I am currently halfway through this semester, and therefor halfway through this project. I began the semester extremely motivated and excited to do work, but the motivation started to fatigue a bit. This isn’t because of a lack of passion or excitement, but a persistent routine. I’ve struggled for years with time management, but it is something I am steadily and progressively improving. I think when I get too locked into a bad routine it becomes difficult to break out of, which has become something I slip into at points in Lock-down. I am glad that this week is the mid semester break. I am going to use this week as a way to start and maintain good habits. The first of which being near daily blog posts, or at the least four per week. After reflecting on Screen project one I feel like I did create something that is representative of the much larger vision I have. My biggest downfall was relying too heavily on that bad “organic” video creation process. Now that I understand with much greater depth how to achieve certain visuals, I am going to story bard and plan out the next short film. Along with this I am going to write a Short story, that way I have a base narrative at the least to structure my work around. I think a longer runtime with more visuals will be good. Another flaw I feel is in the video is the transition and blending of videos, some of them, more so the last third, felt really forced together. I want the video to flow like water visually in its’ transitions.

If I can start these habits during this week I am sure to create something immensely better than Screen Project 1. I posted a link to the video on my social media, and got a very positive response from my peers, so I at least know that I am headed in the right direction in some respects. I mentioned in my log post on the Screen Project that there is an unknown element I feel is missing, that I am not too sure about. I have also been reflecting on that. I think it might need a feminine element (I mean my blog is called ‘Ardour to Anima). I just feel that there is a masculine presence in the video, maybe a visual or auditory Feminine vibe is missing. I am still contemplating over this, hopefully I will discover what it is in the coming weeks.

Surprisingly my first experience watching Lynch was Dune. Dune is often regarded as a terrible adaptation, but I really enjoyed it. There was something about the direction and feel of Dune that I really enjoyed. A few years after I watched all three seasons of Twin Peaks. I was captivated, especially so by The Return. The way Lynch directs and composes his films is so unique in the Hollywood Sphere of influence. We covered him in the Lecture this week and I became even more obsessed with him as a person. He’s an enigma. I’ve always looked up to other directors as a point i should try and strive for, but I now believe that Lynch is the spot I want to get to. He isn’t concerned with fame, or money. He’s merely an artist who wants to create.

I like that his films are apologetically different. Watching the Handbag commercial in the lecture I found myself getting greatly invested into it, I don’t think if it was directed by anyone else that this would have been the case. After the session I watched more interviews with him from the early 90s, and some from now, and he still feels authentic. I also explored more of his YouTube channel. It is becoming more evident that he just enjoys creating. He does daily weather reports, where he looks out the window next to him and just describes what he sees, then wishes everyone a nice day. Not for profit, but just because he can. This is what I want out of my career, I just want to make stuff for people to see and feel. I want to tell stories. Which I believe David also feels, I am sure I’ll find an interview clip with him saying this for the next post.

I’m going to do more research into his creative process, and his directing process. I think I’ll have a binge of his films this week too, that way I can understand him more as a person. Twin Peaks was fantastic, as I am sure the rest of his works are.

For the screen project I wanted to try and juxtapose clips together, drawing them out, rather than rapidly editing them together with a lot of kinetic motion. I think I did this fairly well, but should have created more footage, a mistake on my part. I do believe the intent is there though. With the next video i feel i can build upon this and elevate the themes I’m trying to portray. My biggest hurdle at the moment is the human element. Most of the ideas I have are missing a human representation. I am hoping the restrictions end before the final video is due. I want to try and create my own footage for the next project by projecting clips onto people, and integrating these clips into the footage. My goal with this video was to portray space and expansiveness, as well as hints at something primordial. I used the strobe effect to blend some clips together and had a high contrast for all the clips. I incorporated a compilation of Hubble Deep field pictures, edited of course, to try and bring some more authenticity into the video.

