michael, media work

I would like to develop a more thoroughly planned and thought out approach to creating films and other content as all currently I tend to be very disorganized and will chop and change a lot throughout the creative process, even in the final stages of a project. I have the technical skills and knowledge to shoot and edit visually interesting films and I think that I can be a strong team player while working with others on toward a common goal when the brief is already set out. I think a stronger work ethic and setting out more realistic goals when considering the final outcome will help in this development.

I think that this studio is designed to strengthen those aspects of the film-making process and the prompts and constraints set out for the ongoing exercises are meant to force people like myself to think more critically about the process in it’s entirety from concept to completion instead of just improvising or even winging it throughout when it comes to both the shooting and editing stages. While I know that problem solving and the ability to make creative decisions on the fly are useful within this process (as you can never really foresee the challenges that will pop up) having a stronger vision of what the end goal really is will undoubtedly save time and effort that can be put to better use. In the professional field also I recognise that clients will have a more concrete idea of what they want from a film-maker and showing that you have the ability to effectively turn their ideas into a cohesive and consistent piece of work while also having a certain amount of creative flare and style is crucial to gaining traction and notoriety.

This again goes back to what I consider to be my main weakness… Consistency and clarity of thought.

My initial research into impressionism and influence drawn from film such as Sans Soleil had me planning to make a largely static and slow-paced film and I had a collection of shots mostly filmed on my phone of planes flying around in the sky, shoes hanging from power lines, traffic at night in the rain and birds flying around with some kind of dialogue to accompany it. I had worries however about this idea coming off as half baked in the end. I think that simplicity and minimalism in films such as Agnes Varda’s ‘Les Dites Cariatides’ is actually something that takes a lot of forethought and vision to pull off, I didn’t have as much clear direction on what I wanted to specifically do so I shied away from this idea and ended up doing almost the opposite in creating a film where there’s more often that not, loads going on on-screen.

I found myself very quickly with a few different segments to the overall structure of the edit, as I’d started putting a few random things together more for experimentation then anything else and ended up liking what I had. Then of course Premier crashed and wouldn’t open properly for a few days until I’d updated my video drivers so I went and made the animated part on Photoshop. The rest of the sequence came after that but up until a day or two ago I had no idea how I was going to piece it all together with any sense of continuity and in the end I almost reversed the order of segments within the larger sequence and it went alright, the main point that actually had any reference to another segment was at the end of the first audio clip in which some guy’s talking about controlling your destiny on Earth. This was overlapped with the alien popping up to smell the planet the Earth and I also saw an opportunity to create juxtaposition between the optimistic empowering dialogue of the first segment with the nihilistic notion that we’re nothing more than over-mutated bacteria with no greater reason to life.

The French life question bot and the actual music video part I think are aimed to just kinda say “best not to think about it, just try to enjoy yourself” after presenting the two ends of the spectrum on life meaning and the role of the individual within the world around us.

Bertrand Russell, Philosopher and author of ‘In Praise of Idleness’ is famously quoted “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”

I’m extremely relieved that Premier has decided to work for me. Had to update my OS and a few video drivers but Premier has gone from barely usable to running relatively fast and smooth. I think that given the nature of this project, editing wise I would have been in a really bad position having not fixed my problems with running Premier. Almost every single gif had to be made into a nested sequence after having to go back into Photoshop and re-export to fix compatibility errors, I quickly figured out a way to count frames and make sure each gif had an equal amount so that they’d run together nicely, this saved me a load of time or otherwise trashy un-synced up gifs on screen together. I had to copy and paste effects and attributes from countless different clips onto others and then make sequences out of those once individual video channels were layered properly. It’s a hell of a headache at times and there’s a weird amount of spacial problem solving given the style of interface and literally finding what fits in where or managing how clips or adjustment layers are stacked together. I’ll admit that I had to re-export the entire premier sequence at least three times in the last few days too because of one clip that I hadn’t noticed was in the wrong place or overlapped where it shouldn’t have each time.

I think after all this also I need to learn to let things on screen breath a little more, when I’ve been editing something and watching the same gifs and clips play the whole time I tend to underestimate the amount of time they should or need to be on screen for, this makes for some hectic viewing where even my brain struggles to keep up with what’s happening after exporting and watching the thing properly… But for the sake of the project, the constraints and my goals for it, I’m just going to argue that it’s all part of the act because that’s kind of what life’s like in the every day hustle and bustle.

