i am very sorry to the class not only for failing to demonstrate my light, but forgetting to upload the video of it working… anyway here it is, in case any of you were curious…
Paige’s Video
If anyone wants to watch my Forever Young video just click the link. It’s on my facebook but is set that everyone can view it so I hope it works! Enjoy.
Gabriel’s Final Project
Finally on Youtube Yay!
The Experiment – featuring Dr. Ekulsen Pete
What an exciting predicament that was not so exciting I was in. Forced to recede from my original ideas to the extent where I didn’t have to be a physics master, it opened up new possibilities to enhance my own film making abilities. Hence the wording of it being an experiment. Still, I did not want to stray too far from my notions of a Rube Goldbergian/Pythagoras Switch creation so I started off making contraptions which fell apart in lieu of filming. I captured as much of my meager first attempts as I was able, but cut most of it out in processing and editing, as consequence, the video is lacking in the extra minute or so length that I would have required to obtain more of the atmosphere I wanted to build. I had some footage of Doctor Ekulsen running up the stairs, that didn’t work with the rest of it all because I wanted to keep a balance between him and the other elements, but as for the future, I definitely acquired some good shots to use in other projects or even possibly a recreation or better crack at this coconut. All in all, I think that I worked within my capabilities to produce something that was better all around rather than overambitious and lacking.
Watch the video on youtube here.
Gabriel’s Final Project
My final project was a music video for the songs “If I Had a Heart” and “Concrete Walls” both by Fever Ray. The main theme in my video is witchcraft and black magic, I was inspired by a book I found in the library of symbology, which featured a varied range of symbols from old civilizations such as: Aztecs, Egyptians, Chinese, Greek… etc. It was very interesting to look up some symbols we use in modern life and figure out they used to have a completely different meaning in the past. I also enjoyed doing some research about the occult and pagan belief and trying to revive what we have lost through modernity, technology and logic. for me art it self is not something logical, therefore I wanted this video to make no sense at all, but at the same time to make people experience different emotions and reactions while watching it. I used the Lowell lightning kit – which was really heave by the way 🙂 – but very useful, and helped me achieve the images I wanted to create. I played around with some candles, ink and water, filming myself and my electronic project 😛 (at least I got to use that) I also spent a lot of time editing it, which was really hard; I did it in Final Cut Express – which I learned to use in this class. and I am pretty happy with the results… I think if I would revisit this concept in the future, probably I would make the video much longer, not feature myself, and add lots of weird effects 😛 Thanks for everything, I think this class has been the most useful so far, I learnt to use a bunch of new programs and got lots of freedom to experience everything in my own way.
Best wishes Gabriel.
inspiration:
Stranger Than Kindness – Fever Ray
I think my video is way to heavy, I’ve been having lots of problems trying to upload it, I’ve been trying since yesterday, as soon as I can get it uploaded I’ll post it…
Leon’s Final Project “According to my LUCK”
For my final project I have done a storyboard animatic, which is a rough cut of animations. I choose this project because I like to tell stories, its my passion. And with project I have decided to base it upon my own life! Well kind of…just the things that happened to me for the last couple of months. Everything you see in this short has happened to me since coming to Toronto, unfortunately….
The Premise:
The premise basically revolves around a day in the life of a unfortunate unlucky soul, well me…. and the humorous misfortune that happens to me. The whole video is done without dialogues, the way I see I, is your making a 3 mins videos there’s no point in having dialogues, dialogues create information and background about characters, and with a short like this its really unnecessary. A good storyteller knows that, not that I call myself a good storyteller…. I kind of suck actually. But i liked how this project turned out!
The Process:
I first draw up backgrounds for each scene in my sketchbook, which totaled roughly around 36 scenes. Then draw the animation on post-it notes, I do it on post-it notes because the material on them can been seen through, this way I can make sure I’m animating over the backgrounds and previous animation cel properly, they act as a sort of flip-book if you will. Then scan them into Photoshop where I would clean them up and prep them for editing in Adobe Premier. I much prefer Adobe Premier over Final Cut for the sole reason of having the feature of editing your Photoshop work and premier would be directly correspond to whatever you do in Photoshop, a very handy tool especially if you’re doing traditional animation.
