Week 8 to 13 were extremely stressful and comprised mostly of me doing a mad dash to manage all the assessments due to the best of my ability, while trying to spread my studio work out as equally between the remaining weeks as possible.

This is the storyboard I drew up in week 8, I wanted to explore the theme of a journey and have a message behind the work. The theory behind this storyboard worked and would have been great, but when putting the technique into practice the glass just did not work for the sort of elaborate movement that the storyboard proposed to work. I simplified and changed the design while painting and it became something arguably better, because it was simpler.

The above were some of the images I used as inspiration for creating the film and an example of the portfolio of research that I was focusing mostly on gathering during week 9. I was trying to prepare for getting the materials and what coloured paint to buy by seeking inspiration and looking at what has looked good in the past.

During that week I bought most of my materials and made the camera/light booking. This is a photograph I took on the day I got the light box and was testing out to see if it would work well, it exceeded my expectations.

During the weekend of week 10 I made my first attempt at the technique and the one that I ultimately ended up using in my final edit. The reason why I could only do this on weekends was because that was when I could hire the camera gear for an extended period of time. The process took hours and I took over 300 photos in the first attempt. I used my own DSLR to take photographs and videos of the process.

During week 11 I went into the animation building and edited together the 300+ photographs I took during week 10, using the program Dragon Frame. Splicing them all together into a 12 frame per second stop-motion animation. I was extremely happy with how it turned out, as it was much smoother and the fact that the photos were shot in RAW made the colours look so vibrant.

I also hired the camera out during the week 11’s weekend, to paint the True to Form logo for the studio presentations, but what I painted did not turn out well at all and the photographs were overexposed. Next time I’m going to try to manage time better and be more careful with checking the camera settings. I confess I am a bit rusty with remembering shutter speeds and aperture settings and that’s something I’m going to have to brush up on in the holidays. Sadly, because I messed up this weeks work, I ran out of time to paint the logo for Paul, as I needed to focus on the footage I did have, as well as being inundated by other assessments at this time.

Audio Player

 

What I had to do next was focus on finding audio for the work, so Paul suggested finding a song that not many people may have listened to, and while The Smiths are extremely popular I believed the intro to the song Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me may have worked as it was fairly innocuous. Paul disagreed and found it not only too popular, but also distracting from the film.

I spent the majority of week 12 and 13 editing the film and choosing music/sound options. The sound I ultimately decided to go with was a foley track of a heatbeat, chosen because it is subtle and synced well to the fast pace of the changing images, while not detracting from the film.

Audio Player

I am pleased with the way the film came together and while I would have liked to show more of the process for the class screening and also during this blog compilation. Some things I simply forgot to document or had technical difficulties. I also have quite a few video clips that WordPress isn’t allowing me to upload due to their file size.

This is the completed screener, I attempted to keep it as short and to the point as possible. I originally wanted to have a voiceover, but chose to just use text instead, due to time contraints and not wanting to interrupt the flow of the edit, but upon reflecting I believe that, that was a mistake and that a voiceover would have further emphasised that this video was about merging art and film together.