My final project for this semester in Experiment screen is really typical of my editing style. I’ve never really gotten into the process of going out and capturing lots of consistent content and my videos usually consist of chopped up clips and images from lots of different sources and older footage I find on my computer from backing up old phones and such. I think on reflection I go into the process of editing with more of a focus on visual style and certain effects or editing tricks I’d like to pull off instead of having a clear and solid plan of exactly what I’m making, this again is very evident in my film as it swings all over the place with loosely linked segments as I started off with core ideas to go with audio and I create the middle point or the vivid section I can imagine inside my head and work backwards from there filling gaps and making stuff up as I go.

There has been a really strong A$AP ROCKY influence to my edits basically since he released the L$D music video. Rocky’s videos are among the most creative and polished I’ve ever seen, and in a never ending ocean of Sound Cloud rappers waving blunts around on phone cameras or indie bands filming themselves running around on a beach somewhere it’s refreshing to see something different (at least from a large act) the consistent amount of effort and style put into each video is really impressive and it’s something I’d like to work towards.

 

 

Other well known videos that employ a similar style or as least incorporate the use of stereo gifs are Mura Masa’s ‘What If I Go?’ video and of course Lil Yachty’s ‘Broccoli’ which was cited as one of my earlier influences for this project.

The big learning curve for me when trying to make this sort of stuff isn’t even creating the effects themselves but doing it in a consistent and visually pleasing way. I guess this is easier when you have a team working on projects like this but I sometimes feel like my ambitions to make really cooked cool looking stuff outweigh my actual means to do so in a way that produces a polished end result. While I’m relatively satisfied with my final product for this assignment I still feel like I have a lot of improving to do with my own dedication and development when it comes to furthering my knowledge and skills in this area. Getting more into the practice of meticulously planning what I want my end product to be and then making sure I have all of the consistent material or footage to create it could be really beneficial so I don’t end up winging it all the time like I usually do. I think also instead of always working by myself on this sort of thing it could be really good for me to get into the swing of working with other people in a crew with equipment. It’s something I really enjoy when I do it and I’ve helped on the set of other individual or group projects but have never hired actors, locations asked anyone else to help me film or set up lighting etc for any of my personal work.

I will write more on the process of making this project in particular in my final submission and reflection post, but I also recognized the difficulty in doing technical creative stuff like this without a plan. When you’ve got a time limit but you’re not feeling any inspiration or drive to work on something like this you tend to cut corners or have the attitude that “it looks good enough” and “not every frame has to be nice to look at” which can result in just producing something that’s underwhelming… This of course also is linked to my poor organisation and time management, something else I have to work on.

 

I’m very happy to say that I have all the material I need now to finish this project and it’s only the 14th! The images from my stereo cam have all come through and I’ve begun turning them all into moving gifs. The camera itself is super basic and more or less works just like any other 35mm point and shoot, except that it takes three exposures at once that are fit into one and a half frames in portrait orientation. Unlike my other stereo camera I was using last year it has three lenses instead of four and has no settings to change ISO which can be a bit annoying, but what makes this camera better for my purposes by a landslide is the fact that it cost a fraction of the price and size which makes it a lot easier to just take everywhere with you, has an inbuilt flash,  and is new so I’d like to think I don’t have to worry about the thing breaking on me…

It can be a really tedious process turning these images into moving gifs and then trying to wrangle those gifs inside Premier when you’ve got to do lots at once and try and make them look as consistent as possible timing and motion wise. After they’ve been converted to video timelines too it makes them really hideous to work with and Premier seems to like stretching the first frame out much longer than it should be, but is a necessary step if you want compatible material.

The process of making the gifs themselves (which I hope is follow-able from the screenshots above) more or less just involves cropping the larger image to fit individual frames and then duplicating the layer, lowering opacity and lining the next frame up over the last. You can decide here which part of the image is going to be moving and which part if relatively still, but most of the time you want to line up whatever’s in the foreground and then leave the background to shift.

