Long Time No Play

So I haven't posted in while, mainly because I've been preoccupied with doing other work! I recently went to the Fine Art Grad show at Teesside University as a friend of mine was exhibiting, I'll have a post on that soon. But mostly I've been having a bit of a crisis. It seems to be a common crisis of finishing first year and being met with the reality of when you enrol next year you're done, there is no turning back or switching courses because you won't have the funding available to you. As I joined the course through clearing with a last minute change of career plan it's always been in the back of my head that it could have been the wrong decision. After realising that I would much rather read and analyse plays or watch musicals doubt started to set in, in fact I've never wished more that I could take DFSA as a 50/50 course alongside theatre, or even major in DFSA with a minor in Theatre.

Finding out that I did pretty well with my grades did nothing by solidify my confusion because it turns out I did make the right decision on results day and I love the course, so I have to find a way to make theatre and film mix. When I came home from Uni the first thing I did was take advantage of having my DVD collection within arms reach, I proceeded to watch every musical DVD I had. I started thinking how theatre and film aren't actually that different, the major differences 1) In film the director controls the audiences view point 2) In theatre the audience feels a human connection to the characters, in film you need to pander to more senses to create that connection.

With more and more broadway shows being picked for the big screen I looked at the difference
between successful adaptations and the not so successful. Those lacking in dance numbers seemed to get the theatre goers approval rather than those that have them, Sondheim shows coming out on top. Now I love Stephen Sondheim (Award Winning composer/lyricist, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George to name a few), growing up I was never aloud to perform his songs because they were simply too complicated for me as a singer and the poor accompanist. So how is that the most musically complicated and challenging pieces of theatre are those that cross over the easiest?

Whilst Sondheim shows aren't know for their big dance numbers everything is still meticulously choreographed, movement around the stage is so fluid all a camera man has to do is look at the stage version and mimic the movements they do. Simply putting a stage show on screen isn't the way it works.

Now that came out a lot longer than I expected but it is something I want to look into further. But in other news I bought a piano. When I was younger my Dad taught me piano very briefly before he passed away, but he taught me by ear meaning by the time I had professional lessons I was just really confused as to why people were reading music and why they couldn't remember what they just played. Now today I can read music to an extent and I can play piano to an extent, the goal is to play piano by reading music by the end of summer. Maybe even start learning to compose music properly, mix some music tech skills and become the one person orchestra I had to be at A Level, in other words I'm still working on different projects... I'm just taking a longer route than usual.

Also I found one of my old 'Listening Diaries' that I used during Music Tech, it was the first time I recognised the technique qualibet being used in Les Miserable, it's also the technique that insipired the end of our last short film.

 

That was really ramble-ly and not really that progressive but it's just a sum of everything that's going on right now, hopefully I'll have some more blog worthy things soon.

Final Presentation

So the year is finished which is really freaking weird and with that comes final projects.

Here is the final film 'My Non-Binary Burden' and here is a link to the presentation we did for our assessment.

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.