This video released by the musician and visual artist SOPHIE is a music video for her new track “Faceshopping”. The video accompanies the track, discussing the falsity of authenticity gained by artists whose images are prominent in the media. SOPHIE had released music from a point of anonymity for years, and this video is our first glimpse of the artist’s face.
The video features rapid and rhythmic cuts, interchanging the cut to black with a cut to white, giving the video a strobe effect. The artist uses graphic textures in between these cuts, such as images of raw meat, blood, gore. These elements push the video further into the genre of body horror, whilst still utilising the aesthetic use of strobing to fit the genre of music.
The duration of the cuts vary from frequent to long drawn out, especially in the introduction of the song. There is a four second duration peak between cuts in the beginning of the video, and watching this without sound gives no indication of the video continuing. Directed by SOPHIE and Aaron Chan, This video combines compositional and aesthetic shots transitioned by hard cuts and little effect. Text is used to illustrate the lyrics to this video, however what differentiates this clip between your usual lyric video is the inclusion of words that aren’t heard in the original track. Words flash onscreen to the beat, such as “artificial bloom”, “chemical release”. The inclusion of graphic phrases such as these again adds to the distorted reality of the video.
For this weeks video journal we were asked to actively watch television, and analyse any formal conventions at work. I decided to watch TV from my TV set rather than on my laptop. The physical aspect of a television is less of a ‘box’ to me, but more of a frame holding a moving image. I’ve wondered what would happen if you used a tv as a digital photo frame that never changes it’s image; would the image degenerate after burning through the LCD? Isn’t that what screensavers are for? Screensavers are also an interesting result of the constant stream that is television, as they didn’t exist until DVD. Even static is moving.
The TV sits in the corner of the living room in my sharehouse, covered in dust. We had a brief slew of watching the tennis earlier this year, but it’s main function is for background noise when my family comes to visit. Something about being in a living room with them without the tv in the background is awkward. What I focused on in my analysis was the adbreaks, more so the construction of an adbreak. I was watching channel seven at primetime when I noticed all of the adbreaks were bookended by a promotion for a network series. The sound during an adbreak was so engaging, as ads are intended to reengage the viewer who has momentarily broken their attention. I noticed that these breaks cater to our short attention spans and I wondered how many stories or how much information can we fit into a two minute adbreak? When does it become overwhelming?
Ads for me are so visceral, and the result is a huge wave of nostaliga for adbreaks from when I was a kid and actively participated in watching tv, which I no longer do. This adbreak from 2002, when I was seven, is an amazing example of the connection to tv I fondly remember but no longer experience. The ad with the butchers dancing at the end brought back a bunch of memories; the Persian carpet in our lounge room, the bulky television monitor. The same bookending conventions are at play even in the adbreak from 16 years ago.
Can we feel empathy with a television set? I think I get that feeling of when you finish a book and hold it to your chest. The book hold stories about characters you love. Do we feel the same about a television set? Holding the memories of our childhood? Are we the last generation to feel akin to a TV? Probably!
I’ve been typing countless amounts of words throughout my media degree. However, after a week of Picture This I’ve realised that none of the writing I’ve completed has been creative. I’ve never considered creative writing to be my forte, but how else am I going to articulate ideas from page to screen in a way that honours a good idea.
What I learnt in the studio this week that highlighted my previous lack of experience with screenwriting was that changing the font to “Cambria” does not make your story a script. After reading and critiquing the scripts given in class, I think I experienced an appreciation for screenwriting as an art that had I never noticed. This course has been so visual in the literal sense that I’ve forgotten that the essence of any film is the script. And if the script is visual, the adaptation to screen stays true to the screenwriters vision.
Callie Khouri’s Thelma & Louise had descriptions that expressed so much in so little. “Louise is in her early thirties, but too old to be doing this” is a line I keep repeating in my head. This one line not only describes a character, but offers the writers viewpoint that early thirties is not “too old”. This shows the writers belief that the character has more potential than to be doing this – foreshadowing the events of the rest of the screenplay. I think what my scripts have been lacking is a full realisation of a character. Characters in my current scripts are vessels for dialogue and action and nothing else. Here is an example from a previous script of mine.
Reading this now, there is nothing to discern between the character of Dora and Sally; in fact ‘Dora’ was the example name used in the script template. That’s how little attention I payed towards my characters. This script has some wild action (which I barely describe) and it’s something I would want to work on throughout the semester. Taking a couple of notes from the class, here is a reworking of this text:
1. EXT. TRAM STOP. DAY
DORA waits for a tram at the stop. She’s forgotten her sunglasses and is squinting in the bright mid-day sunlight. Her grip is tight around an unmarked cardboard box, the weight of which causes her to shuffle in her sneakers. SALLY, unperturbed by her friends uncomfort, slouches alongside Dora picking at her nails.