Once you’ve done this for as many frames as you have (in my case three) you then just need to make a frame animation and choose which layers are visible in order from left to right. After that you’ve got to convert this to a video timeline to use in Premier and simply export it out.

In my case, this process is the easy part. Fitting these things to moving film and trying to keep visual and rhythmic consistency is really annoying sometimes but also worth it when you’re satisfied with the end product.

After watching ‘Uncle Yanco’ in class (a great experimental short by Agnès Varda) I decided I really like the playful style of the film and the way that the voice-over dialogue was a bit like listening to somebody have a silly conversation with themselves, meandering through all sorts of different topics and musings while also getting deep and delivering some heart felt wisdom to the audience. This sort of audio dialogue kind of set the visual aspect of the film free in my eyes as the burden of delivering the bulk of the context and content is freed up and Varda was able to get really creative both visually and in the way the visuals were edited.

I wanted to do something similar in my film and had all sorts of ideas about philosophical discussions or monologues I could use as a voice over. I also wanted to capture the same sort of playfulness, artistic and care-free attitude to ‘Uncle Yanco’ that drew me in in the first place. I also really wanted that classic french voice to be the backing for my visuals, only problem is that I don’t know any french people who have the time to sit down and recite all the stuff I would have put in and I didn’t want to do the voice-over myself because I don’t have the right kind of voice so I decided on using a french sounding robot and to create a small segment where a machine asks some of life’s unanswered questions and then states that it can’t know because it’s just a machine and that it’s not even french and has never tasted a baguette or a cigarette. This kinda comes as electronically generated retorts with beeps and colour blips on the screen with simple text in french. I was hoping to put a modern spin on the classical french discussional art-house kind of dialogue while also making a statement about the trivial and hollow nature of technology. For this I used ‘Sound of text‘ created by Nick Pierson.

Continuing on the French art-house influence with a twist, I realised I had filmed the perfect thing to accompany this french sounding robot and that came in the form of my friend dancing around the backyard while smoking a cigarette and wearing a stripy shirt looking like he’d just walked out of a bar in Paris. There’s something really funny to me about watching him dance around to old classy french music in front of a tree full of someone’s undies. It’s a kind of clash of high and low culture and the best part is that it’s all natural, the way he’s moving and the scene that unfolds was all just happening while we undoubtedly drunk for some reason or another (because nobody dances that well sober). I watched it back and was wrapped because it’s the kind of thing you could never expect somebody to be able to act or do on purpose and it just fit my needs so well. I even got a few shots of my other housemate painting while this was unfolding to add to the ‘Uncle Yanco’ vibes…

  

I’ve been watching some ‘PINK FLAMINGO USA’ stuff lately and I really like the hectic style of editing. These videos have multiple shots on screen at once and you feel like you get lots and lots of little random snippets that are put together in a way that looks good and each shot kind of plays off one and other to create an overall experience that’s more than the sum of it’s shots. That’s more or less what I’m aiming to do here too and I’ve already started incorporating this editing style into my project. I personally like the concept of kinda bombarding the viewer with lots of different moments at once that highlight a lifestyle or the energy of a group of people, it’s a bit like the modern in-your-face version of photogenie for people with ultra short attention spans .

On the topic of capturing moments from my life, I also realised that this video was going to turn out very juvenile and reeking of dumb male energy, but that’s alright because it’s being true to who I am and how I spend my time. I was actually very inspired too by my classmate’s work, the diary films sort of showing what they get up to with their friends because doing dumb stuff with mine while constantly going out is just what I do with my life at this point.

I have a full roll of film from the stereo camera to get developed now which has arrived thank god… And I intend to literally just smash out as many gifs as possible before submission since that was such a big part of my initial pitch. As for the other material I’ve been using, there’s a great deal of phone footage as well as slr stuff in there (phones may not be the best but they’re always there when you see some funny stuff going down and want to capture it) a lot of this footage is recent but some of it is older footage I had that fit well with my theme and project so in the absence of gifs (so far) I’ve gone back and found some good usable material. I’ve also included a couple of glitch gifs I had from ALT photography class from parties we’ve had or car journeys.

So my main challenge at this point is to manage the sheer amount of random material I’ve ended up using which of course means a range of qualities and sizes of videos to fit together in a clean way. As for the structure of the overall film… Up until a few days ago I was in the dark about where I was going with it but now luckily I know what I’m doing more or less, although I have ended up with a bunch of different kinda segments that I intend to fit together in a cohesive way that will best compliment my actual aim for the project.

