Light Workshop with Anne

Our workshop with Anne was extremely helpful for learning how to light a set successfully. I learned the importance of light, and how depending on what angles, distance and filters used depends on how the light is projected and therefor tone it creates. We were set tasks in which we could set up red heads with different colour spun's to get creative and create different types of light. We set up a blue and red light to create contrast and give the photo/video of myself an unnatural artsy feel. We then had the task of creating a low lit room, where we would film us playing a card game. Some people could say we went slightly overboard with the video, however I think we successfully manage to set up the light well.

Eyes and reflections

LOOKING GLASS from Benjamin Lebeau on Vimeo.

For my time art project one of the screens is going to be a close up of an eye, with the reflection inside it. I've been looking at tutorials and different techniques people have used to do this. I really like the video above, as it shows some really nice close ups of different eyes. You can see the different colours and textures within the iris, as well as a slight reflection of the surroundings. This was a similar technique I wanted to go for, so I tried this out in After Effects.

Firstly I shot a close up of an eye, and made it slightly bigger so it was just the eye in the frame.

I then colour corrected it to make it look less warm/orange and make the blue and the texture of the eye stand out more. I also stabilise it as because I had to hold the camera close to the face and it was hard to do so on a tripod, the clip came out a little shaky. However, the stabilisation tool worked well, and has kept it from moving.

To add a reflection, I used the erase tool to cut the picture to the right size of the iris, and changed its opacity to make it seem like more of a reflection.

 Even though this worked well, I still have to find a way to be able to make is disappear and change to a different reflection when the subject blinks.

Heart Beat Monitor

My first attempt to create a heartbeat monitor did not go so well even though I followed the video. Hopefully I will find a way for it to work successfully over an existing video for one of my screens, where I am going to show the change in heart rate.

Sounds I need to record

After presenting my 3 ideas, the last idea was the best one and can be explored a lot more.

Idea 3
Some one opens all the boxes which each contain a different item with a sound. The person will go around leaving each box open, and as another one is opened it will add another layer of sound which will in the end result in a track made up off different sound effects, similar to the tracks created for the album One Pig - Matthew Herbert. At the end, the person will climb into a box and the sound will go muffled.

Joe told me to think about what sounds come from the boxes and if they will relate to each other. He also suggested in making the sounds personal to me. When I think about boxes to me its reminds me of all my old memories and toys that have been packed away for years being opened and looked at again. 

I want to implement this personal idea in my sound project but using the sound of toys to create a musical track. 

Here is a list of possibly toy noises I could use just by thinking of my childhood toys:

• Wind up toy ticking
• Jack In a box
• Buttons from a toy cd player
• Squeaky barbie doll limbs
• Musical box
• Tamagotchi sounds
• Spinner
• Gameboy
• Slinky
• Operation game noise
• Lego In a box
• Robot dog
• Ferby
• Rubix Cube
• Scalextric
• Toy cash register 
• Spinning top
• Connect 4
• 
  

I want the tone to be positive, so I need to make sure the track is upbeat, and the toy noises do not make the piece sounds too creepy. I want it to reflect the positive aspects of my childhood, with every box that is opened revealing a new toy.

Time Art Filming

Our time art piece went fairly well, and managed to film everything, the rest just needs to be created on After Effects. I showed Josh some videos and filmed how he responded to it. To make my time art piece effective it will have to go through a lot of editing and overlaying of effects to make it more visually interesting, in which I will do over the next few days to create my rough cut. Even though I was a bit behind schedule I am now catching up!

Josh enjoying himself being used as a experiment for my Time Art film!

Photography Main Idea

Being at home for a couple of days has really helped me and allowed me to take home lots of old photos which could possibly been used in my main photography project. It has also inspired me as my parents told me the story behind a lot of the photos which was interesting.

I have now collected a lot of photos, and have scanned them into my computer, where I hope to experiment, but collaging them into the ideas I had in the previous posts.

Im going to start of by using the outline of me and other family members at different ages, to represent humans at each stage in my life.

 After thing I was thinking of collaging pictures of me and my parents when they were a baby onto this, and change the colour so it corresponds with the colours from the original photo Im using the baby shape for. If this doesn't look good then I will just use the outline and randomly collage pictures inside. I have a lot of pictures so hopefully I can play around a lot with this idea.

