Sound Is Finally Over!

After speaking with Sebastian I decided not to change my sound anymore and just exported it alongside the image.

If were to do this project again I would probably try and incorporate instruments for me that's where I feel more comfortable and I believe I could make it better if I were to use them as well.  I would also use Cubase rather than Audition because like I said before I feel a lot more comfortable with that software and that software is more geared towards making music than audition is.

Other than that I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out and was probably the least intimidating of all the projects.

Time Art Is Finally Over!

So it's finally over with and I have never been more relieved, lots of trial and error and far too much time exporting. (9:18pm - 2:15pm rending into png + 1h rending into mov).

I used a variety of effects on the assumption that individually the effects are quite simple so together they couldn't be that difficult. I created a force field with ripple, I added a lightening effect to my hand and tracked it, I found a great tutorial on how to create the 'Matrix' effect [x] and managed to get a free trial of particular to put that in action. I then tracked and masked the effect onto my hand (rather badly in the end, my poor computer really wasn't up this task but you can't download any programs/plug-ins on the Uni computers). After this effect I used the magic/energy effect I practiced earlier in the month and matched the two screens up so that partial world would transition between the two.

The final effect that I used (aside from colour correction/pentatone) was the energy ball,  had already the energy ball about a month ago and recently tried tracking it to my hand as practice for After Effects. However when practicing I decided that adding a shadow beneath would be really effective, I had to look at a lot of different tutorials which included pre-composing the orb scene and adding a floor layer and making that and the orb a 3D layer, after doing this and adding a light I had a shadow. This was the first time I had ever worked in a 3D space with my own footage and it was proving difficult.

When I finally cracked this effect I was so happy, this had taken hours of trying different things and I was having real problems with the preview screen since the rest of the project was so big my computer just didn't have enough RAM to cope with it. So after all that time adding the shadow I had to get rid of it before exporting because my computer just wasn't going to cope with it, especially with the idea of having the track the camera, 3D layer and 3D orb.

Overall this project wasn't as straight forward as I expected and caused a lot of problems and really tested my ability for time management (and even though I tried and it would have worked but I was over estimating my abilities in AE). If I were to do it again I would do it on a more powerful machine so I could preview the footage properly, I would try to get a lot closer with the edges of the masks and I would just be overall a lot cleaner with the execution of the effects. I would also not do it one long take, that was a very stupid idea, I do not know why I did it. 

Tell Me Things.

I tried and this time you can judge me....

So I finally booked out two cameras, set them up and started trying to frame my twin screen correctly. On Thursday I thought I had it cracked but at this point the sun had gone in  meaning my shoot for the day was over, however I was so sure that the framing was correct I just didn't move the cameras from their spots or the markers on the wall (post-it notes, anything else and accommodation would kill me). Come Friday I came home and immediately started shooting only to import the footage to find out one camera was shooting in the wrong resolution (I know, I know never assume. I'm starting to learn my lesson!), I re-shot straight away and when replaying I thought that would be final shoot.

I imported the footage and everything seemed fine, I then decided I would edit the footage over the weekend and work on some other things that night. Now I'm here with the 'perfect' footage realising it's not so perfect because basic maths exists and I didn't use it. 

I framed the cameras so the middle edges of the cameras matched up so when my arm went though it was pretty seamless aside for the slight difference that really can't be helped. What I didn't take into account was the 20px gutter that would separate the two screens in the final composition, meaning when the gutter was in place the screens just looked odd. Here was this one arm that should have been passing through the screens but instead was getting cut off at one point, carried over and continuing.... it looked weird basically.  

I tried to fix it in AE but the only way I could do it was by zooming in on one side and zooming out on the other meaning they were out of proportion and one had a slight border. So tomorrow I re-film (thankfully this is only a shot piece) and I leave a slight gap between the cameras. I will eventually crack this project, it will happen. Preferably sooner rather than later. 

The Final 5

After heading to library and printing out all the possible photos I decided on my 5 pieces and printed them onto matte A3 paper ready for exhibiting. In keeping with my theme of stationary I'm presenting my pieces hanging from a piece of string pinned into the wall with pushpins and attached to the piece with big bulldog clips. I've always loved the simplicity of this type of presentation and as it fits so well with the theme I felt that this was the best time to use it. 

Now to come up with my artist statement and title, something I've never really thought about before so this should be interesting. 

I also need to decided whether I should mount it onto foam board first or just leave them as card, I'll have a think about that one.

I tried therefore no-one can judge me!

