When confronted with Time-Art I was made to watch the film Samsara to which I realised something, Time-Lapses are absolutely incredible, and so pretty much instantly I needed a reason to do one. A few days later I was reminded by my optician that I needed to have another check up for my eyes, to which I became rather curious about how my eyes have, and will develop over the years.
I decided that I personally wanted to represent birth, life, and death, through 3 simple metaphors being sunrise (in a place for children to play), midday (showing monotonous work), and sunset (being in a calming field/farm. The time-lapses themselves were somewhat simple however the devil is in the detail and I will say that exposure and focus are nightmares to control as I especially learned during the sunset scene, and while I could make the excuse that the slight lack of focus is for the eyesight problems of old age, it really was a dumb mistake in filming
in terms of eyesight problems presented the retina was represented by a reverse keyed lens flare to create a small iris effect, loss of focus was made of Gaussian blurs with some masking for distance, cataracts was a reversed light ray made to be black and blink effects were small animations. The piece was mostly about using keyframes to set up slow blur increases and so on, and while I do hope to use more complex systems in the future, finding methods to reverse light rays and key them out became easily the most complex part of the project as they weren't conventional techniques and therefore not covered by lynda.com (for reference the technique is to make a green screen with light rays and then key and reverse the effects separately).
While I am reasonably happy with the end project for each I worry that it lacks any effective use of the 3 screens and instead adopts a more simplistic approach, the blinking arguably also looks unnatural due to it being limited to a 25fps limit for the animation that is a full 7 frames long. In the end what is achieved is some interesting time lapses and ideas, but I'd argue that it lacks the complexity of idea to make it stand-out in any way.
Showing posts with label Image Factory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Image Factory. Show all posts
Thursday, 10 April 2014
A Load of Stuff About Sound, Hoorah (or Hooray)
When creating my sound piece, I was given this particular picture of Louise Borgeois' Maman: 
Maman is a large spider sculpture that is supposed to be representative of the sculptor's mother, who was a weaver. The large metal sculpture with small eggs inside the main compartment is based on that of a connection, a deep sentimentality and ultimately a sense of solace in the abstract. I absolutely fucking hate spiders so to say my first reaction was that of distaste and a slight amount of fear is no exaggeration. However to me from this picture what I began to see was not simply a large spider, but a collective connection between people, like thoughts bubbling into a cloud of data, yet that spider was there, it bridged the connections between people and yet it was scary to me, and no one seemed to be noticing in the picture; personally I wanted my sound project to reflect that feeling.
The first inspiration for the spider itself it reminded me of an image from a personal favourite manga/anime series "aku no hana", in particular the flower of evil that appears at the end of the first episode has a distinctive crackling sound, it's distorted, has an odd bass backing, and it's almost static-like input both gives the feeling of this electronic frontier and an added sense of fear from myself, however that fear most likely stems from my association of radio interference with monsters in the "silent Hill" series of video games!
For the rest of the sound I took some standard recordings in similar environments to the picture for backing, and used several royalty-free ringtones and crowd and recorded conversation noises from a sound studio recording and started to distort them, each with reverberation to reflect the large open space, but also with slow build-ups, reversed sounds of the people, and increasing volumes to gain this sense of overwhelming the listener. This was based partially on extracts from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass in terms of it's method of starting comprehensible and building up to the point of pure incomprehensible babble. It was from that sense of overwhelming that I attempted to make the sound feel almost fearful before cutting out to show no one noticing it at all.
I feel what I should criticise in this piece is perhaps in the sense of pacing and that the end doesn't overwhelm as much as it perhaps is aiming to do, perhaps by adding more people and extra more digital effects such as white noise I could have furthered that sense to its logical conclusion, however the one minute restriction does lead to a sense of wanting a longer build up, that and the crowd sounds are arguably a bit quiet and that i potentially overstepped the dynamic range of common audio equipment; however personally I'm rather happy with it, I set out to make a less literal and more abstract interpretation of the picture, and I'd like to think I have completed that goal!
Maman is a large spider sculpture that is supposed to be representative of the sculptor's mother, who was a weaver. The large metal sculpture with small eggs inside the main compartment is based on that of a connection, a deep sentimentality and ultimately a sense of solace in the abstract. I absolutely fucking hate spiders so to say my first reaction was that of distaste and a slight amount of fear is no exaggeration. However to me from this picture what I began to see was not simply a large spider, but a collective connection between people, like thoughts bubbling into a cloud of data, yet that spider was there, it bridged the connections between people and yet it was scary to me, and no one seemed to be noticing in the picture; personally I wanted my sound project to reflect that feeling.
