Horror Sketch

PB 3

After a pitch presentation about my intentions and interest of study, I’ve came into further brainstorming thanks to the feedback from the panel. I’ve wanted to explore the emotions or reaction generated by different sub genres of horror and how they may have been a hybrid for a mixed emotion response. Inspired by pieces such as ballet performance film, Black Swan (2010) that also incorporates psychological thrilling elements and Into the Woods (2014), a dark fairytale musical, I was motivated to a boundary-blurring piece to sketch. Therefore in my pitch I thought I would experiment on a challenging and opposing genre such as a hybrid of horror-musical, a rare yet interesting genre collision. As Allan pointed out as a feedback that emotions associated with both genres are opposites, it got me thinking can horror be a musical? The panel also encourage me to think of examples in which however, it is difficult to think of a legitimate terror, suspense kind of horror that also include musical elements to it. Therefore, I’ve further retouched my idea of a sketch that instead, will focus of horror use of music/soundtrack and its affect on audience fear emotions. This sketch perhaps is a resemblance to a horror film with a lot of music within, as well as conveying sonic narrative, instead of experimenting a musical horror film.

 

Continue reading

We’re OTW

Ideas-in-progress

My group and I first started developing ideas through a brainstorm, including various different sources and inspirations which connect to the prompt, “Where there is crime there’s violence, where there’s youth there’s love”. Everyone seems to have great interesting points, simple and succinct.

Brainstorm Map

Brainstorm Map

As we divided individual roles, I personally learned and experience something new as a whole. I have never written an ‘official’ script before and it really overwhelmed me as I started. Like most writers, I was totally blank. Dea was in charge of the character biography and development and therefore she had taken a part in developing our script. Because of our idea of character driven narrative, we tried to focus on our two main characters. Hence, the dense dialogue, mental subjectivity through flashbacks and time lapses and a heavy set of actions as well. What was challenging for me is to keep tying the script back to the main idea of youth and love and crime and violence. To add a little harmony to our experimental film without too much of the abstract touch, I though I could have a balance of both dialogue and action regulating in turns with each other.

Script-in-Progress

1 2 3 4 5 6

Character-in-progress

There are a number of inspirations for our characters. Most on real life youth stories with crime issues, but we have also taken parts of character portrayals from different outstanding films. These films often explore the psychological side of youth behaviour and mental subjectivities, which we are aiming to really focus on. This way we are able to tie the character back to our prompt and play around with our experimental indie style. Dea and I thought it would be a good idea to have some opposite personality clashing together. For example Ryan, the main character is an expressive guy in his early 20s with the problem of anger management and violent behaviour caused by various reasons including drug addiction. In contrast, Julie is a calm introvert needing sense of true belonging despite her closed up and almost-anti-social behaviour. What I think we need to do though, to dig deeper into the psychological theory side of these character bio is to do more research mainly on anxiety and drug issues.

  • Story of Ahmed’s experience with drugs, mother and detention centre

Click here for Ahmed

  • Basketball Diaries- Di Caprio’s character

  • Youth development and characters on Palo Alto

  • Background info- Juvenile justice system in Australia

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCJYlFHvlYU

 

Continue reading

Photography- The Gestalt Principles

In week 3 studios, James elaborate a lot about filmic photography and the Gestalt Principles. This creative device is crucial to create dynamic visual composition, hook the viewers and impart implicitly emotion and logic. These principles include an arrangement of parts altogether as a whole is greater, with each part has meaning on its own as Koffka mentioned. He also explained that the whole is not necessarily made up by the sum of the parts, where actually it is different.

Figure/ Ground

Dominant figure

Dominant figure

Figure meshed with ground

Figure meshed with ground

The object and its surroundings, with figure begin the object or subject while the ground is the setting or pretty much the background/foreground/mid-ground.

Closure

Lightbulb

Lightbulb

With closure principle, the viewers fill the gap; where our brain does the work to interpret meanings.