Overall I think there is much to improve on, in the juxtaposition of shots, the pacing of the clips, the mixing between audio, and the expansiveness of the soundscape, and the missing human element. I think the main component here is to mix footage I have taken and footage I have acquired. This will give more focus to any narrative I want to create through juxtapositions, and the connotations that follow them. Though I can’t help but believe there is something else I am forgetting that’s making me feel it is incomplete. I think there is another integral part that is missing, I’m going to do some more research into Horror and Science Fiction as Genres to try and discover this missing element.

https://vimeo.com/452574342

I discovered a few years ago that I was most productive when listening to music. This was a time when i was still studying math and science based subjects in high school. My teachers always said that it wan’t a good idea to work and prepare for exams and tests this way because I wouldn’t be able to work as efficiently during them. This was a half truth on their part in my opinion. At the back end of my year twelve studies I decided that science wasn’t for me and I want to focus on film, as it is my primary passion. Over the years I realised that listening to music wasn’t focusing my attention, but opening me up creatively. Sort acting as a stimulant for creation. Sound is ultimately the most important part of film. The cinematography can be bad, yet not ruin a film. But if the sound design and mix of a film is bad it will ruin it. With this project I am drawing heavily from the music scenes I listen to.  Music is an auditory experience, but it expands out so vastly from there it would be negligible to not attribute visual styles to it. While making the videos I have been listening to various styles of music that interest me including hip hop, industrial, punk, grunge, and experimental.

I am going to base my focus specifically on Punk as an influence. Most of the music I listen to can be attributed to various sub-genres of punk, or punk inspired at least.  Even a hip hop band i listen to can be considered as a modern evolutionary ancestor of punk. Punk is a very anti-establishment genre at its’ roots, which can be comparable to my project. As I am try to create something that goes against the idea of ‘aspiring perfection’ in the creation of film. I am intentionally going against the norm to explore what can be done with recycled footage. Punk is also a style used to critique culture, which i think I can incorporate into my work. A band that does heavily Influence me is Death Grips (probably because they’re my favourite band). They’re pretty hard to define genre wise because their work varies so heavily from album to album. They’re punk rock and industrial hip hop. The music videos they create also employ similar techniques to the ones I employ, though they film all of the content in use. Their sound and visual style is almost describable as a state of entropic flux, forever coasting on the line of order and chaos.

 

I think with this video project I have developed the style enough to the point where i can make a small short using the style. That being said I believe there will never be a point where the aesthetic I am chasing will ever be achieved. I am forever in pursuit of greater plateaus.

I decided to return to one of the original clips I used when in this styles infancy about a year ago roughly. The unmasking scene from the Phantom of the Opera. When I originally used it I only made use of a small clip of the phantom slowed down. I added various threshold like effects and had a pulsation running through it. It was decent, but i think my latest video is far superior. With this one I wanted a simplicity. By simplicity I mean I didn’t want the scene to be viewable, but through the lens of what I’ve been developing. With every one of these videos I have actually been building off of the last video, or at least incorporating the last video into the newer video. I used a hard light exclusion as a way to shine the newer video through a slowed down version of the old one. My intention was to create a distortion, but not directly onto the newer experiment, but using one video as a filter. I think it turned out wonderfully, it reminds me of looking through a car window on a rainy day, or even a fog of sorts. I’ve been using ‘VR Immersion’ effects on all these projects, and did so again on the base opera clip, they’re mainly how I achieve that glitch visual. I used time displacement as well, to give a delay in pixel and motion synchronicity. I did this because i wanted to try and emulate Data Moshing. I am not entirely sure how to data Mosh, but am researching more into it.

https://vimeo.com/448436439

From all these experiments I have come to some conclusions on what make the videos effective in my eyes. High contrast is an essential, it makes the footage pop out of the screen more, grays make the image look extremely flat like log footage. It makes me feel the same way when seeing poorly graded Blackmagic RAW clips; something I’ve already seen far too much of in my last degree. I think that’s why I always enjoy Robert Richardson’s cinematography. Richardson uses an intense back light, which usually sits higher than the subject, to separate characters and objects from the foreground. I’m using a similar technique, but eliminating blacks using the exclusion effect. This does remove grain, but it focuses the footage on the content i want to use. Grain is another thing I have discovered is essential. The older the footage is, the easier it is to manipulate. I have experimented with adding artificial grain, but is nowhere near the same is authentic film. Digitally shot footage is harder to distort because it is either too clean, or the compression it uses actually blocks the footage. By blocking I mean it makes the image chunky, colour banding is a result of this. I have been exporting mainly in MOV and HEVC formats so I can reuse past creations if need be. H.264 destroys the details of my experiments I’ve noticed. This is a problem because it means I have to work with larger file formats, which is difficult to edit and upload with. Though these newer experiments have taught me to be more patient when creating videos, so it is only the upload times that are a hassle.

