Showing posts with label image factory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label image factory. Show all posts
Final Project

My final film consists of two screens showing a variety of found footage clips of the effects and factors that cause Global Warming. A hurricane can be seen at one point, representing the dramatic increase.  The middle screen is of the Earth slowly deteriorating from this. 

What I've Learned

  • Using CC sphere
  • Using textures to create a planet
  • Working with lens flares (even though this was not used in the end, it can be seen in my trial of the earth previously posted)
  • Overlaying video clips onto one composition 
  • Practising with creating explosions (Not used in final) 
  • Rendering of videos in AE 


Feelings

I had a hard time with the project as I found getting to grips with After Effects to be very challenging. As a beginner, even learning the effects proved to be stressful and left me very confused at many times. However I feel that the whole process has been a learning curve and I can now use AE to a certain extent. I'm happy with the effects that I have learned to use and hopefully this will be a good start to continuing with my learning of the software in the future. I've enjoyed seeing the Earth (screen two) come together, as it was a lot of work and I think it turned out to look semi-decent. If I had've managed my time better, I would have preferred to add some text showing some facts based around Global Warming. I feel the hurricane doesn't make sense without it. 

If I had to re-do the project, I would probably use a less after - effected route and try and make the project more simple. I think I was too ambitious with what I wanted to achieve through it based on my lack of knowledge of AE before the project started. I also think I would narrow my theme down to something more limited that Global Warming, and while I am interested in the topic, I feel like it was too broad and I got confused as to what I should include. 
Story

It begins in a regular church service, nothing out of the ordinary. People can be heard talking in prayer, bells occasionally ring and the sound of a priest giving a sermon. Suddenly the casual scene flips to being more chaotic, representing some kind of destruction of the church and all the negative feelings that surround the idea of religion. The sinister tone and demonic sounds could also be interpreted as a more horrific image, being more apocalyptic. The chaos abruptly stops and a short period of ambience is heard. Scratches and scrapes then represent a person left in the aftermath, the Pope, who is clawing either to escape or in a way that shows his loss of sanity. This sound was inspired by the way the paint looks as if it has been dragged down the painting, creating lines and a distorted image. The heartbeat was laid on the track to be irregular as a heartbeat would if in a panicked state, and becomes faster as the stress grows and becomes more frantic. The sudden stop of the heart is left up to interpretation as to whether the soundtrack has just been cut off or if the person concerned has died. 




Audition Look 

Final multitrack layout

Final mixer 

Sounds Recorded and Used

Feedback from the recording studio (used for the heart beat and for the ambient noises towards the beginning)
Scratches
Scraping

Sounds Developed 

Choir


Found Sounds Used

http://www.freesound.org/people/dsp9000/sounds/76405/
http://www.freesound.org/people/cormi/sounds/104112/
http://www.freesound.org/people/ninebilly/sounds/173010/
http://www.freesound.org/people/andrew1280/sounds/42893/
http://www.freesound.org/people/Gzmo/sounds/140256/
http://www.freesound.org/people/ekzem/sounds/178882/

Final Thoughts


I felt like the beginning was too plain and didn't have much depth, but I was advised by friends who reviewed it before being finalised and exported that it was better to keep things simple rather than over complicate with many noises. I am a little worried that it doesn't sound 'religious' enough but I'm hoping the bells and the priest's voice will make it obvious as to the setting. I am pleased with the middle section of the piece as I think it is pretty close to what I wanted the chaotic atmosphere to sound like. Towards the start the church bells are relatively slow and spread apart but the tempo of them is increased when the action begins in order for it to fit in with the pace at this point. I like how this turned out and I feel it was necessary to remind the audience of the church setting and the religious background. I was also relatively pleased with how the scratching noises sound at the end as think it gathers a real feel to the look of the actual painting, as well as contributing to the story. I was disappointed that I wasn't able to follow my initial thoughts of having some kind of musical rhythm as I was looking forward to composing it, but I feel like the narrative was a lot more sensible to represent the picture on a bigger scale and perhaps a more musical approach may have been too repetitive or boring.

To make it more clear as to what will be exactly on each screen here is a brief of what I hope will occur.


