson learned, give time to check the final product!

I think it was peter Kemp that told me during cinema studies that repetition and variation on repetition is what comes to define a directors style.This process of repeating one element, altering it and repeating it again can apply to almost every element of mis en scene. I think this premise would have also made an interesting final project, perhaps including analysis of what elements other directors repeated in their styles.

To change direction a bit I recently visited the legacies of television exhibition at the NGV which had some interesting pieces in it. The one which really caught my attention most was a piece by Tracy Moffat and Gary Hillberg called Artist which was essentially a super cut of Hollywood’s depiction of the artist, here is a little info page I found on it. It has a loose narrative structure which is based archetypal voyage of the artist, the creation, the criticism and the destruction – from what I can remember. Somehow it reminded me of the Martin Arnold and his films like Alone Life Wastes Andy Hardy, perhaps it was just just on my mind but it made me think of the film in relation to repetition.

I guess you could say that the epiphany this week was then that Artist is kind of like a meta stylistic record except instead of the focus being defined by a director and the text it is defined rather by the industry and the subject. So the Artist is a meta stylistic representation of the depiction of the artist in Hollywood films. Although now I write that out the word ‘style’ feels wrong perhaps is it wrong for me to apply it in that context.

Last week Robin gave me the task of editing my previous obstructions together to create a conversation complete with both parts. The brief was to create two edits, one which would favour the formal characteristics of each piece and one that would favour the dialogue. another request was to shorten them to around 2:30 in length and cut the fat so to speak.

Dialogue

I thought this restraint was the easier of the two and so I aimed to edit the two clips around the conversation, shortening it where possible but still aiming to retain a natural flow and progression. I think I achieved this relatively well but the main challenge proved to be shorting the timeframe down to 2:30. Although the conversation itself lasted for around that time I struggled to find a way to reduce it down that far without sacrificing visual continuity in the movement or what the logical progression of the conversation. As a result the total timeframe of the clip ended hovering around 3:20.

Formal

In attempting to edit the clips in favour of the formal qualities, I found that what I was really aiming for was to attempt to give the characters a similar amount of agency both visually and in the division of the conversation. I started the sequence from scratch as a means of attempting to distance myself from the dialogue edit in case I ended up replicating its structure.

The first challenge was giving the characters an equal visual agency, which was already somewhat skewed as within the second obstruction the formal restriction of close up only allows the audience to empathise with the female character more in comparison to the first obstruction.the lighting also creates reinforced this disparity as it was much softer and warmer to the female character in the second obstruction compared to the males lighting in the first obstruction. I tired to manipulate this difference in my favour to define the characters with some colour grading to accentuate light and tone of each characters space.

I managed to knock of a further 20 secs of the conversation so the formal edit hovers just under 3:00 however I think I encountered the same problem with shortening the clip as the dialogue edit. I found that in the process of shortening the clips the visual agency of the characters was, in most cases, restricted and inherently tied to which lines the characters spoke and so my attempts to balance their agency became somewhat compromised in an effort to maintain the continuity of the action and conversation. The result was that the formal edit also became very focused on the dialogue and so its structure was also quite similar to the first dialogue edit.

I think that with further tinkering I could shorten it a smidgen, maybe I am just too close to the material and I simply need to re-approach it from a different angle perhaps sacrificing continuity in order to distill it back more to its basic qualities.

Started my thinking to deeper levels of motivation/rationale

thinking through concepts  – space, roles, pacing

Tangent – scene analysis

Got caught on idea from the five obstructions, – started looking into the nature of obstruction

directing the ‘Door’ scene

Montage and decoupage research question

Week 7 scene

Formulation of the project idea

Experimenting with project ideas

Re navigating project idea

Obstruction 1 – the original / reflection

Obstruction 2 – ???

Obstruction 3 – ???

Obstruction 4 – ???

30 words

Investigating my own sense of coverage by applying multiple sets of constraints to a single scene in an effort to push myself to rethink the scene with a fresh or experimental approach.

