Monday
This week we were working in groups on our short film for our cross-course collaboration project. Our group's theme was 'cube,' and we quickly came up with a few ideas inspired by the prompt image and the cafes around us, of a metal cube on a sandy beach, of using ice cubes and brown sugar cubes to represent the sand and water, and thinking about what we could do with them. We decided to use Monday for ideas generation, use the two days where the group would be split for interchange for preparation, and then come back on Thursday to film and use Friday for editing the film together.
Thinking about collections we could visit, we decided on Norwich castle, with it being the biggest cube in the area, as well as it looking to be made of sandstone (further research revealed it to actually be limestone, but the colour is still very reminiscent). Inside was a large exhibition on dolls' houses - we thought the idea of a cube, in this case a room, containing an environment was an interesting one, and discussed some ideas about how we could implement this in a film. There were some ideas about using a 3D scene in combination with found footage, but these ideas quickly became very technically challenging and out of scope, especially for the fine art members of the team.
After some discussion with a tutor we returned to our ice and sugar cubes idea, but decided to combine it with the cube container concept and use Norwich castle as our object, creating a folding cube net which could be opened up to reveal a structure of ice and sugar cubes, which would then melt away. We would then play the video in reverse and dramatically sped up to make it look as if the castle was constructing itself from the melted materials. During our research we found that Norwich actually has a long history in growing and refining sugar, so the historical link was an interesting one to turn up.
Wednesday
We each took one element of the film to prepare, mine was the cube net, due to the fact that I had the most digital painting expertise of the group. I only had time to paint one wall due to the interchange event during the middle of the project, but filming was done from straight in front of the structure, so it didn't ultimately matter too much.
I did a lot of thinking about how to construct the cube to give the best effect when it was unfolded, and how we would trigger the unfolding process. After making a couple of test cubes, the best idea I came up with was to use separated sheets for each wall connected by masking tape, instead of a single folded sheet, to allow the walls to fall away cleanly when the trigger was used, rather than slowly and unevenly unfolding. To keep the sides together and provide an easy release, I made a small 'hat' for the structure which could be easily and quickly lifted off, making sure to make it slightly bigger than the walls so that they fell outwards instead of inwards. It was nice to think my way through a technical problem and get my hands on some physical media; I really enjoyed the process and was very satisfied with the end result.
When it came to filming, we had a couple of issues like not having enough ice cubes to build a big enough structure for the net, and that the sugar cubes were rough-hewn which made stacking them rather difficult. We probably could have communicated better in order to avoid these problems, but we found ways around them in the end, like stacking the cubes higher in the front to compensate for the lack of materials.
Friday
We spent the day editing the film together; it took a little longer than expected. None of the team really had a lot of experience with video editing, so it was a learning experience for all of us and involved a lot of researching on sites like youtube and just experimenting with the programme to find how to do what we wanted. We used adobe premier for the editing and sped up the video, unfortunately even though the audio sounded really interesting at that speed, there were some problems exporting it that neither we nor the technicians in the media lab could fix, so we ended up abandoning the audio in favour of a silent video, which another team member added some ambient sound to over the weekend. 
In terms of effects, the video quality was a bit shaky due to the fluorescent lighting in the room we were using, so we decided to take advantage of that and go for a more vintage footage effect. We desaturated the footage and added a vignette, as well as adjusting the colour balance to bring out the yellows. The end result had a great texture to it and I was really pleased with how it turned out considering the time frame, I think our group worked really well together and it was nice to interact with others who had very different working methods from mine.
Interchange
For interchange I signed up for a full-day location drawing session at Strumpshaw Fen. I'm aware that environment drawing is a weakness of mine by comparison with the rest of my work, so I wanted to try a session to put me out of my comfort zone and try to strengthen my skills in the area. For the morning I focused on taking pictures and just looking at the environment, before moving onto drawing in the afternoon.
Despite my trying to focus on the landscape, I continually found myself drawn to the birds and fungi in the area. I tried to keep my drawings of these to a minimum and focus on the enviroment, but over the course of the day I realised that I need to be able to use solid blocks of color when creating landscapes to avoid becoming swamped in unnecessary line detail. The parts of the day I enjoyed most were when I allowed myself to do some quick gesture drawings of the birds in the area, in particular the swans with their long curved necks were really fun to sketch.
I tried to vary the line weight here to create depth, not sure of how effective it was.
Below I tried using some artbar blocks (like a watercolour pastel), thinking that I could use them over each other to build up the drawing, but they turned out to be too transparent to paint on top of each other, so it looks very washed out and lacks depth.
Here I did two studies of the same scene in different media, focusing on not going into too much detail and showing what was going on with as little visual information as possible.
The day was a really good experience, although after spending all day landscape sketching I'm not convinced it's an area I want to focus on, or at least not with the materials I was using. I find landscapes uninteresting compared to individual living forms, but I think using something more solid like acrylic or oil paint would make the experience more enjoyable for me, or maybe I just need more practise in the area.
No comments:
Post a Comment