Essentially I want it to kinda look like this picture but just using photographs instead digitally.

I will also being taking my own pictures for the teenage/adult stage. Today I took a picture of myself and Josh which I could use for one of the photos.

Andrew Carnie

I really like Andrew Carnie's work, as it combines images of the human exterior with unusual images of the interior. This is something I could consider for one of my screens, in order the make it more interesting. I could have a video of the heat beating over laid with exterior shots, so the viewer can see what is happening inside and outside the body. I want to also make sure the backdrop/ background is dark or black so the audience can focus just on the subject of the screens, and nothing detracts away from the purpose of them.

The Life Cycle

Looking back on my ideas I feel ideas could a bit too personal. One thing I noticed looking at old photos is that there is a broad selection of my family at different ages and it was funny to see the change in their appearance over time. using old photographs and photoshop I could create a life cycle showing how we age over time, and representing how hard it is for us to remember how we looked like when we were younger, however with photos it holds those memories, and you can see how you have changed physically over the years.

I will need to research how I could possibly do this, however for now I am going to experiment with the silhouette technique as I feel I could possibly use this to show the life cycle.

I've been feeling stressed lately due to the work load from university and weekend work, so I decided to visit home for the next couple of days to relax. Going home has not only made me feel more relaxed, i've realised it could actually possibly inspire my photography and sound piece. My parents took a big box down from the loft full of photo albums of when most of the family and I were younger. This is something I definantly want to take advantage of for my photography project.

Marina Abramovic

I was looking at how artist uses the human body to create art, and come across this shocking article showing the extremes artists will go to, to create something that has a large impact on an audience.  The artist let the audience do whatever they wanted to her without her resisting. At first the played around with her (tickled ect), but after a while they became more aggressive such as taring off clothes, pressing thorns into her stomach, and drawing a knife to her neck.  This went on for several hours. This is very much based on the human psychology, and how we can react towards other people.

http://www.cracked.com/article_20116_7-horrifying-uses-human-body-to-create-art_p2.html


Even though this is very extreme, and I wont do this to my subject for my Time art. I want to adopt the technique of the subject (who is going to be in my time art piece) to react to certain videos/ images to see there change in response exteriorly, as well as showing what goes on inside the body.

Sound Main project ideas

I have several different ideas in which I think that could make an interesting experimental sound project for the picture that has been selected for me, EMBANKMENT.

Inspiration for my sound project 

In this movie I really liked the scene where she was sent a tape, and has to listen at the surroundings on the tape in to trace the man she is looking for steps. I wanted to do this for my project so the listener can picture the individual walking around the room, and have a good sense of setting.





Idea 1
The room will have different people looking at the exhibit and talking about it. The perspective of how we will here the sound is from one individual who will be walking around the room.  You will hear foot steps of the person, and they will occasionally stop. Depending on what side the people will be when the individual walks past them will be playing through the corresponding speaker, so the listener has a good understanding on where the people are standing.

This was my first idea, however I felt that this could be possibly boring, and won't experiment with sound enough, as I want to include and variety of sounds including dialogue, ambience and sound effects in my piece.


Idea 2
Walking/ running around the room looking in boxes but finding items (which make sound) inside. The person appears to possibly be running away from someone or something. At the end of the sound piece you will hear the person climb into the box, and here the muffled footsteps of the person who was chasing them walk past.

I could take a more mainstream approach and make it like a scene in a movie, where alarms are going off and the individual is running away from security/people.

Idea 3
Some one opens all the boxes which each contain a different item with a sound. The person will go around leaving each box open, and as another one is opened it will add another layer of sound which will in the end result in a track made up off different sound effects, similar to the tracks created for the album One Pig - Matthew Herbert. At the end, the person will climb into a box and the sound will go muffled.


Sounds I have already collected

Spending too much time on tumblr...

Recently in my spare time I have realised I have been spending a lot of time on tumblr looking through photos and memes in which have consumed many hours of my life. However I though recently I would put this website to use, as even thought a lot of  it doesn't display photography from well known people it certainly gives me a lot of inspiration.