So this idea and the phrase ‘pure cinema’ has been throw around during pretty much every cinema or film course I’ve done although no one has ever defined it for me. I have the feeling that the term is somewhat eludes a universal definition, it seems to be dependant to an extent on your particular ideologies and philosophical values in relation to cinema (I’m sure Bazin and Eisenstien would have different ideas of pure cinema). Before I start thinking through this Idea I should make it clear that I have not really researched this topic specifically although I think it could have been a very interesting area to investigate as a final project. Alright so now I’ve put that little disclaimer up, I’ll attempt to define what the term ‘pure cinema’ means to me, who knows It might be interesting to come back sometime in the near future and see if my definition has changed. In recent memory I’ve heard the term arise from multiple sources in reference to multiple films, most recently as the title of an article part of my research on Jean Luc Godard’s Contempt, in relation to Daivd Lynch’s Inland Empire, my tutor mentioned that some action director filmmaker said that for they though action was a form of pure cinema and I could be wrong on this last one but I seem to remember Robin calling an elliptical sequence from a French new wave pure cinema. So what connects the dots? Seemingly just the medium itself, pure cinema does not seem to be defined by a particular, genre, aesthetic, content, narrative etc. Furthermore I don’t think it can be willing created or even planned, you might be able to set up the pieces but to execute them correctly would be reliant on a combination of various factors actors, mis-en-scene etc. What I’m trying to get at is I think that pure cinema is not a formulaic creation and that like other forms of creative expressions, music for example, its purity cannot be defined or foreseen, it must be experienced. Some filmmakers, like music artists are able to produce this ‘purity’ more consistently than others and so they become autuers and their practise receives celebration. It is important to remember cinema is an industry, and so there are certain formulas which become popular such as the current bulge in big budget super hero movies or in terms of the music industry the old 1-4-5 chord progression. Although I think its widely recognised that this financial success does not have any kind of direct equation or translation to amount of ‘pure cinema’ that is produced by such films. So in ending this loose, unfounded ramblings my loose definiton of Pure cinema would be – a moment in which the formal properties align and harmonize perfectly with the films thematic qualities.

discus throw

This week my task was to film the other half of the breakup narrative from last week.

My constraints were,

Using a female aesthetic/feminine perspective

and

Only closeups

Also I had to use a tripod where possible

Female aesthetic/feminine perspective was a bit of an abstract concept and so my idea was just to avoid using any kind of stereotypical ‘male gaze’ i.e eroticising or objectifying the woman. My second idea was to give the female character a bit more agency compared to the first obstruction within the narrative. I think I accomplished this concept fairly well during production, I also think that only using closeups complemented this to a certain extent as the spectator becomes closer and more sympathetic to the female character.

Only closeups was a constraint that I feel has a very complex set of implications so I’ll just mention a few that I considered. It restricts to detail or perhaps reorders a view or comprehension of space as it becomes impossible to capture large areas within a single shot. Exposing a space then requires multiple shots or complex camera movements which also imposes a different set of implications to the rhythm, pacing and narrative. It also limits large figural movements in a single shot and changes ideas for multiple compositions in a single shot with focus again becoming on the details.  In my case I attempted to highlight details of facial movements and as they would be the center of the emotional expression within the scene. By almost exclusively focusing on the female characters face I prioritised the narrative and pacing over exploring the space. Perhaps in hindsight I got caught up too much in the narrative and I might have been able to challenge my sense of decoupage a little more by peeling the focus onto other objects and not showing the conversation as much as I did. After discussing the clip with Robin I think part of the motivation behind the close up constraint became clear, it aimed to let the viewers imagination develop a sense of space for the character rather than showing it as I did in the first obstruction.

I had the idea in preproduction of alternating between the female characters point of view and looking at her and I though about distinguishing them with differing depth of field, however I did not really follow this idea up as much, you can see I used it for the opening shot and I also ended up picking up similar shots but did not incorporate them as I felt they would have needed cues within the action (looking in a specific direction) which I did not include when filming.

I planned to use a lot of soft low key lighting to define the space and I think I executed this concept quite consistently. I knew a lot of the shots were going to be the female characters so I also wanted to try adding quite a lot of movement in various parts to keep the frame from being too static. To solve this I used a few tracking shots and kept the character pacing around the room to create different compositions. Another idea I tried was creating multiple compositions in a single shot which I did twice, once as a static shot which the actor moves from closeup to extreme closeup and the second shot right afterwards time through panning the camera to follow the movement. Another concept that I pulled off was having a mirror a couple of shots i.e a shot of the top half of her face is balanced later with a shot of the bottom of her face, a track moving in front of her is mirrored later by a track from behind her. Although admittedly this idea didn’t have any purposeful motivation behind it, perhaps it would have been more significant if I had gone through with the alternating POV idea. In retrospect I also did this ‘mirroring’ technique in the first obstruction, or at least had it in mind when I was filming but I still am not sure why I am subconsciously attracted to this idea.

I should also note that The action or blocking of the second obstruction was fairly similar to the first, in regards to the character moving from one room to another. In the first obstruction the movement the purpose of the movement was to indicate the conversation was becoming more personal by changing to a more private space, it also gave me a chance to change the lighting as the demeanour of the character also changes with the turn in conversation. In this second obstruction the movement was mostly just to create some movement as well as change the lighting set up. In a way I feel I kind of stalled by not creating a new course of action especially because I was aware I was using the same movement during planning, however I guess it wasn’t really specified by any of the constraints to create a new course of action although maybe I should have constrained myself once I realised.

Investigating my own sense of coverage by applying multiple sets of constraints to a single scene in an effort to push myself to rethink the scene with a fresh or experimental approach.