Month: March 2016

“On The Eye” progress

Brief 4 Final

Final sequences:

Finally, it is week 12 and every single assignment that has been haunting us is all finished. My Popular Cinema essay, Creative Advertising “post-card” campaign and now the On The Frame brief 4 exegesis and the test sequences are all over. The last blog update was about the process of this brief 4 project up to the point where Dyy and I just finished shooting. So here are some progress made since then on.

The editing process, which took a while longer as a result of technical (Premiere Pro) incompetence. At first we thought that we could include some background music and sound effects, though we changed our mind to stick with the natural background sounds recorded diegetically. This is because I think it works better in focusing dominantly on the frame’s aesthetics and movement rather than some music added in. While I was editing the opening scene, I found that it was quite hard to have the sequences matching up with the storyboard that I have sketched. Therefore while trying to follow my storyboard, I have also done some experiment on cuts and matching shots and have learned a whole lot more in how to overcome problems in Premiere Pro (mainly through You-Tube and Linda.com). There were shots that needed to be cut and put together. Though as the shot images “rule of thirds” do not match that it obviously show an unwanted cut between those shots, I have learned to use fast-forwarding the duration of the two shots while adding an “additive cross dissolve” video transition effects to make the two shots seems as one.

Screen Shot 2015-10-23 at 1.47.59 pm

Focusing greatly on both the opening scene and the ending scene, we decided to only edit and submit these sequences as tests or experiments without having the whole film drawn in the storyboard fully finished. Throughout my exegesis, I am also able to answer the research question that if “the camera is an extension of human body, can then film think and develop just as human being do?” This is an interesting notion that film is able to, as it is a mirror to human mind therefore can think. Futhermore, film can stretch its ideas as a result of the possibility that it is a form of future thinking, hence develop its thoughts just as human being learns new knowledge.

 

High-Concept Cinema

When I think about Inception, its ambiguity always fascinate me and trigger an inspiration for my media practices. I’ve always been one interested in the ambiguity of a film such as Donnie Darko, Looper, Meshes of the Afternoon and Sex, Lies and Videotape which even influenced me to produce an abstract short film in media one as well as On The Frame brief four project.

Inception gives the freedom to its viewers to decide what they want to infer, leading to their own conclusions and respond to how the film “think”. In our week 9 studio Dan had put us into groups to write any thoughts and ideas about the film and this is what we came up with in the poster attached; all jumbled-up-drawings that “serves” as semiotics and messy writings. Inception not only portray the theories and psychology of the human mind, dreams and consciousness but does it in a way of thinking like a human being. With the use of loud heart-thumping soundtracks, matter of cognition with extreme slow motion corresponding to different levels of parallel consciousness (dream within a dream, the deeper the levels the faster we think), mise-en-scene according to different themes and architecture of the dreams and so on, Inception “thinks” and shows us the co-existance of perspectives and that there is no such thing as reality, only a perception (clearly because of different levels of the dream is of different person and also because of the ambiguity of the film’s ending). Hence, Dan set up different true/false statements on the screen and we had to decide where we stand, anywhere in the room, in which we agree to an extent.

“Cobb is dreaming the whole time.”

What an open ended topic which I guess left me question if Cobb is dreaming the whole time, the whole studio time. Someone else mentioned, “Which time?” and how does time actually work in the film where basically the film is an ambiguity especially of the timeframe and plot. We were not exactly sure and perhaps never will be, in regards to where Cobb actually is if he is free of his conviction or if he ended up in “limbo” where he is, in projection, free and went home to see his kids, who looked roughly the same age as what was shown in Cobb’s subjectivity before he got home. So the whole class had this argument. What I’ve concluded though, is that Cobb is not dreaming the whole time even when the shot cuts, not showing if the totem (Mal’s spinning top) does fall at the end of the film. Again, it is the understanding of off-screen space as Frampton pointed out. What is not shown on the frame does make a significant impact on my conclusions.

What we have here are notes and jumbled-up ideas my group and I came up with as we explore Inception.

Project Brief 4

The last project of On the Frame studio, or should I say “On the Eye” centres the idea of camera as an extension of man, therefore the vision presented from the eye. Our project (Dyy and I) was based on Dziga’s Man with a Movie Camera. Here we go, our racing-through-the-semester assignment again…

It has been a couple of weeks of painful shooting-editing and exegesis writing full of all-nighter sessions. Both Dyy and I finished our storyboard in late August and finally finished all the shooting by week 10. Our storyboard is quite successful in terms of clear drawings, providing that each of us has different responsibility (or part). Dyy is responsible for the test sequences sketches from the audience’s perception while myself focus only from the character’s perception. Therefore during the editing process, I would only edit the scenes of my part. Surprisingly, we only shoots for 3 days and most scenes took place during nightime. Though the preparation took us a while, since we have to do the make-up and costuming, getting to the set locations and waiting for every actor/cast to show up.

We were shooting during those days of cold winter-spring (that is supposed to be spring anyway) in the alleyway where the main character finally follows the girl and finds out she is a vampire. For us, there were a lot of re-shooting needed specially on that part due to the “fake blood” mess, re-makeup to do, unsuitable acting process and technical difficulties. Though it was great that a couple of “volunteer” friends came along to do the make-up and gave our actors tips on acting; “push the victim harder!” or something like “tilt only your head sideways as you pretend to bite”. One tiny problem had occured one day as the man lead, had a haircut as weabout to finish the shooting days, and that it turned out we had to do  some re-shoot. Therefore, we had to do even more re-shoots despite the fact that it only took us three days of this process. So to leave it at that, we just had to do the editing and the final exegesis after our update presentation to the class during our week 10 studio. Futhermore, here are some sketches as well as photos during the process as we progresses.

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