Continuance

Leading lines formed by the river flows.

Leading lines formed by the river flows

When the eyes follows around within the frame yet also outside of the frame. This can be generated through the use of especially leading lines, directional repetition and lighting.

The law of common fate

Perpendicular position suggests disconnection

Perpendicular position suggests disconnection

Parallel composition among the children shows common fate

Parallel composition among the children shows common fate

 Where two or more subjects share or oppose common situation or fate.

Similarity

The woman in the centre being an anomaly (different)

The woman in the centre being an anomaly (different)

There are similarities or pattern among images like colours, forms, etc. In this photo it is that every man as similar subjects concerned about the injured subject except for the woman smiling and the only different subject who stands out. She will be the anomaly of this image.

Proximity

Flower as skirt

Flower as skirt

Something off put together as a subject.

 

 

“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.

 

deleuze framing

vlcsnap-2015-08-13-07h32m36s83-ps4kbm

 

This reproduction piece of photograph is based on a still image from the film, The Third Man, 1949. As evident, the image is of black and white and therefore the reproduction should also be a black and white image. As of the production context of the original image is during the WWII in Vienna , the reproduction is portrayed to be a modern-day or contemporary Melbourne context instead of being exactly a replica. Though, the framing, position and setting are all an imitation of the original still.

reproduction deleuze

 

Based on Gilles Deleuze’s idea that ‘The out-of-field refers to what is neither seen nor understood, but is nevertheless perfectly present’ (p.16), I’ve made another reproduction that demonstrates the idea. The stop-motion piece shows a frame that replicates the original given frame from The Third Man, while followed by other different frames, which shows the out-of-field of the original still. In this case, what we as viewers would understand is that the subject (man) is waiting for a girl outside her window and when she shows up unexpectedly, he gets shocked. We would understand at least that he is waiting for something even before the frame of the girl is shown. Therefore, our perception and comprehension of the world outside and also inside the film means that we are able to interpret the film based on how our world (in the out-of-field) works.

Manipulation of Time

Our week 3 studios focuses on narrative and time. As Dan said, frame is time, not just a signifier of time. The idea that everything in the film is moving sounds a bit confusing let alone our minds respond, what about still shots on the frame? But even in stills, time is moving. In terms of narratives, having either plots that moves forward or flashbacks or jumbled up in different chronology, the story still begins and ends in linear order. That is the difference between a plot and a story, which in my popular cinema seminar I’ve learned two new vocabularies identifying these two conventions. These includes Fabula (or story) which can be defined as the purpose and meaning of the whole narrative, and Syuzhat (or plot) which is the order that the story is presented.

We are able to manipulate time through filmic codes and conventions including the popular technique of flashbacksIf we see a shot or a scene that is framed in a different colour, hue, filter or even sound than other scenes, as viewers we interpret this distinguishable content as a different part of the narrative. Another technique of time-manipulation is the use of slow-motion movement that is developed into a more advanced mobile movement called the bullet-time.

Photography is about framing

When thinking about frames, my mind automatically visualise the physical outskirts of an image. But this week, I’ve learned that framing means much more deeper than that. It is also about the image composition itself and how an image is constructed the way it is through visual codes. It is just what we are doing when taking a photograph. From the readings that we did for this week, my favourite quote from the readings so far is that “Photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe” (Sontag). We all have different perspectives on each certain image and it is up to us how we interpret those visual compositions. “They are a grammar and more importantly and ethics of seeing”. With this being said, framing acts as a guidelines and a “position of thinking” (Frampton, 2006). Therefore, while working on my 50 frames in this week 2, it has implanted in my mind that the subjects in my photographs has an allegory. For example, the photograph of the origami jar that I took may be interpreted that the artist of the origami is Japanese, having it originated from Japan. But it can also mean that a passionate origami maker, not necessarily from Japan, has created the colourful mixture of origami papers. Its allegory also leads into a perception that it is about a journey of a person who loves colourful and brightness life setting.

IMG_2144