Flour, who'd of thought?

The Spinning Dancer - 

oil painting by Afremov

 by Leonidafremov on 

@DeviantArt: Oil Paintings

Whilst I've been at home I've been leaning more towards Fields and Frames research as that's my individual project and so it's more under my control, however yesterday me, Megan and Emily had a quick conversation around Wednesdays tutorial and what we should have in regards to research. The idea itself is still pretty much an accumulation of different ideas however slowly but surely links are being made the main this for us at the moment is to not force the connections.

As I mentioned in my last post my initial idea was the use of paint/powder paint to create something during the dance so that when the dance is over there is a tangible thing left of it. But pursuing this idea would then limit the production to a studio (something we are aiming for anyway but with grad films still shooting I believe it will be quite difficult). But it just looks so intriguing, occasionally I like to pursue ideas that just look nice and see where they go. The current thought was that an acro-dancer would use talcum powder whilst training, to migrate the ideas together we talked about slowly having the powder evolve into coloured powder the more confident she get's whilst warming up before eventually washing it off in the tub of milk.

I know Megan has a better overview of the base storyline (Seen here) but here's my interpretation. Shot starts with the dancer approaching a room, once in the room - full of mirrors - she starts moving stunted, not fluid, in constant view of a mirror, constantly being judged. She then picks up the powder to start warming up, clapping the powder between her hands and rubbing them together (some of which are close ups, some shown in the reflection of the mirrors) and starts warming up - stretching and just generally preparing. She grabs another hand full of powder and claps her hands together before the camera follows the powder into the air acting as a transition to an empty room. It's here where the performance starts to happen, slowly the powder starts to turn into different colours as she warms up and then she starts performing - free, fluid, graceful - everything she wasn't in the first section. The dance then slows down to a almost painful speed as she starts cooling down and starts stretching again, eventually making her way to the bath of milk, dancing around the bath prolonging the experience before immersing herself in it. The camera would then track up just as her head goes beneath the milk showing the powder still in the air (highlighted by the studio lights), showing the remainder of her performance.

That sounded overly dramatic, but you get the idea?

Whilst I love the idea here I don't think it comes across too well, the yellow light being a particular pain taking away the dramatic effect of the powder - I'm also not a fan of drawing on the floor with it, it's just a bit too childlike for me. 

I then found this video, I was so excited when I saw the thumbnail because this is exactly what I had in mind when I thought of using the powder paint the first place. However it's a slideshow of images but the idea is still the same. The common theme when using this style of the video/photography is that the dancer tends to be going upward to get the ghost-like effect. A movement that could be very symbolic for our dancer consider the dance is her trying to improve herself. 

It turns out the way to get best results is to use flour? I was a bit skeptical but it looks amazing. 

Here there is a mixture of techniques that I like, the fact that they VFX the colour onto the flour is intriguing and looks fantastic in the still shots, I believe it would only look better in the moving ones. The mixture of slow motion shots and regular speed shots also shows a bit of what Megan spoke of in her blog by merging the two speeds together to show different sections of the dance. I also love the use of the powder as a transition - something I mentioned earlier.

Here is also a video showcasing some very interesting, crow inspired choreography. A style that could possibly be suited to the first section of the film but maybe a bit slower.

However the music in the final piece is very dramatic, overly dramatic to some extent which is why I have a whole other blog post ready to go on that side of things. You'll just have to wait and see. 

Working from home is hard

Due to a family emergency I had to come back to Middlesbrough for the week without any real plan of how I was going to work around missing Uni. I get quite restless when I don't have anything to do so I just started doing what I normally do when stressed - planning.

A mini timetable showing the end of Feb - March

For the dance video I wanted to expand on my post-production skills whether in sound or video editing I haven't really decided, both if possible. However I do enjoy the pre-production process so when Megan approached me about producing her idea it was a no-brainer. In the workshop I also spoke about an idea I had of a dancer dancing using paint and the paint flying everywhere so when the dance is over the camera would pan up and reveal the artwork that the flying paint had created. A long shot from the idea of a dancer warming up and stretching before entering a bath of milk. But we got talking and we thought about merging the two ideas however after that we both got caught up in different projects and didn't get to speak much about it other than who we are going to get to crew our project - Emily was then brought on as Head of Production Design.