  • Screen one and three will have found footage of the sources that cause Global Warming such as power plants, smoke, burning fossil fuels etc
  • At one point on these screens a hurricane made using tools of AE will come towards the screen.
  • Text will be over laid, showing facts and figures on the topics.
  • Screen two will be a steady shot of the Earth, and as it is rotating it will be seen to be deteriorating due to the effects of the other two screens. 
  • Ending of middle screen could be of the Earth exploding 
  • At the very end will reform and loop back to beginning in a fluid motion. 
I am not sure if all these ideas will definitely get transferred into the final project, as it is taking me awhile to get my head around the software, but this is the rough plan for the layout and I aim to try and get as much into the piece as possible. 
One screen is going to be of the Earth rotating. This is what it should roughly look like in the final edit although some things may get tweaked slightly, such as the Earth spinning slightly slower.



Effects Used

  • CC Sphere 
  • Earth textures
  • Lens Flare
  • Rotation of sphere 
  • Adding images and layers 



Today me, Josh, Tom, Shahid and Rob had booked the recording studio out to play around with creating sounds for the project.


Having fun in the studio!

We messed around with the different effects etc and came up with some interesting sounds for all of our projects. Some of us are sharing particular sounds and I'm intrigued to see how each of us interpret and use them differently according to our image. 

Here are some of the sounds I intend to use in their unedited stage (that's why there are voices!).


I've been looking more into the meanings behind the painting and trying to find out the different feelings and moods that are given off. Here I have highlighted and noted anything relevant or helpful for me that I have found: 

"Bacon’s popes depart even further from their source, often replacing the pontiff’s head with the equally recognisable screaming face of the wounded nurse mown down by the soldiers’ gunfire in the Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin." 

 "The insertion subverts the encapsulation of power and self-assurance projected by Velázquez. The screaming mouth, isolated from other facial features and divorced from any narrative context, suggests existential agony. The pathos of human vulnerability and loss of faith or conviction are accentuated by the precisely rendered space frames in many Bacon images of popes"

"Bacon's obsessive reworking of the papal theme suggests that it may have possessed further significance and perhaps psychological charge for the artist in relation to his sexuality"


Pope 1 - Study after Pope Innocent X by Velazquez 1951

"Francis Bacon, the artist, paints provocative and disturbing images that carry a raw sense of anxiety and alienation. They reflect that existential fear, loathing and incomprehension at the atrocities of the Holocaust that came to light at the end of World War Two"


"If Velazquez's 'Portrait of Pope Innocent X' portrays the public face of power while hinting at the private flaws of the man behind it, then Bacon’s ‘Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X’ broadcasts his inner psychoses."

Opinions
I've found to be a lot of relation to anxiety and fear mentioned around the picture through my searches online. I even found quite a few suggestions that his paintings may 'encapsulate Bacon's traumatic feelings' about his father who rejected him when he found out his son's 'homosexual inclinations.' The encapsulation of power also seemed to be a keen interest of Bacon. 

I feel a real sense of the how he has distorted the original image and it seems to me like the one powerful image of the Pope by Velazquez has been re-made to show that the Pope isn't perfect. Bacon once said 'We are all carcasses' hinting in a belief that no man should be better than another resulting in this 'The Pope is flawed like any other human' theory. The colours create a kind of monstrous and frightening vibe and despite the purple giving off a haunting presence it is also meant to be a royal colour, hinting towards his status in the Catholic church. The vibrant colours make the painting stand out with it's weird, twisted mood. The Pope's face reminds me of agony, something that appears to be associated quite a bit online with the painting. 

Sound

From my research I have learnt that I want to show some kind of agony or terror and relate it back to the church and more religious scenes. This could be done with mixing screams and scratches with the sound of church bells, sermon, choir etc. I want to reflect back to the painting with the sounds and perhaps scratches could represent the stylistic nature of the paint and how it looks like the image has been dragged. 

 Sources

 http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2013/february/08/the-truth-behind-francis-bacons-screaming-popes/

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/portraits/francis_bacon.htm




To get a little bit of background knowledge and try to get an idea of Bacon's point of view when painting The Screaming Pope I decided to look into his history.

