After hearing everyone's pitches on the first day of the assessment, i felt myself wanting to change the way I was presenting my ideas, and do a more of a pitch of myself as a Cinematographer but also mention my desire to try Sound Design.
I was quite relieved that my presentation wasn't till the second day so i could do this.
I went to the library & quickly changed my presentation, making sure I was clear & was obviously expressing an interest in everyone's projects if they wanted me.
I felt like the presentation went well. I knew i wasn't as organised as i should be, i'm never any good at fully organising my personal ideas together, so that always seems a bit of a let down. I also appear to apologise a lot for what I do, and i know i need to work on that because i shouldn't be down about my work, and if i do a pitch in the professional work, i need to be confident otherwise i won't get anywhere!
It seemed like people were interested in working with me, and i expressed my interest to other people.
Here's a couple i've thought about a little bit more.
Solitude
Taken by me
Finding people who have seaked out silence from the world, isolation. But in a more peace & quiet way rather than sad. I think it is a simple concept. Alone.
I want to make an installation that is sensory based. I liked the idea of manipulating an emotion by presenting a video. My last piece was to make people anxious, but this time i want to make something different.I realised that i need it to continue the theme of point of view to get the full effect of being inside someone's mind, and manipulation.
My first idea is based around Tranquility & the idea of finding a calm place. It would involve different booths where people can go to places & feel calm. It could potentially comment on the busy technology filled lives we lead, and how i am also using the same technologies to make people get away from such things so it shows how much of a hold it has on us.
I will ask people about their ideas of tranquility & go to locations in the UK to find places i can film, potentially point of view, and make a soundscape to match. Also potentially some smells to accompany in the booths, and some form of touch. I want it to feel like a real experience.
Through the quick research into tranquility, i have found a link of manipulation within the idea of tranquility. "Within tranquillity studies, much of the emphasis has been placed on understanding the role of vision in the perception of natural environments, which is probably not surprising, considering that upon first viewing a scene its configurational coherence can be established with incredible speed.
Indeed scene information can be captured in a single glance and the gist of a scene determined in as little as 100ms. The speed of processing of complex natural images was tested by Thorpe et al. using colour photographs of a wide range of animals (mammals, birds, reptiles and fish), in their natural environments, mixed with distracters that included pictures of forests, mountains, lakes, buildings and fruit.
During this experiment, subjects were shown an image for 20ms and asked to determine whether it contained an animal or not. The electrophysiological brain responses obtained in this study showed that a decision could be made within 150ms of the image being seen, indicating the speed at which cognitive visual processing occurs. However, audition, and in particular the individual components that collectively comprise the soundscape, a term coined by Schafer to describe the ever present array of sounds that constitute the sonic environment, also significantly inform the various schemata used to characterise differing landscape types. This interpretation is supported by the auditory reaction times, which are 50 to 60ms faster than that of the visual modality. It is also known that sound can alter visual perception. and that under certain conditions areas of the brain involved in processing auditory information can be activated in response to visual stimuli. Research conducted by Pheasant has shown that when individuals make tranquillity assessments based on a uni-modal auditory or visual sensory input, they characterise the environment by drawing upon a number of key landscape and soundscape characteristics. For example, when making assessments in response to visual-only stimuli the percentage of water, flora and geological features present within a scene, positively influence how tranquil a location is perceived to be. Likewise when responding to uni-modal auditory stimuli, the perceived loudness of biological sounds positively influences the perception of tranquillity, whilst the perceived loudness of mechanical sounds have a negative effect. However, when presented with bi-modal auditory-visual stimuli the individual soundscape and landscape components alone no longer influenced the perception of tranquillity. Rather configurational coherence was provided by the percentage of natural and contextual features present within the scene and the equivalent continuous sound pressure level (LAeq)."
It seems that you can manipulate someone's perseptions of what is happening through audio being different to sound. This is making me think of making a project that manipulates the mind & comments also on how there is less and less tranquility in the world. It's all becoming artificial through apps & youtube 'calming' videos. The Visual Illusion Produced By Sound -
http://www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/pdf/ShamsKamitaniCogBrainRes02.pdf The Importance of Auditory-Visual Interaction in the Construction of ‘Tranquil Space’-
"Visual capture is a phenomenon in human perception where people tend to rely most heavily on visual images and the things they see dominate their understanding of a scene. If something feels inconsistent or does not make sense, the brain may unconsciously smooth it out, relying on visual capture to decide how to interpret the information in a way that will feel logical. "
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-visual-capture.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McGurk_effect
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4091305/
The McGurk effect is a phenomenon that demonstrates an interaction between hearing and vision in speech perception. The illusion occurs when the auditory component of one sound is paired with the visual component of another sound, leading to the perception of a third sound. The visual information a person gets from seeing a person speak changes the way they hear the sound."
"Make something i am proud of in terms of beauty, spectacle. Don't be pressured by concept. I need to find a concept while photographing. Photos don't work when planned/pressured to be as planned. Re-discover old places, find new places. Discover the world through the camera."