 

 

I had to order a new stereo camera off the internet from HK since my last one broke. This of course meant that I had to wait a good few weeks before I even had the right equipment to get underway with this project. While I did go and film some random stuff on my phone and SLR just while I was out and about, I wanted to make a decent start so I decided I’d make an animated intro. This is my first time actually animating something that’s more than about ten frames long but luckily it’s not vastly different if you have an idea of what you want it to look like and a good few hours of spare time. I’ll create a post on animating stereo gifs as well as the process of creating this further down the line.

I also chose to go with an existential sort of approach to the film as it starts out questioning the nature of everything. From this standpoint I felt like I was able to really take it anywhere, because if you break down rules and reduce the nature of everything within the context of the film to an ambiguous mess (which it was always going to be) then you’ve got more freedom in re-establishing the world you’re trying to show or create.

I’ve since added parallel shots of my sniffing a banana and my housemate sitting on a couch that line up with the aliens on-screen. I also decided that the alien animation intro would be best suited as a dream that one of the people (not actor because he literally just plays himself) in my film would wake up from, otherwise It’d be a struggle to make it visually and conceptually make sense within the project. The footage I’ve used for the section under the microscope is all old archival stuff off YouTube.

For assignment four I aim to create an impressionist style experimental music video. My focus has been on photogénie in particular which has been refereed to as film art on occasion, focusing moreso on the abstract and ephemeral within film as opposed to the big picture.  (It’s in the small moments and quirks which create a sense of atmosphere and energy to what’s on screen.)

I personally get so bored with the never-ending stream of superhero flicks that get churned out nowadays and take a lot more away from a film which feels unique and full of details so I naturally tend to gravitate towards more abstract or experimental concepts.

The way in which I intend to capture the spirit of small moments is through a combination of digital film and analog stereo gifs. In a funny way these stereo gifs are almost a perfect intersection between film and photography, in that you can play with movement, timing and relationship between frames while it’s all still fixated on one single moment in time.

I intend to play with composition, framing and the relationship between shots on-screen to create a cohesive mass of images and clips that come together to express the same sort of feeling or create contrast. There will also be a range of different mediums and processes as a part of the final cut, including: hand drawn animation, analog photography, image manipulation on photoshop, and post production editing on premier pro.

“The Senses,” Epstein writes: “There are no stories, there have never been stories. There are only situations, having neither head nor tail; without beginning, middle or end.” (Smith, 2016)

 

 

 

Smith, J. (2016). Why Criticism: Jean Epstein and Photogénie – Vague Visages. [online] Vague Visages. Available at: https://vaguevisages.com/2016/07/26/why-criticism-jean-epstein-and-photogenie/ [Accessed 8 Oct. 2019].

 

I remember watching this film for the first time when I was about 17 years old and it’s easily of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen. Set to the soundtrack of GKMC it’s all about a look into every day life in Compton, possibly America’s most notorious ghetto initially brought into the spotlight initially by N.W.A who brought the struggles and harsh reality of day to day life being young and black in America to the mainstream. However unlike the music and vision of 90s gangsta rap, this film really explores menial day to day life in Compton and the importance of this is I think is that it focuses on the humanity and real lives of people just trying to live their lives among the chaos and urban decay that we immediately attribute to America’s ghettos.

The use of shots, voice overs and music creates such a unique and captivating experience that feels so natural and genuine while being quite artistic and even abstract at times. Another thing this film does so well is the way it cycles through different feelings and moods, switching from crazy gang activity to relaxed shots of people cruising along the street or house parties and kids going to school etc. You feel like such a wide view of Compton is captured here. Sticking to the impressionistic style, the film also focuses largely on little details and closeups of subjects that creates an intimate kind of connection to the people within the film.

A really interesting part of this film too is the people hanging upside down from street lamps in otherwise normal looking scenes, my interpretation of this is that it’s supposed to outline people who have been killed at various locations while on the average day these spaces are more or less like any usual corner store or car park. The juxtaposition between chaos and calm that’s continued throughout the whole film is brought out most strongly in these shots.