Life

  • Francis Bacon, the artist, was born in Dublin on 28 October, 1909, the second of five children.
  • He left home at the age of sixteen and went to live in Berlin.
  • In 1928 he decided to become an artist after seeing an exhibition of Picasso’s work in Paris.
  • His early work (1929-1944) was influenced by Surrealism but did not gain much critical success.
  • In 1944 Bacon exhibited ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ to a public outcry due to its horrific imagery. This was the key painting in the development of Francis Bacon’s work.
  • After painting ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ he destroyed most of his early work as he believed that it failed to communicate the way he felt about the world.
  • ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’ introduces many of the characteristics associated with Francis Bacon’s art: mutilated imagery, a sense of anxiety and alienation, the triptych format, antique gilt frames with glass and subjects that relate to the Crucifixion and Greek mythology.
  • Bacon never painted from life - he always worked from photographs.
  • Photographic references that Bacon frequently referred to were Velazquez's'Portrait of Innocent X', the wounded nurse from the film 'The Battleship Potemkin', Muybridge’s ‘The Human Figure in Motion’, Clark's 'Positioning in Radiography'and medical textbooks that illustrated diseases of the mouth.
  • Bacon's art was seen as a metaphor for the corruption of the human spirit in the post World War Two era.
  • Bacon often painted variations of the same subject and sometimes revisited certain subjects many years later. ‘Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion’has a later version painted in 1988.
  • Francis Bacon died of a heart attack in Madrid in 1992.

The Screaming Pope

  • Painted in 1953
  • Bacon worked from reproductions and never saw the original painting by Velazquez. 
  • He painted about forty five variations based around the subject of the Pope - The Screaming Pope being one.
  • Possibly inspired by Picasso for producing variations on a work from the past.


Idea

My film is going to be about human wastefulness and how it is effecting the planet. It will target issues such as global warming, climate change and environmental degradation,  showing what may happen to the Earth if we continue being not resourceful. Having some concerns about the well being of the planet, my aim is to get across to others the severity of the issues that we may have to deal in the future if not careful. 

Three Screens

Screen one and three will be a collection of found footage clips and photographs of the action of destroying the planet, such as sewage being piped into rivers etc. These will be most likely take from news reports and other such sources.  

Screen two is going to be a moving image of planet Earth. This will flicker between different periods of the Earth, beginning with the Ice Age and showing its development from there, eventually forming an image of what it will look like due to the problems we are currently creating. This screen will loop several times throughout before all screens reach an end and return to the beginning again.

At one point I would like all three screens to merge into one scene, showing a collection of stars and space. Also, I would like to incorporate text on to the screens as well, showing different statistics associated with the disasters and issues. 

Visual Inspirations


How will this be achieved

Everything will be done on After Effects using a variety of different methods to animate, distort and add visual effects to already existing images. The majority of tutorials to help me with this shall be found on Youtube, Lynda and Video Copilot.

Relevant tutorial links (so far)





















Research

Check list of environmental issues that can be used (quick find info from links)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_issues

Water (depletion) — Aral Sea • Dead Sea• Lake Chad. Other Wikipedia articles on water problems are Water pollution, Water crisis/scarcity, Wastewater, Anoxic waters


Video Research (so far)
Sir David Attenborough: The Truth About Climate Change (graph)



Global Warming Facts
Global Warming The Signs and the Science
Man (animation on how humans are impacting the planet negatively)

 Effects of global warming and signs of end of the world (picture video for reference ideas)
Other useful websites

If the polar ice caps melted, how much would the oceans rise?

 11 facts about global warming

 Global warming facts

 33 facts about global warming

Storyboard Outline (rough)







Today we were given our art forms that would be the basis of our own personal experimental sound design project. I got given the 1953 painting "Study after Velazquez's Portrait of Pope Innocent X" by an Irish artist, Francis Bacon.


As the title states, it is a re-interpretation of the 1650 painting by Diego Velazquez,  "Portrait of Pope Innocent X."

Initial Thoughts

The look of the painting seems to reflect a very horrific and distorted image of the Pope, so maybe I could reflect that in my sound. 

One Pig: August// Matthew Herbert 




Joe showed us a few of these pieces depicting the life cycle of a pig and the noises that come from it. I got really intrigued by the August stage, showing the sounds of the pig being cooked and eaten. I appreciated the effort in the mixing to create a certain rhythm and pace to the collective sounds. I'd like to create a similar musical style pattern with my own, but probably in a more creepy way than this particular one. 