This was my first rewrite of this script. To incorporate the elimination of ‘to be verbs’ as mentioned in the reading by McKee, I’ll rewrite this passage:
DORA waits for a tram at the stop. Once again forgetting to bring her sunglasses, she squints in the bright mid-day sun. Her hands tightly grip an unmarked cardboard box, the weight of which causes her to shuffle in her sneakers. SALLY, unperturbed by her friends uncomfort, slouches alongside Dora picking at her nails.
Ok so… I know I’m supposed to write two posts per week but week 11 for me was more focused on my other classes and I didn’t get up to much editing or thinking about box at all considering I had three essays to smash out that week. I’d prefer if I could write another post about week 12 which has been much more vital in experimenting and developing Blue Moon. So this is that post, which in my opinion is much more interesting than what I would have wrote in week 11 because I’m having a scary epiphany.
In my previous post, which I intended to be my last, I had uploaded the final cut of Blue Moon to Vimeo and shared it with a friend and showed a housemate etc. I was happy because it was ‘done’ and uploading meant setting it free into the world. However, as the assessment 4 deadline looms I checked back to see if I had missed any posts. I had missed my second week 11 post, which I was going to rewrite just now. Week 11 post part one discusses a muffled track I intended to put over the outdoors scenes of Blue Moon that I never got around to doing. It was the song with an effect that made the music sound as if it was coming from another room. To chuck it into my week 11 post I quickly scrapped together the muffled song over the visual… and loved it…. too much.
Yes my final cut is done…. yes i’ve uploaded and sent it out to the world… but this effect encapsulates exactly the diegesis I love in the Top Of The Lake clip I deconstructed here. The train in the background is way more apparent, the song is less controlling, it’s much less of a ‘music video’. I’m hoping my group gets back to me with feedback asap because I need advice. Is it worth reworking or should I leave it?
LESSONS LEARNED: If you plan on experimenting, take the experiment the whole way through otherwise what’s the point of experimenting at all (right ladies!)
– no half-assing!
I’ve just uploaded my final cut. Wow the world works in mysterious ways.
Feels good.
I’ve sent it to my closest pal and production partner Colin and am waiting for a response. I can see that exporting to vimeo settings then actually watching it on vimeo changes EVERYTHING. That crisp vision I crap on about in all these videos is clear and brilliant. I’m really happy with how this ramshackle little vid turned out. There’s a sense of space that I never noticed before long distance shots of the green, to closeups on face. Indoors is so confined in this video, and outdoors is so free? Adding title cards really opened me up to noticing these things. It gives the video a sense of finality.
Colin replied,
some useful feedback
I noticed a fleck of light on Chris’s glasses that I didn’t see before.
The camera shakes from when the tripod was knocked annoys me but there’s not much else I can do about it at this point. This is a cool lil proddy, a great learning experience. Asthis is my final BOX post, I’ll address what I’ve learnt throughout the semester through a short list:
Trust my instincts and trust myself. I need to shake off my self doubt, my insecurities. Filmmaking used to be so much fun for me but now I’m so terrified whatever I make wont be good enough for an employer or for peers etc. It’s not about that though!! Don’t be scared of being contrived! Everything in filmmaking happens for a reason, everything is set in place for a purpose, so thus everything is contrived and we are all try hards and we desperately want our work to be liked… if that doesn’t make sense it’s an epiphany I need to work out how to articulate.
I can write a script about anything and nothing and it’s still valid. And I enjoyed writing the deli script and blue moon thoroughly!
A good lens if your friend.
Look at how things are made. Look at the camera movements in everything. The panning, the height, whether he camera is based on a tripod or hand held, look at the depth of field, tracking the performance, the lighting (is it offside? it’s always offside!)
Feed the cat.Here’s my last deconstruction (couldn’t find a longer version of this scene but it’s got the best part in it):
I’ve been obsessed with Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake. In this scene, a hardened father and husband has angrily stormed a women’s retreat in search for his wife and daughter. Here he approaches them after trying to win them back.
The use of sound in this show is incredible. Campion’s use of extreme wide shots opens the soundscape up to an incredible array of noises. Birds are distant in the opening ECU, with her meddling guitar blending in closely. I rarely see shows (or notice) an instrument playing in diegetic manner. I rewatched ‘Blue Moon’ with my atmos volume higher, yet the soundtrack still encompasses the image. To achieve this effect what I would have done differently would be to record the atmos of every setting with as much importance as the image. The guitarist in this clip is small and insignificant compared to the location, as the song should have been in Blue Moon (regardless of if I titled the film after it!). Water trickles, footsteps are light on the grass, the father yells from a distance. Campion’s soundtracks give an incredible sense of space, distance and location.