So I sat down with my own camera again and played around with filming the 2 screen part of the project with just one camera... which could have went better.

I want to film my project with a neutral background that has flaws in someway (dents or scratches, not completely noticeable but there nonetheless) I think a perfect background (like a studio space) would take away the grounded look I want it to have so people associate it with humans rather than robots. The idea for this piece is that as human we invite technology into our lives and eventually they will take over the spaces that we inhabit.

Filming two parts that have to match up perfectly proved difficult although I didn't realise how much so until I got to editing. I decided to edit each segment individually, pre-compose and then add everything together at the end however I didn't get past the first scene because whilst filming I had managed to change my position making me a bit closer to the camera than I was when shooting the left side of the screen, I also moved faster and didn't match up with the other side. I tried editing them in different ways, scaling up/down, changing the speed ect. But honestly it just seems more trouble than it's worth when the same effect can be made by simply putting two cameras next to each other.

I did get some bits to match up but only for a few seconds before they were out of time again, although they did look pretty cool when they matched up.

Now tomorrow I'm going to ask in the equipment store if they can help me out with 2 cameras (that film video) and hopefully I'll get filming this project over with so I can get started on the fun part - actually editing it. I'm quite surprised at how excited I am to see this project turn out, on the condition that from this point onwards nothing and I mean nothing at all goes wrong. But let's be honest it's inevitable.

Time Art Practice

So after trying and failing to film my Time Art piece over the weekend (Note to self: Never assume anything, you will pick up the only cameras that don't shoot video) I felt like I should be doing something somewhat productive in regards to my twin screen projects. Now I have a pretty clear idea of what I want to do and a very badly drawn storyboard to back it up but I've never actually use the effects I'm planning to use. They seem pretty simple and I'm competent enough in After Effects now to work out problems when they arise and try new things that tutorials may not cover.

I took my own DSLR and set up the worlds worst studio in my bedroom (equipment consisting of a desk lamp, tripod and camera against a cream wall) and started filming a vague idea of what I storyboarded. I then imported into AE and just got to work, playing around with what I can do and basically doing what I wanted, my ultimate dream in life, I gave myself magical powers.

The tutorial I was following was useful for getting the idea but the guy was using stock footage that I didn't have access too so I had to play around with what I had already learnt in AE and see what happened. I ended up using partial world and a new generator I hasn't used before to create lighting effects, this added with a bit of colour correcting and a 'mystical atmosphere' called quad-toning I made it appear as if I was deflecting magic.

Whilst it sped up a lot when exporting (I still need to figure out why) I'm pretty pleased with it for a first attempt.

I then took a magic orb I created a while ago and decided to make it hover on my hand as if I was the one creating it. Here I was focusing more on making the orb look as if it belonged in the shot than the accuracy of the tracking hence why the exit is a bit dodgy but again I'm pretty proud of the result, now I only need to figure out how to add a hovering shadow beneath it and I think it'll fit into my twin screen nicely.

I'm going to keep playing around in AE with different tutorials I've found in the hopes that I can use everything in my final edit, I have the Panasonic until Friday and after speaking with Simon I think I've came up with a way of filming using just 1 camera instead of 2 - hopefully this will work. We'll see!

Mastered and Ready to g- wait.

So I finally sat down to finish my sound project, after speaking with Sebastian I only had a few things I need to change, clipping being the major one and making the sounds a bit more spontaneous in regards to panning.

Clipping was easily fixed and panning seemed easy until I sat down to do it, I based my projects off a very structured plan I had in my head and the prospect of changing that plan was actually quite daunting. When I started changing things up and playing them back they just seemed a bit 'off' to me, now in the later parts of my track this didn't bother me because that was my intention - everything is supposed to go wrong it's supposed to be off kilter a little bit. But I started playing around with just the smaller tracks that ones that are setting the beat/pace, they don't change in time they just change in position and in some cases pitch. After mastering and exporting I had a final listen to the piece before I imported it into Premier but something was missing, I noticed that in my attempt to make things spontaneous I had inadvertently taken all bass tones away from the left ear. Now whilst in my 'make things traditional' sense I wanted to go back and change it immediately but then I thought maybe this could be it's signature, something to make the piece unique?