Merzbow  


Ultra Marine Blues


Pulse Demon

Worms Plastic Earthbound

These are the first sounds that came to mind when I first got given the image, so I imagine that I will use this as a basis as to the style I want to go down with the project. 

Space Sounds



I looked through many different sounds recorded from space and found a lot of them to be really interesting and some slightly creepy and unworldly. In this one of Neptune's sounds, at times I felt like it sounded as if there were faint, distant screams. 


As a beginner at After Effects I've been looking into tutorials that interest me and seeing if there is any way I can incorporate them into the project, so as to broaden my skills while keeping me engaged. At first After Effects is very daunting but after Simon's tutorial I found it might not be as bad, providing you do the research to understand how it works. Here are some tutorials that I've come across that I found helpful and for me to possibly use in the future of the project.

Simple animation of a character

Motion graphics and typography


Simple animations


Cool text



Earth animation


Just a quick update about the workshop today. Vicky showed us a lot of her own work and talked about how to do effective research. I thought it was cool how she had used bits of the body to make her films/ art, such as painting her feet and walking over a film reel. I found these to be interesting ways to show human movement through video and it got me thinking about if there are similar ways in which to show time.

We were also put into groups and told to discuss our ideas with each other, which proved to be helpful as we were able to contribute ideas to one another in order to make improvements and provide inspiration.
Time is a very open topic, and the amount of ideas that come with it are endless. However choosing an idea that will mean the three screen installation will work effectively is very tricky, as well as considering what different aspects of After Effects to add to the video. 




I found this really interesting as Brian Eno talks about time in a manner of being able to 'specify a starting point' but just like the garden he mentions the ending will be unpredictable. I like the idea of movement within time as well as the fact we can't really control certain things, so maybe I could try and incorporate that in the video in someway.


This short film on moments got me really thinking that sometimes time isn't about doing just massive things, but that it should be spent in the little things that make you happy as well. It's such a simple idea but for me is massively effective. It shows different time periods in people's lives such as birth, chasing after a bus, crying and tying laces to name a few, stuff that everyone goes through in everyday life. I feel like it makes the video a lot more relatable to the audience and the viewer becomes more engaged in appreciating a more tinier, but equally important aspect of life.




When listening to some music, these songs came on and it definitely got me thinking about the aspect of Time again. I thought about how time is running out and how quickly it can move sometimes, particularly when having fun. In the grand scheme of things are life is short and over quickly...this is something I'm definitely going to consider. 

On Friday we were given our brief for the Time Art project. It is to be played on three upright screens, with a duration of one minute. While the idea of time really interests me, the installation type aspect of the project sounds very daunting to me, being something that I've never had an opportunity to do before. However I am going in with an open mind and seeing what I can come up with! 

We watched a documentary style movie called Samsara (directed by Ron Fricke) to get us engaged in the concept of time in film. This is a style that I have never seen before and it was a very new way for me to view a movie. I found it interesting how it was shot, and the imagery throughout was absolutely stunning. I'm not going to lie, possibly if you aren't really a film person you may find it a tiny bit boring or typically artsy, but there is no doubt that anyone cannot appreciate the effort put into making such a large scale production. Filmed over a five year period in over twenty five countries, the work involved to create it is astounding. I also was able to check out Samsara's predecessor, Baraka (also directed by Ron Fricke) which allowed me to engage further into this style of film. 

Samsara
Baraka 


What really grabbed my attention was the following scene in Samsara...


At first I found the whole thing very strange and didn't quite understand the full intention behind it. After the film, Simon questioned me and Rob on what we thought it might mean, and we basically said we assumed it was to show the man releasing tension from being confined to working in a boring office. It was then revealed that this may be a case, however the main objective was behind the previous shots of a robots taking over human work, and thus this performance by the office man was used to show the amount of emotion that humans can convey where robots can not. This became a very effective scene for me then and after fully understanding it made me appreciate the message displayed. The talk with Simon also made me realise that I need to start looking deeper into the meanings and think more carefully about what is being conveyed - not just looking for the obvious. 

Both films definitely helped me think more about the project and I enjoyed expanding my knowledge of the more styles that films can take on. 


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Lauren Fox
Third year at UCA studying Digital Film and Screen Arts
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