The first inspiration for the spider itself it reminded me of an image from a personal favourite manga/anime series "aku no hana", in particular the flower of evil that appears at the end of the first episode has a distinctive crackling sound, it's distorted, has an odd bass backing, and it's almost static-like input both gives the feeling of this electronic frontier and an added sense of fear from myself, however that fear most likely stems from my association of radio interference with monsters in the "silent Hill" series of video games!
For the rest of the sound I took some standard recordings in similar environments to the picture for backing, and used several royalty-free ringtones and crowd and recorded conversation noises from a sound studio recording and started to distort them, each with reverberation to reflect the large open space, but also with slow build-ups, reversed sounds of the people, and increasing volumes to gain this sense of overwhelming the listener. This was based partially on extracts from Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass in terms of it's method of starting comprehensible and building up to the point of pure incomprehensible babble. It was from that sense of overwhelming that I attempted to make the sound feel almost fearful before cutting out to show no one noticing it at all.
I feel what I should criticise in this piece is perhaps in the sense of pacing and that the end doesn't overwhelm as much as it perhaps is aiming to do, perhaps by adding more people and extra more digital effects such as white noise I could have furthered that sense to its logical conclusion, however the one minute restriction does lead to a sense of wanting a longer build up, that and the crowd sounds are arguably a bit quiet and that i potentially overstepped the dynamic range of common audio equipment; however personally I'm rather happy with it, I set out to make a less literal and more abstract interpretation of the picture, and I'd like to think I have completed that goal!
Thursday, 13 February 2014
Osmosis - Treatment
Osmosis is a 3 screened (each screen at resolution 1080 x 1920 Portrait) display based on the nature of eyesight over one's life. This is achieved by the left screen representing birth/infancy, the central screen representing the main part of one's life, and the last representing the latter stages of one's life. This is done over 3 Time-lapses in fields of 15 seconds each:
- The Birth Time-lapse: This is a time-lapse of sunrise (sun coming from the left of the frame) with a baby-milk bottle or rattle at the bottom-left third of the frame. The Screen fades in from black to reveal all in geometric, colourless shapes (most likely using rotoscoping to give this effect); this quickly fades into primary colours and then slowly fades into an out of focus, blurred version of the video with correct colouring; by the end of the 15 second loop this blur should recede entirely to reveal the image in it's original state.
- The Life Time-Lapse: This is a time-lapse of daytime (sun going over top center frame) with a computer monitor in center frame, every couple of seconds it will begin to blur which will be followed by quick frame cuts to opticians and glasses, once it's cut back to the time-lapse the frame is back to being in focus and this process repeats itself as the time-lapse continues.
- The Old-Age Time-Lapse: This is a time-lapse of sundown (sun leaving across the right of the frame) with a newspaper on the crossword section and a pencil at the bottom-right of the frame. as the time-lapse goes on there'll be loss of foreground focus, followed light-tearing on the screen, and cloudy spots developing and encroaching the screen like cataracts. the problems worsen as the sun goes down as the frame goes into pure darkness where it remains for the rest of its loop, symbolising death.
Shooting can be done over the course of a single weekend (weather allowing) with permissin from either a local park are or done in the privacy of garden grounds. This can be done simply using a High Definition DSLR with a Large memory storage space and automatic timers for taking photographs over set periods of time. for a 3 hour space of time to be captured on screen at 25 fps format for the image sequence then for a 15 second loop the pictures will be automatically needed every 28 seconds approximately with careful need to look after the camera and check the framing, luckily as the camer aill be facing more towards the sun there is little risk of self shadow getting in the way, however it is rather likely that multiple shoots may be necessary as it is more a game of patience and thus having multiple takes of the same time scene allows optimal choice for the best one, therefore filming should be seen as perhaps a 3-4 free day based affair.
Once this is done the chosen sequences will be imported into Adobe After effects where the correct filters can be customised and applied to each sequence.
During showings of one minute long each scene will run fully from left-to-right with the next one being triggered by the last sequence finishing. after te 3rd sequence all will play simulaneously before starting this loop again. If the screens are labelled in numbers in order from left to right then the loop will precede as:
1 then 2 then 3 then 1+2+3.
Childhood problems based on: http://www.babycentre.co.uk/a6508/developmental-milestones-sight
Life-Problems based on: My Awful Eyes
Old-Age Problems Based on: http://www.webmd.com/eye-health/vision-problems-aging-adults
Thursday, 30 January 2014
Illness, the need for more posts, and 3 more important ideas!
Okay, so as the title suggests I am rather ill at the moment...now that I have your sympathy I will soon ask you for donation money to give me more chocolate! that is all for that matter.
The second part suggests that I need to write more of these damned posts, something about being essential to the course or whatever...that makes me REALLY think I should be posting far more frequently.