The shot construction is beautifully composed; in the establishing shot mother and daughter are sitting parallel, symmetrically distanced placing the shot into a brilliant rule of thirds.
A dirty o/s from the father’s perspective, blacking out one third of the screen as he, a suited man, encroaches on this wide open feminist nature haven. As we reverse back to his face, the offside is lit, even though in the opening image the sun is clearly pointing to the left of screen, yet his face is lit on the right. I’m assuming this would be by bouncing the light off of a reflector.
Does the above sequence break the line? Or does it just play with subjectivity. He seems like the one in control during the beginning of the exchange, but as he starts to play around, she seems to hold the cards. I am trying to work out whether this breaks the line, especially the second image of the father from a mid shot, it definitely seems to be further out than 60 degrees, and in the third image (of the daughter) it’s unclear who she is looking at. My final verdict is that the line was broken.
That’s all I have for now. Thank’s for a wonderful studio. I’ve learnt a hell of a lot, and a lot of a hell.
A bit nerve-wracking to be honest but I am really delighted with my feedback from the class viewing. People seemed to like it, the building didn’t burn down, people’s eyes didn’t melt out of their sockets. I warned some people about the mistakes that were in the video such as my heavy breathing in the background, some camera shakes and the singer’s movements not syncing up to the soundtrack. It’s better to call out my own errors than everyone think I’m unaware of them, I reasoned. In retrospect, if I hadn’t had told them about the errors I genuinely think no one would have picked up on them.
My feedback was to lengthen the end shot where Chris and Mark are slow dancing on the green “until the shot becomes awkward”. I love doing this. In my original edit, the shot of the wind meter went for nearly ten seconds. I’m happy to keep them dancing for as long as I can. Another piece of feedback was to change the lip-syncing tempo to become completely out of sync, like wildly out of sync so that the overzealous movements we got on the night aren’t as apparent, and we can justify it under the guise of abstraction. I’m not sure about this because I don’t want viewers to focus on how jarring a movement like this can be, or to think it was a mistake in the edit. I’m going to make a version with this effect and show it to my housemates as a test audience and see if they think it works or think it “sucks”.
Viewing the class’s productions was strangely cathartic. I don’t know what I expected but it was strangely reassuring to see everyone’s beautiful productions, birthed from the same set of prompts and ideas. This class definitely challenged the way I work and approach a brief, but at the same time opened up a whole new creative stream I didn’t know how to access. I think the project I was most taken with was the visual poem set in Macedon, I cant remember the name of. The image quality was so crisp and picturesque. Throughout the entire Bowls Club project I’ve been fretting that the image quality my XA50 was shoddy and grainy. Seeing the crispness of their DSLR footage, along with the DSLR footage Bell produced in the bowls club really opened my eyes to the importance of a good lens. Choosing a quality lens will be a big technical skill I’ll be taking away from this class. However, technical qualities and skills are totally important, but I think being able to script, conceptualise and put a project into motion from a really tiny or mundane prompt is the most important skill I’ve gained throughout this class.
Our consult session was really helpful, especially on the topic of SOUND.
Sound that needed to be tweaked was the track itself. I vibed this record crackle-distant-radio-sound when I wrote the script where the song would be played from a radio, then lifted to non-diegesis as the singing begun, and thus I’ve attempted to alter the song to this. I’ve exported the song to Audition which is a program I’m still shaky on, and after watching a couple of youtube tutorials, I’ve used the custom FFT filters to give the song a radio effect. It’s somewhere between old radio sound and a mobile phone voice from a movie. I like it regardless. There’s a brilliant function I was playing around with that makes the audio sound as if it was from another room. Here’s the effected track below:
I still am yet to place the atmos audio under the song but I’m hoping this will deter the music video-ness of the project. I got a great clip of a magpie warbling and the train in the the distance, honking along with a level crossing ding. I need to go onto the media servers at uni tomorrow before the class-viewing cut is complete to get a couple of snippets from Bell’s file; the sound of the gate creaking (I’l place over the image of the bowls club sign), a shot of the clock in the kitchen (this time in focus), and more atmos. As for my colour grade, it was encouraged that I’d crank it up a few notches to see a real difference. I’m so terrified of colour grading! I’m scared everything will look like the toaster filter on instagram. Nevertheless, I will persist.
I think I’ve cooled off the footage a little bit now. The rough edit is done, and I do truly enjoy the sound we have recorded. Fluorescent hums, the wind on the green and the ticking of the clock works beautifully with the record crackle of the song. Yes, it’s a bit rushed, but it’s something I will reshoot down the track.