- my first thoughts from my notebook.
In terms of photography, throughout university i have found myself having trouble with trying to bring concepts into photography. I always have plans or feel pressured to plan & then when i execute them, they don't really work out how i wanted.
In the third year, i would like to use photography a bit differently from how i had used it in the past. It is still a big part of my life and i would like to be able to showcase these skills to a bigger audience at the graduation show as well as developing my skills. As i said above, i do think that finding different ideas & trying to produce outcomes throughout the year will help, but i have still been trying to think of any concepts that i could explore. If i do these and then they fail, i know i will have to keep going and keep trying to push myself and my photographs.
Idea 1: Beeching
I feel like this idea is something i have already seen or heard, but it popped into my mind while i was researching. I was thinking of doing a project about where i come from, but putting my location into flickr & google always comes up with trains. It reminded me of my dad & Beeching. My dad used to be a train driver, and throughout my young and adult life, i have known of Beeching and the effect he had on the railways. We have visited lots of old railways and places that have been turned into new walks etc. I find it interesting that even 50 years later, you can see the effect it has had on both the landscape and the towns that were left without a rail system. I would like to visit a select number of locations and find out more from local people about how it effected them, as well as photographing what has been left behind.
Idea 2: Autumn
Even though i know i'd have to do this pretty quickly, i'd love to document the different colours of autumn. I'd like to be able to pick many different leaves & show the subtle differences in colour between each one. I am facinated by colour and nature so it would be a nice mix of both. I'd like to single out each leaf and potentially put it on a lightbox to show the makings of the leaf.
I have always been interested in cinematography since the beginning & it is still something i am passionate about. I love visualising films & i feel in control when i am on set, especially with lighting. I feel like i have a good eye for it. I also feel like i have a good ear for sound. I know sound is a lot more neglected in film & i always want to create films that have paid attention to the sound design, so i want to make films that both have visuals that i have crafted, but also sound design that i have thought about and edited. I am not entirely sure how i can balance these two roles though. I could design the sound but have somebody else record it, and me mix it while i am on set with the cinematography, but i'm not sure whether this will work.
It's hard when i know i should be focusing on a role, and i am, but i always have this niggling thought of 'oh but i love sound, and i know i'm good at it, but i am a cinematographer' which maybe isn't a good idea? Hmm.
I like street photography because i like how you can create a story as to what happened from the image. i'd like to be able to capture moments, capture real emotions & situations.
Halloween/new year/christmas -
celebration related but afterwards on the street - worn etc
inspired by the time I was on the tube, and we stopped at a station & on the other side of the platform was another tube. More people were dressed up just like us, and we had this shared moment of 'oh yay more halloween people!' and they pointed & cheered as the train went off. I like how during special occasions, people seem to have better attitudes & spirits towards people and everything around them.
At the first introduction to the third year, I was quite nervous but excited to make new and bigger projects. I'd focused my attention on Al's film mostly before coming back. I'd kind of lost confidence in myself after the second year. Partly due to my work not being 100% in my eyes, but also because i didn't feel organised.
I felt like i could have acheived so much more & better work had i focused & possibly asked for more help.
Rosie mentioned wanting people to use the university space to out advantage & it made me think about creating some personal projects.
I thought about it and & my focus was pointed to photography and installation.
I have always done photography, but i still don't feel like i've pushed myself enough with the medium so i wanted to focus on new ideas & concepts.
With installation, i wanted to push my ideas of last year & take it to the next level.
I want to push myself to the limit this year. I really want to be able to know that i have put my heart and soul into every piece of work, researched intensely so i have a complete understanding of my work, the audience, the astestics. Everything that would make a film a film.
I want to:
Perfect my time management skills and become a lot more focused & organised
be living and breathing my projects, try to put as much as i can in to each of them
if i have specific roles, study extensively and try to effectively work in a team
Enhance my existing skills during production
Just try to make myself a complete professional, which involves believing that I can be who I want to be, and also putting in the hours to get to that level.
I want to leave university proud of a piece of work knowing I did everything i possibly could to make it.
We spent quite a while trying to find an animator to be on our project, but we were having no luck.
We decided it might be better to focus it all on live action, & possibly use the idea of a childs imagination to fuel the art direction of the film.
This interested me because i am heavily influenced by directors and stories that utilise this style in their work.
I thought of different ways in which i could present the set.
I thought of paper like styles because Al had mentioned possibly vooming into a script. I also thought this would be interesting as you could cover most of it in childs drawings.
I also took inspiration from The Mighty Boosh and wondered whether we could project our backgrounds into the scene to make it seem more two dimensional & 'childlike'
Inspirations:
Bunny & The Bull
Bunny and the Bull is set inside the imagination of a man, following his memories up to the point of a tramatic event. The film utilises the idea of him being inside by basing each section of the film around different parts of his house. I was interested in this idea because it was focused on the mind, but also i loved the different art styles they used.
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