Okay that bit's now over and done with, so now time for 3 ideas for a 3 portrait-screened looping up to 1 minute art piece thingamajig:
1. Diluted
The idea of this piece is to have 3 screens that run in different times to each other with a single person using this interaction to create imagery through scenes overlaying with each other. The center screen containing the person plays in real time and for the mos part will be at a mid shot so that the person can reach their arm out of one screen and into another. the left screen is slow-motion, however that effect is activated every time the arm passes through the screen, that means that through swiping ones arm across the screen twice one would see 2 arms, by using different speeds and several arm movements one can make odd and beautiful patterns and sequences. The right screen will make several periodic screenshots every few seconds that overlay on one another to create new shapes or patterns or pictures. using a green screen these effects would be possible if several layers and a 60fps or more recording device was used to create smooth slow motion and that the main challenge would be that of choreography and creating the overlays on top of each other. if ambition would take hold then the idea of perhaps dropping an object in the still frame and picking it out again would be a hugely interesting effect and one I'd personally love to do, however the question of how is a hugely pervasive one.
2. Osmosis
This one's a bit odd because it's rather simple and abstract in concept but essentially revolves around my fascination with the fact that my eyesight is consistently getting worse every year, and plus since Samsara almost all of me has wanted to do time-lapses, in this case the obvious idea of morning, noon and night which are also to be used as metaphors for birth, life, and death. Birth in this case is all about fading in from blurs and colour-blindness as children under 1 are still developing eyesight and suffer many problems from it. Life in this case is slowly blurring but consistently stopped by the act of changing the lens, in this case the putting on of glasses that'll clear it up after small readjustment period followed by a blur and looping etc. Death is to include blurred spots and burnt image reminiscent of things like cataracts with a slow blur and fade to black that'll loop directly into the birth scenario.
3. Monotony
scenes of walking crowds wearing business attire shot so that only the waste down can be seen walk towards the center screen from their respective scene (so left walks to right, right walks to left etc.) an this short clip on both sides will be looped but slowly getting faster and faster, the middle screen takes both these images and merges the 2 images together with the faster and faster loops overlapping previous loops and causing a sense of chaos in this crossover from just this simple image, once the middle screen is completely incomprehensible it'll all stop, rewind, and start all over again.
The second part suggests that I need to write more of these damned posts, something about being essential to the course or whatever...that makes me REALLY think I should be posting far more frequently.
Okay that bit's now over and done with, so now time for 3 ideas for a 3 portrait-screened looping up to 1 minute art piece thingamajig:
1. Diluted
The idea of this piece is to have 3 screens that run in different times to each other with a single person using this interaction to create imagery through scenes overlaying with each other. The center screen containing the person plays in real time and for the mos part will be at a mid shot so that the person can reach their arm out of one screen and into another. the left screen is slow-motion, however that effect is activated every time the arm passes through the screen, that means that through swiping ones arm across the screen twice one would see 2 arms, by using different speeds and several arm movements one can make odd and beautiful patterns and sequences. The right screen will make several periodic screenshots every few seconds that overlay on one another to create new shapes or patterns or pictures. using a green screen these effects would be possible if several layers and a 60fps or more recording device was used to create smooth slow motion and that the main challenge would be that of choreography and creating the overlays on top of each other. if ambition would take hold then the idea of perhaps dropping an object in the still frame and picking it out again would be a hugely interesting effect and one I'd personally love to do, however the question of how is a hugely pervasive one.
2. Osmosis
This one's a bit odd because it's rather simple and abstract in concept but essentially revolves around my fascination with the fact that my eyesight is consistently getting worse every year, and plus since Samsara almost all of me has wanted to do time-lapses, in this case the obvious idea of morning, noon and night which are also to be used as metaphors for birth, life, and death. Birth in this case is all about fading in from blurs and colour-blindness as children under 1 are still developing eyesight and suffer many problems from it. Life in this case is slowly blurring but consistently stopped by the act of changing the lens, in this case the putting on of glasses that'll clear it up after small readjustment period followed by a blur and looping etc. Death is to include blurred spots and burnt image reminiscent of things like cataracts with a slow blur and fade to black that'll loop directly into the birth scenario.
3. Monotony
scenes of walking crowds wearing business attire shot so that only the waste down can be seen walk towards the center screen from their respective scene (so left walks to right, right walks to left etc.) an this short clip on both sides will be looped but slowly getting faster and faster, the middle screen takes both these images and merges the 2 images together with the faster and faster loops overlapping previous loops and causing a sense of chaos in this crossover from just this simple image, once the middle screen is completely incomprehensible it'll all stop, rewind, and start all over again.
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