Afterwards I went out and bought myself a new notebook because unless I physically write something down 9 times out of 10 I will forget it. The first thing I did was split my book into 3 sections (as this was mainly for Fields and Frames development) and draw up a potential timetable for the Dance Video, mapping out when we had tutorials and using them as mini-deadlines giving us something to aim for. This is primarily so the group can start working on F+F and know when to plan out their work so things don't clash.  You can see a full digital version here.

I'm still pooling together research and have a few books on hold for when I return but I'm afraid the next tutorial will be me playing catch up and working around Open Days (Work are being very understanding and letting me leave for 20-25 minutes at a low point in the day - I just need to work this into the tutorial sign ups). But other than that I'm still here but I miss my desk and the library, next week I'll hopefully be back to normal. 

And it's Finished.

Finishing this project has been so tedious and just painful to an extent I can't even put into words. I once again spent the morning fixing the animation - rekey-framing every single wave. That's 73 layers. All of them. Re-animated.  I also acted on some feedback for instance I changed the colour of the text to make it more visible, I added some waves to the 'sea' to give a bit more context (although I'm still not completely happy with this part, I may have to re-think this for the gallery), I changed some timings and just had a general clean up. 

Once that was exported after many attempts - I apparently made something transparent that shouldn't have been and it was coming up bright blue during the export, but only during the export not in the actual After Effects preview which meant a few failed attempts.

Then in the afternoon I went back to Protools to re-sync the music and add a few more diegetic sounds the the social media tones and some general sci-fi noises just to give the audience a bit more information to grab onto.

For me sound has been the most straight forward aspect of this project so ending on this was a good move for me because it gave me the chance to do something I was comfortable with and use that to make the piece better. However there was only so much I could do before I overworked it. So I finished up quickly and exported in Premier Pro.




I honestly could have continued working on this project for a lot longer, I feel like what I've produced isn't quite up to the standard that I had in my head and that's been messing with my judgement a lot. As I'm typing this I'm not entirely sure I feel comfortable putting it on exhibition in the gallery or even handing it in. I don't feel like it's my best work, although that might be the stress talking.

But on the other hand I also have to keep reminding myself that the majority of the skills I used in this piece were brand new to me. I have never used Illustrator before, I've never used After Effects in this capacity before, I did my sound scape in within 2 sessions in the studio because I forgot to schedule time to do it.  It's been eye opening and the actual conjuring of the idea and the research was fascinating to me, the actual execution could do with some more work. I guess the most relevant thing I've learnt during this project is that when you have an idea you're passionate about you also have to be prepared to fail.

Also that there is no shortcuts - sometimes you just have to sit at a computer for 4 hours staring at binary code going up and down. Always up and down.

My time management skills have been pushed to the limit and whilst I'm in a better position now than I was with my last After Effects project (I seemed to have planned up until the studio shoot and then nothing, it's like I never expected to make it out the other side). But I've worked hard and whilst I'm not entirely happy with the final product I can honestly say it's not through lack of trying. I'm aware of the shortcomings of the piece and have tried to fix them to best of my ability. Working alone has been hard but worth it because now I am aware of my strengths and my weakness, giving me something to aim too.  I'm also very proud of that wave.

Trial and Error

Before leaving Uni on Thursday I started work on the illustrator heavy aspect of the piece, something I wasn't looking to. As I've said before Illustrator really isn't my forte and working with it was proving difficult, I'd go to use tools and they would be in a different place or simply wouldn't exist. So I turned to the internet.

Social media has a heavy influence on this piece and I've used my own experience with it to figure out parts that should be included in the projection. Something that really stand out for me was back in the days of MSN you could assign certain GIFs to words/letters sometimes to look good but mostly to annoy your friends and the best thing about them was - they moved.