For my life cycle piece I could display it similar to these pictures, as from whatever angle and perspective you will see the piece from it can be easily interpreted, reflecting that we can see life in different ways.

I could either college the photos within the shape of a person as they are growing up similar to this image

however in a circle with the photos collaged within, or I could collage the images in the shape of leaves, and maybe tint the images to the same colour of that change in colour on the leaves, starting with the green colour of pictures when me and my family were babies, to the dark purple colour of when my older family members.

If this idea doesn't really work or is slightly boring when presented I could possible make each collage picture I make almost morph into each other similar to the pictures I found on tumblr below, however this technique would need me researching tutorials on how to do this.

I will probably post sketches of my idea soon as it is hard to type exactly what I visualise for my piece. However I hope it displays a balance of personal reflections as well as something that can be interpreted and understood from another viewer.

The Life Cycle of Us

" Nothing is normal in life because change is constant which is actually a conundrum in it of itself. Life is a conundrum so it is a cycle that is to repeat over and over again. This has been written before and will be written again. Not surprising." 

~Ava Stanko

I just wanted to try and understand the idea of life cycles and how they are perceived, especially for humans. I feel like someone life could be a life cycle that continues to go around, even when it comes to the end of an individuals life cycle and they pass, memories, photographs and items will remain and their life will be relived through these memories. I want to show that in my photography project. I want to take the 5 individual photos and bring them into one big piece/ instalment, displayed in the shape of a cycle.

I kind of like this picture as it suggests that maybe there is more to the life cycles that people can see and that there is hope beyond the grave. Something that could also be explored in my photography.

The Boundaries of Life and Death from Saskia Kretzschmann on Vimeo.
This video has a very good visual representation of a life cycle also, and how it can be represented in an artistic way.

Sølve Sundsbø & Bela Borsodi

Sølve Sundsbø
Bela Borsodi

 I really like the idea of taking past photos and collaging them onto a more recent photo, or the shape of someone. One possible idea is to take previous photos of one of my family members, and then take a photo of them (or use a existing more recent photo) and cut out their outline to create a silhouette like image, similar to the Bela Borsodi photo above with the outline of the women and items inside them. I could create this as a series by doing this for every family member.

Another possible idea is cutting parts from different photos together to create the image of a person, similar to the Sølve Sundsbø photographs above, again for each family member. The only thing that concerns me with these ideas is that they might be too personal, and the audience could possibly find them unrealatble, but also i need to think of a more interesting way to display these other than printing them out and mounting them.


I am considering using a projecter to display my photos, as it allows the photos to morph between each photo, and like other photography instalments i've seen it also give me the opinion to incorporate experimental sound.  

Stephen Gill

Its not so much what this photographer has taken a picture of that I find interesting, it's the way Stephen Gill has used plants collaged onto a photo, to make it like it is actually placed into the photograph, giving it more texture when it is displayed. This connects back to earlier posts when I looked into using plants to print photography and giving things different purposes, thus recreating new memories from the same object.

If I were to print my photography out to display this I could consider this technique in order to make the piece more interesting and give it more texture.

Andrew B Myers

I also wanted to look into personal items and how an item can reflect a memory, however if I were to do this idea, I feel just taking a picture of an item would be boring, and could look dull. I really like this work by Andrew B Myers, as he takes some uncommon items, and puts them together in an unusual way, while keeping it colourful and interesting as well as meaningful.  Even though this is photography, at first glance it looks all most cartoony due to the pastel coloured backdrops, and colourful items.

Just an idea

I could take items that are sentimental to people, and take pictures of them in this way. Another idea was to take pictures of people in a studio, and make parts of them cartoonised. To relate this to memories the cartoonised parts could be related to their favourite childhood fairytale characters. For example I could take a photo of someone in the studio and cartoon there legs like a fish tail to look like Ariel from the little mermaid (if that was there favourite character). At some point in a later post if I were to do this idea I will probably sketch it out to make it more clearer. However the inspiration also came from this (Korean pop) music video, mainly because of the colourful backdrops and bright fairytale cartoon like appearance.

Experimenting with Science as Art

I've been researching articles and exhibits that use science as art to create interesting pieces. 

http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/exhibitions/visceral

https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/visceral/

https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/files/VISCERAL_THE%20LIVING%20ART%20EXPERIMENT.pdf

http://www.bodyworlds.com/en.html
The body works is specifically looking at the human body and creating models of the interior.