After I finished this experiment i tried to incorporate it into digital footage of a shore line, and it turned out terribly. Lot’s of grays, low contrast. and the beach footage was digitally acquired so it was harder to distort. and I tested exporting in a higher compression format, which destroyed it too much. They only confirmed what I had suspected above. From here onward I need to keep a minimalism in what i display in the foreground. And keep the attention more focused.

https://vimeo.com/448424953

For years I had been recommended to watch Hannibal, I did actually start it a few years ago but got distracted and didn’t return to it. I watched the full three seasons in the last fortnight, and It has opened my mind up to directions I can take this experimentation. Hannibal is executed to subtly at times, but also very avant-garde in other aspects. The show is very much a thriller, but it incorporates heavy themes of grotesque body horror, and psychological horror. Body horror is very closely related to cosmic horror, the two often being used together (The Thing, Event Horizon, Alien, etc). I found it incredibly interesting how Hannibal substituted some killing scenes for Hannibal cooking organs, and then serving it to people. I feel that is was arguably more shocking and effective in portraying horror. The juxtaposition of seeing something so simple as preparing a meal, with the knowledge that the organs are human was very chilling. I feel that juxtaposition will be key in trying to achieve any semblance of horror that I am trying to illicit. Hannibal also has points where the editing gets really strange, often unlike anything else I’ve seen in television. In the third season there is a sex scene, but the audience see’s it through a kaleidoscopic vision, often making it appear as though the two people are conjoined into one being. It’s probably the best use of this effect I’ve seen. I’ve played with the kaleidoscope effect in the past, but it wasn’t used with any ‘intent’ other than to try and make an image appear more interesting. I think I will use it in a similar way to Hannibal, to try and depict conjunction or separation in a way besides an decrease/increase of distance. Hannibal also uses silence as a way to build up tension, with very slow scenes. It isn’t afraid to linger on a shot, or direct and edit actors actions at an incredibly slow pace. I think this leaves more room for the audience to analyse what is being said and seen, effectively making it so the horror isn’t just built up on screen, but also in the minds of the audience. Most of the videos I make are very energetic, as it is aesthetically appealing to me, but I think I will experiment with slowing down footage, with little non-diegetic noise in the background.

I’ve found myself watching less and less during lock down, I fear it is a byproduct of my focus to try and not allow my anxiety get the better of me through this. I am glad I pushed through Hannibal though, I think it was very educational on how Horror can be more than just what we see on screen, thinking about it now it is very reminiscent of Se7en in a way.

I spent the last few days learning new effects in After Effects, specifically how to modulate various aspects of an effect using key frames generated from an audio waveform. From this i realiesed that I’d have to apply it differently to how i was imagining. Depending on the audio track it can generate really intense jumps in effect progression, or not much at all. At my current understanding of how it works I can apply as more of cosmetic, to add more character to footage. Though I am still learning about how to apply them to their maximum capability. I realised whilst learning how audio can be used to affect the distortion of an image that I have been focusing wholly on the visual aspect of the project, neglecting the audio aspect. Horror is heavily reliant on the build up of tension through audio ques, cosmic horror is no exemption. In prior projects I have experimented with deep droning noises to build atmosphere, but for this project I am trying to supersede what I’ve made.

I spent some time re accustoming myself to Adobe Audition. I have experience using it because I co-made a short film in my last degree for an assignment, and the mixer had recorded the levels too low, no fault to anyone specifically. When i bumped up the audio it was so close to the sound floor that the grain was far too loud. I had to learn how to use Audition in order to clean up the audio. I had never fully explored the full capabilities of what distortion it could achieve. I knew that I wanted a droning sound, but i didn’t want it to be too glitched out or distorted. My goal was to make something that provoked a sense of magnitude and expanse, with a heavy foreboding feeling of dread. I used the audio from  J. Robert Oppenheimer’s interview about the first test of the atomic bomb, where he references Vishnu becoming his destroyer form. The audio and pauses were already representative of the emotion i want to portray, so my hope is that would remain after i distorted it.

The following below is the audio track that I ended up with. I played around with various forms of reverb and echo, with a few distortion effects over the top. The second to last iteration kept the track in it’s original speed, meaning Oppenheimer could still be intelligible enough to hear. It sounded fine, but when ever I’d wait for the sequence to render during the creation of the visual part of the video it would slow the audio. There was something about the slowed version that produced a greater feeling of dread, not something I can explain quite yet at the moment. It almost sounds primordial. The visual aspect was only used to practice with the effects some more, though i do like how the threshold effect gives the image another dimension of character; so I will explore this further aesthetically in future experiments.