The outdoor shots are beautiful, and the rotating wind gauge is nearly so mesmerising it could be a GIF. I’m starting the colour grade tonight.
I’ve come back to this post about an hour into the colour grade. The greens are standing out beautifully in the dancing on the grass scene but I’m having trouble with some of the grades looking polarised (I’m not sure if that’s the right term) especially over the singer who stands under those bright red lights. (below)
I am excited to show my edit in the consult later this week. I know theres some tweaking, especially syncing the movement of her lips with the audio of the song, along with just some edits which could be rearranged.
I’m trying to edit the bowls club piece which was aptly titled by the actress Justine “boys in love at the bowls club” and I’m having a hard time. Emotionally I am struggling to edit because the shoot doesn’t much look like it would have if I had directed it. The footage is hard to edit with eleven takes from the same angle and half of the footage devoted to an unscripted scene that didn’t translate well with the actress. The location was so brilliant, the cast were great, it just didn’t come together how I pictured and emotionally I’m struggling to edit.
needing more varied angles, reverse shots, crowd reactions etc
I was hoping to work as an interchangeable group where we would all look at the monitor and scope out ideas and give criticisms as a team. I don’t think this is how the rest of the team works and in my pitch I should have made it clearer that I wanted to work in collaborative roles where we would all have a say in the shooting style. I think next time if there’s a pitch included I will put a priority into expressing the ways I would like to work, as I totally left this out of my presentation in the weeks earlier. Thus my reflection on collaboration would be that I think need to learn to speak up more and assert myself if I know I have an idea that will work well on screen. Also I know how to use the cameras and need to stop doubting myself as a more hands on role during filming would have been great.
Looking at the footage, there aren’t enough different shots to make this easy to edit. There are no closeups or details, and nearly every shot is a wide angle. I feel as if theres a distance between the viewer and the characters. We were truly short on time, as the host of the club wanted us out at 9.45 and our actors didn’t arrive until 7. I was pushing for us to squeeze in as many closeups and detail shots as possible; so much of the story is in the characters hands. I would have loved some closeups of the beers they were holding, nervous tapping, the shoes dancing etc. I made a list of what I would have liked to include:
A objective MS shot of Chris (glasses) with the chair in the foreground. Mark would walk into the shot and we see his hand on the chair.
A reverse shot of Mark from Chris’s perspective, giving a glance down at Chris not flirtatiously, but more in a sense that the time has come where we dance – I never wrote the script to be flirtatious, more abstract attraction, as if dancing together was something they knew they had to do, and were happy to? I don’t know if that makes sense.
Chris smiling back at him, probably from a side angle, no longer in their perspectives bur from our own, and then a closeup of those hands clasping, preferably with a short depth of field, the camera following the clasped hands onto the dancefloor.
A shot of the couple dancing from the singers perspective (symmetrical dirty o/s… so more dirty overhead?)
Then there would be closeups and ECU’s of their heads resting on each other’s shoulders.
I understand the actors were doing us a favour and weren’t 100% comfortable with acting and holding each other this way but sometimes you have to push. It was really rewarding working with actors again. People are generous with their time and efforts and I want this to look good for them. Colour grading post will be next.
We’ve gone back Tuesday night for our second shoot. I just looked at the footage today and it’s okay but Sammy and Louise agreed we were all a bit flustered when shooting on location for the first time. It was FREEZING and super windy. I played music off my phone to scare away the ghosts.
I had this thing about not knowing how to frame a shot in class. I do know how to frame a shot. I am good with a camera, I’ve done camera training for two years at La Trobe. I feel like I let so much of that training slip from my mind when I came to RMIT. I wanted to start on a fresh slate, but the short films I made at La Trobe had some dope camera moves and I was 8/10 times the Camera op or sound op. I know what I’m doing I’m just a bit intimidated because my group has such strong photographers. But when it comes to shooting on the night I don’t think we will be using singular roles. Everyone is super capable of doing each role in the team and I think working interchangeably will be great. Everyone can look through the monitor and call the shots as I dont think any of the girls are sensitive to criticism and are flexible with roles .
The footage we got Tuesday is much more calm and controlled. Shots are running for long enough, everything is much more detailed and I think we’ve applied the “camera on world off” mentality. I guess it was seeing the place at night for the first time Monday that was distracting because it’s a new space for all of us. I am so keen for this shoot, and also the tennis club one will be wonderful to move to a similar but new location. The court we are thinking of using for Bell’s script is clay and it’s nearly like the bowls green but in an alternate universe.