Whilst I really don't believe that I started looking at the sources from 'Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art', maybe this is something that other people do? I read a lot around the use of space in exhibiting sound pieces and how the architecture of a room can make or break a piece of work. I listen to Le Monte Young (Mainly his non-experimental work I'm afraid, still interesting) [x x x], and rather infuriatingly couldn't find a working version of Achim Wollschieds Wallfeild a piece I think would have been very interesting to listen too especially since it's subject matter is so close to what I based this project on. I was also looking forward to hearing everyday sounds turned into tones, something very similar to what my first instinct was in regards to this project right at the beginning. The lack of video/audio documentation of any of the pieces I'm actively looking for is really annoying yet to an extent I can understand why they are not in the public domain, 'Background Noise' is a book that explains experimental sound is there to fill space rather have space to accommodate sound. A lot of the artists seem to spend more time building the stage than working on the performance which in hindsight is probably the best way to do it, if you don't know what you are working with how do you make something that compliments it accordingly.

Now I'm not sure of the acoustics of the room this piece is going heard, nor would I know what to do with that information if I had it. What I do know is that when listening through headphones the imbalance my piece currently has doesn't match the narrative I had set out for it, so I believe it's going to change.

However here is my piece as it currently stands, it will change a bit before hand in day and I'm going to try and grab another tutorial with Sebastian to see if he has anymore advice on how to improve it before hand it.

First Day Shooting

So today we started off our day in the sound studio where we began recording some of the narrator voices that will go over the top of our visuals, whilst it took longer than expected I'm pretty pleased with the results we got seeing as the four people we had recording this morning aren't actors. I think we conveyed the emotion enough for the audience to understand the severity of the situation, this paired with our visuals I hope will hopefully make our film successful.

After getting our paperwork signed off, we ran some chores around Farnham including hitting up the local grocers for some fruit for our studio shoot. Whilst buying singular items of fruit and making a big deal about their appearance got us some funny looks in the shop it proved to be really successful (after some help from Anne). When writing up our call sheets however I think we were a bit optimistic to get in and out with no problems on our first real studio shoot which is why I'm really happy we also have the studio tomorrow as well. I think now we are back into the habit of filming, which we haven't done in a while, things will go a lot quicker from here.

Famous last words, I know.

Tomorrow we are shooting our 'core' shots which basically translates to our naturalistic shots, these are the shots that we hope the audience will recognise. It's these shots that I personally, as a person who is still quite new to experimental films, value and appreciate in the mist of abstract work. I believe that to tell the most honest story we can we have to tap into 2 powers our audience have, the power of observation and the power of empathy, to tell any story these are the two most important tools you can use but even more so when exposing a story that most people turn their noses up at. We hope that using settings and situations people will recognise (observation) paired with the overlaid narration and abstract scenes will make people start to actually listen and connect with the stories we are trying to tell (empathy). We are also back in the studio finishing up some scenes from today that due to connection problems we couldn't film and we'll also have a chance to have a go at our Time Art Projects.

The call sheet for tomorrow can be found here [x] and I think that is everything!

Scripting...

Today I sat down with the responses we received in regards to our short film and read through all of the transcripts, making note of any particular topics or phrases that I think should be read out by our narrators during the film. Our film is a delicate balance between visuals and narrative, whilst there is a lot of visuals it's also very narrative driven.

A few weeks ago we all sat down and made paragraphs out of the responses we has received via spreadsheet, this helped me a great deal because every person already has their own mini story, for me it was just a job of picking out the parts we needed whilst also staying true to their own narrative voice. At the moment it still reads rather note like but I'm going to keep tweaking it over the weekend with the help of Klara and Emily through Google Docs (the thing that's keeping me sane right now).

You can read the script as it stands here [x]. You'll notice that everyone's stories whilst in small segments are also clumped together, at the moment the storyboard isn't entirely in order, we know what we want the scenes to look like but not where they should appear in the film. So I decided that it would be easier on us and our actors (as we are in the recording studio on Monday) if we keep everything together.

I guess that's all to say for now, hopefully the script sounds natural and if not the power of sound editing is on our side.

Mixing down.

Today I sat down and finished isolating all my individual sounds so I could finally start mixing my final project. I already has an amazingly drawn diagram of what I wanted and where I wanted it so at the moment it's just a case of getting everything in the right order on the screen. My original plan was to create several different multitrack mixes and then compile them all together for mastering but I can't seem to find a way to do it,  so my new plan is to arrange the different 'rooms' in different mixes and then transfer the sounds already in order into my main mix before I start scoping.

2 Multitracks come together to form the opening sequence

At the moment I'm just getting the basics down such as where everything should be going and where the sound will appear in the listeners head when they sit down to listen to it. I'm then going to compile tracks based on their position for instance the 7 main positions I have at the moment are L100, L60, L20, 0, R20, R60 and R100, however these will probably change as I still want to play around with the positions of the actual rooms rather than just the positions of the objects making the noise.

