The first prompt for the assessment was joy. There are so many different settings or objects that could have been filmed for this. I decided to film settings or objects that would remind me or the audience of happiness or joy, such as the playground or ferris wheel. For this video I used Sofia Coppola as inspiration, including her film The Virgin Suicides (1999), where Coppola uses lighting to reveal important story and character details. Coppola uses orange hues in many of the outdoor shots to convey a sense of warmth and comfort and it gives the audience a sense that the scene is carefree and safe. Therefore I aimed to use mostly high-key and natural lighting for this video so it appears softer and calmer. I found that when planning and filming this video that colour and lighting were really essential for creating the mood of the piece. In the editing I added an orange tint using colour correction to my videos to also help create a sense of warmth, comfort and happiness.  Interestingly, my day shooting consisted of oranges, red and yellow colours and my night shooting was more bright and colourful standing out against the black backdrop. if I were to do this task again I would have tried to push the idea of lighting more by going out to capture my colourful night lighting so that there would be an obvious comparison but still would have a similar effect of joy and playfulness.

The second prompt was for hurt. For this I decided to shoot different videos that came together to represent themes of isolation or loneliness. I used a mixture of long shots and close-ups with mostly high angles to portray a sense of vulnerability and drama. What I wanted to experiment with also was filming settings or objects that are usually associated with a sense of happiness, such as the playground, so that I could experiment with editing, lighting and music to encourage a more eerie and unsettling feeling amongst the audience. Similarly, the inspiration for this video came from Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides (1999) where juxtaposed to the orange hued was the dark blue lighting to reflect sad or dangerous moments in the film. I added a blue tint using colour correction to all of the videos to accentuate a sense of coldness and sadness to the videos. By combining the lighting and camera shots I wanted the effect to be more jarring and harsher. In the future, it would be interesting to keep in mind the effects of lighting during production and I maybe could have made it more dramatic over the objects and not just relying on the editing which would be have more of a dramatic and stronger effect in setting the mood of the piece.

Another prompt was to create videos for a portrait. I filmed different shots and actions of the same person to experiment with how different facial expressions and gestures can help create a sense of character. For example I had my character laughing or tilting their head to the ground to reflect happiness or sadness. I decided to make the videos black and white so that the focus is on the character and anything in the background doesn’t draw the audience away from the person. In this exercise there is no dialogue therefore I took inspiration Mackendrick (2004, p. 3) that the camera has the ability to “capture thought”. It states that the camera has the ability to convey feelings, sensations or movement effectively without dialogue, which was a great opportunity to explore for a portrait. Such as how the high-key natural lighting help set the mood of happiness or relaxed character in contrast to the low-key lighting where it casts a shadow across the characters face representing a sense of sadness or thinking. For this I was able to use the Sony a7 camera which was great to get more experience using a different equipment. When thinking about portrait it is really important to have the right camera settings including exposure and focus so that there are no distractions in the frame and the portrait is clear. Maybe what I would have done differently is to have more actions or gestures that would help give more information into who the character is or maybe use different characters doing similar or different actions and see how it compares. Overall, I was happy with how it turned out and these notes will be useful when thinking about character in my future projects.

Lastly, for word I decided to record someone else’s voice repeating the same word over again. I added different effects to the audio including raising the pitch and EQ to make it seem more distant. I wanted the audio to slowly become more and more muffled and eventually becoming incoherent. The videos accompanying the audio were aimed to aid it and reinforce a sense of mystery to ordinary settings. A majority of these shots were long shots of the settings or objects, to match up to help create the theme of mystery and being lost and I also wanted to explore how the dialogue without music is essential to this atmosphere and what it can achieve. I was happy with the ending as it matched more what I was trying to achieve and I found the videos give the audio more meaning. This is an important factor to remember for future projects is how the audio and visuals aspects work together to immerse the audience depending on the mood you are trying to achieve. This was more difficult task however, and I would have liked to experiment more with audio in terms of achieving a clearer echo or dreamlike sound rather than sounding more robotic, which is something that I can consider in future. knowing this it would be interesting to experiment more and switching this up in future projects it would create a really jarring and interesting effect as Mackendrick (2004, p. 7) states that “cinema can be at its most interesting and forceful when images play against the literal dialogue.”

References:

Mackendrick, A 2004, The Pre-Verbal Language of Cinema, Positif Editions, Paris, France.

The Virgin Suicides 1999, Sofia Coppola, Paramount Classics.