I wanted to incorporate that somehow and decided that the 'Social Media Pop-Up Scene' should have moving emojis, the downside being I would have to then make the moving emojis. So they aren't elaborate or fancy but the slight movement catches the eye and I think on a big screen will look really interesting.

Also here is the guide I used to make the base emoji and then I just animated the sequence within my own knowledge before pre-composing them in After Effects.

At this point I also made the base for the social media scene, now I really wasn't proud of this work and it was literally giving me nightmares so I knew it had to change I just wasn't sure how. What I did know was the content. I gave each of the characters on the ship a profile page including; Name, status eg King, Nobleman etc and feeling. I also included a little quote I feel represent them as characters, each quote is from the text and is either said by or to the character in question. I got this idea again from the days of MSN, being able to put a little message beside your name and from the idea of a Facebook status - hence the colour scheme. However instead of a profile picture (which let's face it with my drawing skills would have been laughable) I put the animated emoji that corresponds with the characters current feeling either; concerned, scared or worried. 

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I then saved the vectors as different images, every time loosing a character so when I put it into after effects I could do a bit of stop frame animation. Overall I'm finally becoming happy with the final product, I've still got a way to go before everything is ready but for the first time I think I might actually meet the deadline which is a crazy concept to have considering where I was this time last week. 

Here's the latest test I've made and since I've made significant changes to the animation the sound is not a bit more out of sync, a problem that will be rectified by assessment day.

'Sound Is Half The Experience' - George Lucas

This past Friday I finally managed to get a computer in W103 (I left booking a bit late - I always forget you have to book this room) but I was finally in a better position to start arranging my sound properly. I had already set up the project and had everything ready to go so I went in at 9am and didn't leave until 1pm and there's still a lot of work to be done, but I'm going to explain what I've got so far.

As explained in my last post about sound, which can be read here, I recorded a lot of water effects.  I wanted to ground the adaptation and almost juxtapose what you see on screen. One of the things you absolutely (or really shouldn't) associate with computers is water and that is the grounding element of the play and I needed that grounding within my adaptation for it to be successful. I also needed the water to help add to the character of Ariel. In the original play the 2 characters which are complete opposites in demeanor and in status are Ariel and Caliban. I was reading around the character a while back and saw an article on how Shakespeare intentionally made Ariel an 'Elemental Being of the Higher Order' by assigning him the upwards tending-elements Air and Water. To oppose this he made Caliban an 'Elemental Being of the Lower Order' by assigning him the downwards-tending elements Fire and Earth. Meaning to give the piece more depth of meaning juxtaposing the sound and the projection is, for me personally, the best way to go.  

When I first pitched this idea I described the soundtrack as water effects with 8-bit orchestrations and I've tried to stick to that. One of the things I love about working in Protools is being able to take an existing sound and change it so that the timbre is the same yet the effect is different. One of the things I tried out whilst editing was taking the existing sounds of water (and my piano simulating objects hitting each other underwater) and turn them into more computerised / robotic sounds. I would then play them together and play around with the mix so you could get the best of both effects, the grounding of the water along with the diegetic sounds of the computer. 

Throughout this project I really wanted to get a midi track in there to give the project a musical element alongside the soundscape as Shakespeare did this himself, in The Tempest more so than others. Ariel in particular sings a lot of his 'spells' so he has a even bigger presence as a spirt. However now we are so close to deadline I think this is very much a time dependant element that may have to take a backseat as whilst I've done a fair bit of research on the subject I've yet to figure out the composition.

I should also point out the waves in the track is an online find, I thought I could get away with just having water sounds but nothing could really replace the actual sounds of waves and since there's no sea nearby I turned to the internet. I do think that it was the right decision though, the piece really needed a better tonal centre than the keyboard typing. 