"These images are from various exhibitions in Body Worlds. Body Worlds uses a technique called Plastination which essentially stops the process of decay and allows the preservation of bodies. The bodies that you see above are in fact made up of real tissue. Dr. Gunther Von Hagens is the anatomist who originally invented Plastination and began this series of exhibitions. They have steadily been becoming more and more creative and artistic. All the bodies are given by donation. Body Worlds has been met with all sorts of critic, from extremely positive to very negative."

EMBANKMENT - Ideas Expanded

Using reverbs to alter sounds and how they are heard. This can be used for my project - white boxes and sound coming from each box. This allows me to be more creative, and create more of a story playing with sounds.

Experimental Sound Design Project - EMBANKMENT - Rachel Whiteread (2005)

Information about the exhibit

Comparing this image to the rest, I thought this was the hardest picture to create sound for and that I would not have to create a lot of sound for the piece.

My first idea was to put the sound perspective of someone walking around the room (can hear footsteps of the person) passing different people maybe talking/whispering about the piece. I will change what speaker the people come through depending on what side the person would see them on (I will be simulating this through sound).

I would also record the sound of a large empty space (that maybe has some faint humming in the background) to put behind the track to give the experimental sound piece more space and atmosphere.

Even though these sounds will make the place more realistic and true to what a individual would hear walking around the room, I feel that it needs something extra to make it more creative and experimental. Like the scene from the movie The Double Life of Veronique (1991) I want there to be some sort of journey, and that the listeners can work out where the individual in my sound is walking, and what they are doing. I had an idea of the person walking around the room, hearing people talking or whispering from different directions. Then the person would open one of the boxes, climb inside and close the box, and all the noises and people talking from the outside world would become muffled. I could probably play around with this idea, just in order to make it more creative and a bit more interesting, rather than just recording the sound of an empty room with boxes.

Using Audition- Mixing (WE CAN PAINT SOUND?!?)

In this lesson we learnt how to mix tracks, remove unwanted sound & noise, and literally paint sound!

Time Art project development and plan

Idea Developed Further

For my first screen I have been looking at tutorials

Heart Monitor Tutorial

 These are the methods I will have to carry out in After Effects, however editing of the film can be done in Adobe Premiere. Once these have been done I will bring it all into Adobe After Effects and create the 3 screens.

The actions of the person will be filmed on my Canon 600D. 

Experimental Sound Research

One Pig - Matthew Herbert

Strangely I enjoyed listening to this piece by Matthew Herbert. Having knowledge that this song was created from a pig (particularly it being cooked and eaten) it was interesting to listen and pick out the different sounds that have been cleverly layered to create this track. In the future this definitely would be a interesting technique to carry out when do experimental sound projects. I like the idea of taking unusual sounds which may be dismissed/ not appreciated in everyday life, and creating something that can be appreciated.

http://lidomusic.blogspot.co.uk/

Lido Darren Hayman

Chris Watson

http://www.chriswatson.net/downloads.html

Chris Watson has captured a selection of interesting and unique field sounds.

Filming Day 1 - Virginia Waters

We were extremely lucky today as the weather was perfect! Virginia Waters was the perfect place to shoot and we got a range of different shots, including forest, waterfall and lake shots which will hopefully represent the distance the scarf will travel in order to find its way home. We also found it easy to be able to get shots without disturbing the general public (or them disturbing us), as the area is just so large.

We also got some field sounds at each location, as even though we are using voice over and non diagetic music throughout, we still wanted to keep in location sounds to make the viewer feel more immersed/ appreciate the settings we have filmed at in our film.

Even though we originally planned to have our set roles, we all took part in being the camera man and director, as we all thought of different ideas to creatively film. Working with  a scarf as the main 'actor' was slightly difficult as its movements can be very unpredictable, and the wind did not always carry it. However, with a bit of invisible string we managed to make the scarf float through the air.

My trusted poky scarf moving stick helped a lot in the filming - a great example of improvisation!!!!!!!!!

Even though we got some good shots today we still have a lot to film the next few days in our other location, and hopefully it will go as well as it did today!!!