– Draw backgrounds onto sketchbook
– Draw the animation on Post-It notes over the backgrounds
– scan them then clean and crop them for editing
– then finally edit and animate them in Adobe Premier!
Challenges:
The biggest Challenge i had with this project was definitely the time constraint, i realized that this would be time consuming, but i definitely underestimated the time it takes to do up the animation. I had to cut a lot of scenes out. There was actually one scene in which I’m late for my time based media class and as I arrive Kate Hartman gives me a hard time and gets very angry. But that scene would’ve taken too long to edit; the whole process took me around 30 pages of my sketchbook, and 60 animation cels. And right now I realize that I really should put sound effects and some sound in it, I think ill edit that some time in the future. But in the end it’s all worth it eh?
David’s Final Project
So for my final project I decided to make a song because I enjoyed the audio element of our video project’s earlier in the term. I thought that making a song would be fun and take what I learned in that project a step further. I didn’t know exactly what I was looking to record as I hadn’t been playing any music in quite a few months. As I started to get to work I began writing on my guitar and rather quickly a song came together. I made a rough recording on my tape recorder and showed it to my friend who has a recording studio and he let me come in one afternoon and record my song onto his 2 inch tape machine. I played the bass guitar parts to a click track and then played the guitar chords over that. Next I tried to do the drums, but as I am not a drummer, I quickly gave up on that. So I called it a day and asked a drummer friend of mine to listen to my rough song and think of what he could do with drums on it. Luckily he agreed and once the drums were added a few days later, I was amazed that I had something that sounded like a real song. That day I recorded the lyrics that I had written, and had another friend double my voice with hers. I really liked the result of the male/female element to the vocals. So now I had a song with drums and vocals but it still sounded thin or maybe a little amateurish. My friend suggested that I start to layer guitar parts and that really is what started to make the song sound distinct. I just kept going and going with the guitar parts basically for the rest of the three hours my friend had given me to use his studio space. I was extremely lucky to have this kind of a resource available to me, as everything I could have ever needed to make a professional recording was made available to me. So now I had about ten guitar parts and a bass track, drums, and multiple vocal tracks of me and my friend Julie. I could now start mixing in Logic Pro and about a week later I had a rough mix happening that I liked and with a few last minute overdubs of a little synthesizer and adding effects like reverb and compression, all of a sudden I was finished. Then I continued to tamper with the mix and and almost ruined what I had by overmixing. I should have left it alone but I couldn’t resist and had to stay up all night fixing what I had done. I subtracted a few guitar parts and got it back to the kind of sound that I had wanted, and overall I was really pleased with what I had accomplished. The song is called ‘Life’s Planned’ and I really happy with the result.
p.s I have been trying for two hours to upload the song but can’t so far, I’ll keep trying, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Joelle’s Written Statement
My original concept was to create a film that would echo basic commonalities between people. I wanted to create this sense of similarity as I am fascinated by the idea of familiarity and sameness among people. I feel like it has become a strong theme in my work.
I was originally going to rely heavily on symbolic imagery, as I did not want to use actors but it should have been clear to me that it may prove difficult to make a film about people without any in it. So that idea was quickly substituted.
As far as the symbolic imagery was concerned, I decided that I’m already quite tired of it, so I explored another avenue as I became interested in the idea of reflections and this concept of an alternative likeness. Out of this notion came my inkblot structure idea; the same film, twice, but opposite. This structure also enables the film to be played on a loop. In fact, the way I had originally imagined this project, was as a video installation with a semi-reflective/semi-translucent backdrop, with this film playing on a loop.
The footage was filmed in two afternoons, both back and forth scenes were shot at the same time to facilitate the camera placement and ensure that the shots would be as similar as possible.
While editing I desaturated all of the footage and slowed everything down to approximately 80 per cent speed. The soundtrack I chose consists of a piece called “The Chill Air” by Brian Eno and Harold Budd. I noticed a funny coincidence after the fact; this track is a part of the album named The Plateau of Mirror.
I believe the mood I captured is close to the one I aimed for; stripped, quiet, alienated, close, sameness.
It can be viewed here.
Eduardo’s Final Project
“You will not find it here” or Escapism through water.