My idea for the entire sequence is to repeat the grooves complied by the noises I have from each room and gradually get higher in pitch (only 1 step at a time, as if building towards something) whilst also getting faster. Once it has reached its pinnacle moment things will start going wrong, things will go out of time, things will go off pitch and ultimately go wrong. In the background of this noise footsteps will become frantic running from side to side/forward to back, I want the listener to feel that the human doesn't belong there and that it's the humans presence in the house that's caused everything to go wrong because that's really what happens in real life and what happened in the case of this sculpture. When first built the house was perfect, structurally sound and perfectly capable of staying there for a long as we deemed it necessary it's the constant use and wear and tear of being used by people that caused the house to be condemned in the first place, if the house hadn't been condemned Rachel Whiteread wouldn't have a sculpture to show. 

To help me visualise the look of this imaginary house and where I believe noises should be coming from I've gone back to my amazing drawings with far too many annotations, this is just for me to use whilst editing and it's great for trying things out in my head (that sounds a bit weird but we'll go with it anyway!) before I try them in the mix where something could potentially go wrong.

I am making notes of effects I've tried and believe will work somewhere else in the piece just not here, for instance when editing some generic sounds from the kitchen I found a chorus effect (bass chorus) which is exactly what I'll be looking for when I a bit further into the piece and things start to go wrong.

Let's just say there is a method to the madness. 

Final Images, maybe, possibly....

So I went into the studio on Thursday with the intention of it being my last time in regards to my Reflections Photography project . My goal for the shoot was to have 10 usable images, so I took 10 books with me but for some reason I have only have 8 different books in my images - I remember using all 10 books however I'm beginning to think that some of them were rather similar hence why to me now they all look the same.

That confusion aside, I now have 8 usable images that I'm going to review with Leah tomorrow which will hopefully become my final project.

I do have some favourites out of the 8, 4 I'm pretty sold on, 2 I'm torn on and 2 I'm not too keen on although that could be due to me editing them in a weird way (they look quite different to the others, I think I missed out a step somewhere along the line!)

Favourites:

I have other versions of this picture that would edit better in my eyes, I just haven't got around to re-editing just yet. 

2 I'm torn between:

I really like this one because of it's obvious difference from the other books, I think the size gives it a very different structure and presence. However I think the post-it notes getting lost in the image isn't as ascetically pleasing as the others.

I was really looking forward to shooting this book, it's a notebook I've had for years and only just got around to writing in when I came to University. I thought the mirrored edge would be a great visual effect, I didn't however click on to the fact that you would see me as the photographer mirrored in the notebook. 

The final two:

This is a very small book on bugs I took out of the library with the hope of using extra large post-it notes in, when I was shooting however the post-it notes I had with me just didn't look right when I was shooting so I stuck the smaller arrows I had with me. If I went back and re-edited the image I'm sure I could find a way for it be more interesting but for now I'm not to sure on it being a part of my final presentation.

 

In this image in particular I think the image is just a bit boring, I was trying to go for a standard organised look but that combined with the build of the book has lead to a rather lack-luster image.  Although as I said for the last image I could probably re-edit the image to be a bit brighter and a bit more entertaining if needed.

But that is what I've been working on all week, I spent my Wednesday in the library with people giving me funny looks as I just walked around looking for interesting and diverse books - you don't get a lot of variety in academic libraries or local charity shops apparently, but I tried.  

Recording the house

Before I set out to record my sounds I did a diagram of what I excepted my piece to look like, to help me visualise it I decided that I would draw a house (because drawing is obviously my best talent) and then label it accordingly. My idea has changed a lot over the time I've been thinking about it and I've decided to stop over analysing my idea and go for what I believe is obvious but then twist it slightly. I want to incorporate the way the sculpture was made with my interpretation of what sounds the house would make. 

The idea is simple, record sounds around my house and arrange them so in a surround sound system they sit where they would be if you were standing in front of the house, these sounds will eventually become 'panicked' and speed up until they are engulfed by what is essentially concrete, diluting the sounds until all that is left is the noises from the Attic (I'm thinking a possible ghost, I haven't quite decide yet I just want something to resonate with the listener to show that it's still there, it hasn't disappeared it's just changed in state)

So I have all my sounds now, minus a few I'm going to have to source online, but other than that I'm ready to start arranging in Audition. I'm also going to try and research some sound installations online although in the past my search has been futile I'm now going to broaden my search to movie soundtracks and realistic soundtracks to see how they composed the arrangement.