So I played around with the sounds I've already got then imported my video to sync things up however in the soundtrack I had to accommodate around 10 secs of film at the beginning that doesn't exist yet. I also had to work around the fact that some of the sounds are sill missing. It's completely self inflicted, I just forgot that I needed to record some extra 'computer' sounds to give a more diegetic sound to the track and to accent some of the movements such as the 'pinch-and-zoom' and the social media pop-ups. But this can all be rectified with one last session in Protools or Audition if I desperately have to to.

So that's all I've got so far - here is a another trial run I did quickly in Premier Pro, I tired to match it up the best I could but without the little bit of video at the beginning it proved difficult. There are still some things now looking back I need to change but I think this is a better representation of the final product. George Lucas is right - sound really is half of the experience.

Power Through

The past few days have been hard. It was if I was working non-stop yet nothing was getting any further, it was just a constant uphill battle. What was more annoying was that I knew what I had to do but I just didn't know what order. Part of me was leaning more towards working on the soundscape and then animating in time to the music but then I needed to see the visuals to figure out what the sounds would be and where.

Layers of coded 'waves'

I keyframes the Y axis for each wave

So I made a list and just - powered through. It's always annoying when you get to stage of a project, when it's no longer creative it's just a bit draining. I was also faced with the problem of needed to heavily use a program I don't normally use, that being Illustrator.

As I said before Lynda.com has been my friend and a lot of last minute Google-ing has happened during the making of this project. Something I haven't been able to figure out yet is how to make something look less 'adobe-manufactured' in illustrator, or After Effects for that matter meaning right now I'm not best pleased with the outcome but I'm just going to go with it and get it finished, then I can make it look pretty again.

I also put fillers in for the information points so I could figure out time whilst still working on the graphic

                           

This is how the video looked at the end of a few hours work on Wednesday, not that much of a difference which is really annoying but hopefully tomorrow will be more productive. Although I did figure out how to get the wave to move the way I wanted it too, now I just have to animate the rest properly.

I Blinked And It Was Over

'I just need to write this post, just get it over with and
yeah I just need to write it.' - Me for the past week.

This project went so quickly I don't think I've fully recovered from it yet because as soon as we tore down the set I was straight back into Maps and Journey's. Overall this project may have been the most stressful thing I've ever done for a grade and I once overnighted my coursework by courier to an exam board.

Looking back I honestly can't see a lot of good but I think that's because I was completely immersed in what was happening and I didn't have the opportunity to take a step back and look at it for what it was - a group of students learning and practicing a lot of new skills.  I approached this project as if I was in a professional setting, even if I didn't really know what I was doing, but in approaching it that way along the way I forgot that other people also don't really know what they are doing. It became very obvious to me around the time we changed the script that a lot of people just hadn't grasped that the shoot was happening as quickly as it was, like they just hadn't looked the timetable as a whole semester. I remember being rather firm and almost demanding things from people and people were shocked because we 'have loads of time before we shoot' when in fact we were building the set in 2 weeks. Something I learnt very early on in this project was that if I ask for something on a specific day I will most likely not receive it on that day, when we changed the script I started purposely asking for things 2 days earlier than I needed them because I knew they would be up to 2 days late. A bit sneaky but I meant no harm and for the most part it got the job done!

Final shot of the project!

Before the shoot started I was told that everything was under control and that everything was ready for the Monday, we even had a quick tech rehearsal before we left for the weekend. The build was pretty smooth, it took a few more shopping trips than I had originally planned but it was all working out and the best thing - no arguments. None. It was as if as soon as everyone was on a level playing field and were just mucking in to get the job finished everything fell into place. During the pre-production things were tense because you would think you were getting somewhere but then someone wouldn't be in Uni for a day meaning things had to be decided without them, meaning when they came back they would annoyed at certain things not being included; or people would just want different things and weren't willing to compromise. It was just a hard time within the group. Whilst building however everyone just had fun, it was a new experience for everyone so we were all learning together and just having a bit of a laugh.

I've already blogged about the first day of shooting here so check that out if you haven't already and I'll go straight onto the second day.