 

I think I’ve reached the point in experimentation where I can begin to build a catalog of videos that aesthetically aren’t too dissimilar to feel fragmented in juxtaposition. I want to explore more into Other ways i can use audio to distort videos, other than key frames. I am going to see what programs there are to generate images from audio, then use these as another layer of distortion. My inspirations are rooted in Glitch art and the Punk/Industrial scenes aesthetically; but i don’t want them to be defining classifications. My aim is to venture into new territories creatively. My goal is to create at least two new videos a week minimum from this point onward, experimenting with audio and image.

https://vimeo.com/445457272

 

This week i want to try and animate effects not linearly, but through pulses, or other degrees of change. I am currently know how to generate key-frames from music a waveform, but the real trouble is linking them too effects on other layers. I have watched a number of tutorials, but they are all very basic and not to the level of implementation I’m thinking of. They’re mainly tutorials on how to pulsate text for generic YouTube videos. I think effects animating in sync to the bpm of music will add a new dynamic to the imagery I’m creating, and bring it to a higher dimension. I was going to try and get my own footage to use, but now we are only allowed out for an hour of exercise, so I’ll have to see if that is still possible.

In terms of the Short film I am not focusing towards a narrative, I want it to be more of an experience. So there will be a little narrative, so it isn’t just a compilation of visuals. But I am focusing more on the spectacle of it. I am not sure about music either, because i don’t want to create a music video. Most stock music isn’t very unique in my opinion, or “good”. I will be leaning more into Astronomical ,Cosmological, and Cosmic Horror Imagery. I want to experiment more with colour and contrast too.

I will be looking more into deep field imagery to get more inspiration on the next few video experiments i make. Below is the first picture ever taken of a black hole, I like the yellows and Oranges. the softness of the image is a nice contrast to the violent destructive nature that is hidden at its center.

 

The first experiment was only done to get accustomed with the tools at my disposal. With these videos I wanted to push past the limits of what I’ve made previously. One of my biggest passions outside of film-making is Cosmology and Astronomy. The universe is such a strange and incomprehensibly grand place, beautiful really. But it is also terrifying. I’m a big fan of cosmic horror as a genre because of this. With the first visual i wanted to create something that resembles things you’d see in deep field astronomy pictures. If I was to be completely faithful to this then the image would be static, so I decided to include movement in the image. I started with a video of a river flowing violently, distorted it till appeared abstract enough to be malleable artistically for me. I didn’t want the colours to be too saturated, but i didn’t want it to be too bland either. previously I’ve talked about how blues and reds weren’t really visually appealing, so hear i shifted it to a more teal and aqua colour palette. There are still blues and reds, but I think they give a nice accent to the softer parts of the image. I kept some sharpness in the fragments flowing through the video to keep that punk aesthetic, and it reminded me of how gas appears on an astronomical scale. I am emulating how black holes behave in the video, I didn’t add an Event Horizon because it would have detracted from the movement in the image.

With the third video i wanted to try and merge video one and two. My aim was to try and make something that was reflective of the imagery seen in cosmic horror. I’ve tried merging videos through fades and exclusions in the past, and did with this one initially, but it just didn’t feel right re watching it. I have used strobes as well in the past, but they’re tricky to get right, too slow and it feels sluggish, too fast and it is disorienting. instead of strobing a solid white screen, i made the layer transparent, and with that also had two strobes that operated at two different time signatures. I believe it has worked out better than previous iterations, but there is still much room for improvement. I increased the contrast too, it gives a more violent aura to the image. I added grain effects to soften transitions in parts though, otherwise it would feel too disjointed from each other, and be more of a collage than a singular image.

 

https://vimeo.com/444021954

https://vimeo.com/444019388

To prepare for the short film I begin by making something small, just a test run to relearn what certain effects do. In previous projects I was focused heavily on destroying videos and then trying to turn them into something. The problem with this is it leaves no room for an estimation of what the final video will look like. I have developed the style far enough now however, that I can guess what the visuals will look like roughly by the end. The aim of this first video was to make something visually appealing, but not abstract really.

I feel like the video came out well, and is a reflection on the improved eye I have for creating these graphics. I went with a green as the primary colour because previous work incorporated lots of blues and reds, and when i look back on them I don’t believe they are visually appealing (this could be fixed with a higher saturation, but it may be too much and make visual iconography unknowable). I learnt some new effects which allow me to lean into the glitch aesthetic, while sort of having a cyberpunk vibe. I was listening to tracks from Tron: Legacy when i made this, which features distorted audio at points and had influence on this visual. I was also inspired by the neon colours and harsh blacks that are in that film.

https://vimeo.com/444024175