Conceptually, my video represents a state of mind. Swimming is, in my personal case, not a physical activity but quite the opposite. For a moment, It liberates my body, my mind, and my imagination from my usual reality. Being surrounded by water puts me in a state of mind where everything becomes unimportant: matter, space, and time.
At the beginning, I thought that showing water, and how its appearance changes depending on light and the time of the day, was going to be enough to represent that state of mind. However, I realized that water was only the bridge. The important thing was how that element affects me and how my mind finds a way to escape. Some people use drugs and others need prayers and beliefs. There are as many rituals as there are people living on this planet. What I needed to say was… let’s escape through water.
With this in mind, I decided that still images, instead of actual video, was more appropriate for my purpose. Since the idea was to create some kind of illusions, and take that concept further to show hallucinations, I needed Photoshop to transform the images of water into something more dynamic and surreal. I needed to change its colour, its texture, and then combine images of myself, water and images of galaxies, fractals, and other illusions.
For two days I took several pictures of the pool, during different times of the day. I added images of myself walking, touching the surface of the water, etc. After that, I spent some time putting everything in order, creating different folders that I called “walking morning”, etc. That helped me a lot to create some sort of narrative.
Since I didn’t want to have any kind of dialogue or sound effects, I started looking for a soundtrack. I listened to different options carefully before deciding that “Heaven”, from the band HEALTH, was the appropriate song choice. What I liked about it was that it was not the stereotypical sound for introspection. Before importing images into iMovie, I put the music in and that gave me the rhythm. The music lead me to the idea of dividing the story into three segments.
The first segment was going to be the moment before getting into the pool, and then the images of me walking inside the water, kind of the first steps into another world. At that point I decided to add some kind of text, and after some research I came across a part in the movie “Caravaggio” by Derek Jarman. I thought it was perfect, because it was poetic, kind of surreal, and very descriptive of a specific moment right before waking up, like coming from a dream to reality.
From that moment the process became more difficult in terms of work. I had the concept and the other two segments very clear (2nd segment: hallucinations, final segment: coming back to reality). I spent three days mixing all the pictures, searching for images of fractals, caves, and other kind of resources, and kept adding them into iMovie. Keeping the same palette of colours and the same dream-like texture was very important.
The final segment, which is the shorter one, was a challenge, since I wanted this to use pictures without any retouching, to show somehow that the mind was coming back to reality. But I needed them to match with the rest, especially with the segment of hallucinations, which is very vibrant in terms of colour and texture. The key was to find the perfect rhythm.
Overall, I am very satisfied with the end result and the experience of this project. It achieved what I wanted to communicate, as well, aesthetically it is very pleasing in my opinion. It was a challenging project, but it was a nice ending for a very interesting class.
Thanks!
Light the Dark by Anna Valerio
For my final project, I created a song and video. As you all saw, I performed the song live in class and had the video playing in the background. Normally I like to play music with a jazzy vibe to it, however I felt ambient would be best for the mood I was trying to portray. I wanted the project to deal with the difference between light and dark and how the two depend on each other. The original track is roughly 4 minutes, so I had to cut it down to 3 for the presentation.
I will post a link to the full version of the song later. Here is a link to my music video Light the Dark.
I also thought I would post the lyrics if anyone wanted to read them.
Light The Dark by Anna Valerio
Trembling fingers
Cold, cold eyes
Your lips are loose
Your heart is paralyzed
Don’t let yourself fade away
Don’t let it all fade to grey
Without dark there can be no light
Light up the darkness
Without black there can be no white
Light up the darkness
Cold chills
Blood rush
Fever fuss
Love and lust
Take a breath
Hold it in
Let it go
From within
Breathe in deep
The words you can’t keep
Let them go
Let me go
Without dark there can be no light
Light up the darkness
Without black there can be no white
Light up the darkness
Take a breath
Hold it in
Let it go
From within
Breathe in deep
The words you can’t keep
Let them go
Let me go
Without dark there can be no light
Light up the darkness
Without black there can be no white
Light up the darkness
Disintegrating into the nothingness that surrounds you
Don’t let it consume you
Without dark there can be no light
Without black there can be no white
I’ll pull you from the shadows
I won’t let you fall, fall, fall…
I’m here
I’m right here