This day was the most stressful by far and I would like to make something clear the 2 day shoot was my idea. I had to make a decision and at the time it was around a week (?) before the set build was starting and we were starting to cast actors and they needed times. At this point the script was finalised and I was emailing Rosie regarding pay and expenses, I was told we could have 2 actors for 1 day if they are paid for by the University. Now I knew this wasn't enough time and I mentioned that we were considering trying for expenses only but with that came a set of moral obligations - how long can you expect an actor to work without pay? I made the call of 2 days because it made sense. We had a 4 page script and I had spoken to members of the group who agreed that it was a plausible option, the only thing I didn't have to make the decision off was storyboards because they simply weren't made yet.

Staying late on the Tuesday wasn't planned but I also had to make the call off working 2 hours extra (on top of an admittedly long day) or have the unpaid actor have to drive back to Farnham from Southampton to film another 2 scenes. I'm glad we stayed back to finish like we did however if I had known the complexity of the shots earlier on I probably would have tried to stretch it over the Wednesday as well. When I made the call I was making it on the assumption that we only had 2 more shots to do the final shot of the lights changing and a slider shot, I honestly had no idea we were using the dolly and I think it came as a shock to most people as all day we had said we weren't using it.

I did feel a bit out of loop whist on set because in all honestly I didn't understand the storyboard and shot list, I thought it was due to inexperience but a few of us were a bit confused about it so I spent a lot of the day asking questions and the rest of the day pretending I had answers to other peoples questions. Because that's what a producer does - they act like they are the most organised person in the room so much they eventually become the most organised person in the room.

My colour coded production pack - I needed to organise! 

Overall, now I can look back properly, I do think we worked well as a team on the set but I also think the pressure helped in a way? I know that sounds bad but what I have learnt through this project is if you give DFSA  a relaxed environment they'll work in a relaxed way, the same way when I remained calm during pre-production people remained calm with me which was great but they still didn't quicken their work pace which would have a been useful at the time. So whilst it was stressful I think it made for a better workflow which I know is not a mutual feeling across the group.

Personally this project has been eye opening, I learnt new things about film that I didn't know before, I learnt that being strict with things from the start would have saved us a lot of stress. I also found that when I gave specific jobs to people they did get done, not as quick as I would have liked but they got done. However I wish some teams would have communicated more because I simply didn't have the time to go through each team and individually break things down to make sure they got done - that was a trust exercise for the control freak in me, honestly it was terrifying. I also learnt that being the producer of a project does not make you responsible for everyone else's grades, a lot of the time I felt this huge responsibility not only for making a good film but for making sure everyone passes this unit. If I knew someone wasn't blogging I'd drop hints that they really should be doing that, I read unit descriptions out for people, I told people things that I thought would help boost their grade, all in good spirit and I would help people anyway but 'leading' this project made it feel so much more than just helping people, in part I felt responsible. And I shouldn't have.

I worked very hard on this project from the beginning and whilst I tried to stay out of the creative decisions simply because I felt like there needed to be an apolitical opinion making the harder decisions (like not building the House of Commons or building 2 sets instead of 1 or building a kitchen).  But I can honestly say I couldn't have done any better with the knowledge I had at the time, I've changed my workflow so much since this project started and I think in part it's due to this project turning out the way it did. I believe that it helped me become more aware of my job role in the 'real world' and I learnt how to just deal with things and get it done anyway.

I was genuinely worried that this post would be a bit ranty so before I started I made a pro/con list that I kept with me as I wrote:

Pros
- Worked well as a team
- Learned something new
- Worked with actors in a professional setting
- Created a group dynamic

Cons
- When I give you a deadline stick to it because there's probably a reason behind it.
- Not as organised as I would have liked
- 2 day shoot my decision (Not quite but we left casting late due to the late script change)
- I didn't realise film needed a bigger tech rehearsal than  the one I allotted
- Communication
- When I was calm everyone else was also calm which meant to get stuff done I had to stress out
- People didn't research there roles until last minute meaning quite a few last minute decisions

I may come back and write more once I've reflected on this a bit longer but right now I'm leaving it as it is - a break would be nice about now.