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[film-bones]

[cinemagorgeous]

Sci-fi concept art by Edouard Groult

[nebulagalore]

[castlepirate]

This is the final video project of this semester, summing up a large series of videos we have done for this overall project. It's hard to do this multiple series of videos justice but i think we somehow managed to give a taster of different videos we have done. I look forward to seeing if it is enough to entice people to check out our other videos being displayed on both the installation in the studio space and online on our YouTube page.

[castlepirate]

This is the rough set up of our final installation, we wanted to use two screens like I use at home, so that the larger screen can be for dedicated video viewing and the smaller laptop screen can be for navigation of the folders and work, this means that people will be able to see video is ment to be playing but at the same time other works are to be on display to be explored if they so desire. We wanted a very "normal-ised" feeling of the installation so that it almost seems rustic modern-ish avoiding trashy themes of our previous projects and just going with a 'simple' but not minimalistic style.

We chose to use speakers instead of a headset to make it a much more social experience, I find if you are sitting at a P.C with headphones on it seems like you are trying to hide everything you are doing on the computer as if it is dirty, we want people to be aware whenever someone is watching the videos we have made to draw more attention and people over to view it.

We chose to use a classic 80s icon pack for the computers icons to give it a more classic and stylized theme, thus making it look more like its been done on purpose so people will feel more inclined to explore it. The background will be a classic windows teal green color so to make the focus simply the video and the folders on the desktop.

[castlepirate]

Mediated Performance Statement

For our paper mediated performance we tied it in with our main studio project of embodiment, this provided us with the challenge of defining what exact parts of our project were to be part of Mediated performance and what parts where the studio paper. Because of the nature of our project working with different people portraying different character archetypes and attempting to successfully capture this on film I think the best example of what was solely ‘mediated performance’ would be the documented events that we did with each of our characters; for example the date, the rap battles as well as the times when we would do one on one interviews although the scenarios where more than one person was involved would better help show how these people reacted in different social situations and thus show better their character.

We picked each of our different characters for different specific reasons but the one thing that stood out was that they had to be the type of person who was unique at a first glace (Although this wasn’t specifically true for Christina who was very ‘normalised’ by the other characters) Chips be chose because of his rebellious ‘anti-system’ nature and his ability to have intellectual discussions about what he believes in and not ever withdrawing his opinions for the sake of another person. Jason naturally because of his out of context nature and wit, he was a very typical hero type who was has an extremely large ego that would be constantly boosted by both himself and by mistaking things people said to him as compliments. Christina is overtly open about herself to people she meets and will not hesitate to give and take compliments.

 These three main characters chosen for the date scenario worked like a charm, with Chips trying to have meaningful discussions with Christina and Jason trying to interject with his own out of context nonsense or occasionally making points that would be quickly shut down by Chips or Christina. For the organization of the date scenario we wanted the setting to be semi-romantic with candles and ‘restaurant’ like which meant having a waiter (Me) who served a variety of drinks and read out the menu in a professional manner. This was all to set the mood of a ‘fancy dinner date’ with the exception being that Chips and Jason were unaware of each other supposed appearing at the date. The date was a great performance by each of the people involved, which also provided great content for the final project.

The battle raps that we did were originally Jason’s idea but it was a great way to show his enthusiasm and effort into something. The second rap battle specifically Jason really shone through and managed to throw off his opponent with his whacky but still valid rhymes, these events helped to show how Jason can be comedic and laugh at himself at times and enjoy himself while still being the whacky character that we love. We plan to do more of these raps just simply because they are so much fun to film and are easy to do, not more than one take is ever needed.

Solo interviews with Chips, Jason and Christina were also in the mediated performance category of work but not as much as the rap battles and especially the date which showed the characters interacting with each other/different people. However these interviews did provide interesting insight into how the characters reacted in different scenarios, I did an interview with Christina inside a rough adult store because of its ironic connection to her archetype as a ‘sensualist’ she gave a very standard interview in which she talked about relationships and her life, unfortunately the camera automatically stopped recording after 20minuites without me realising causing me to lose both my sanity and a large sum of footage, some of which of her walking around the store making comments which we tried to recapture but did not get the original quality of footage, and you can even see me sulking in the background with Jack attempting to console me.

The organizing of these different events and meetings/chance encounters we had with these different people have been great learning experiences with understanding how someone wants to be viewed on film or seeing how they chose to act in certain ways in certain scenarios.

[castlepirate]

Sound space and Image Recap

As we are nearing the end of this final semester this will be a recap of all of the minor prospects we planned to do for the Sound Space and image paper, excluding the final project.

Garage T.V Installation

The T.V set up in Alex's garage faced a multitude of problems when we tried to have it going. Apparently after the first night the Channel had been changed and the TV was playing static at full volume, we came up with the solution of removing the capability to change the channel or the volume of the TV, But unfortunately the power cable for the TV had also been mangled and cut. I would definitely try to fix this up or to set it up so it is more controlled and doesn't warrant any unwanted attention from people who would ruin it but i guess this taught us a lesson in 'fool-proofing' our installation and to expect literally the worst to happen, I would love to have this up and running 24/7, possibly in a different more safe location so that we can constantly show our work. like a form of discovering a real life representation of a  YouTube channel.

View Finder

We met up with a nice woman at Sound&Vision and showed her some of our work, after a few days she emailed us saying she was interested in showing my Graveyard review (part 3)

Im really excited to have some of my work on show in a public space, its also going to be showing on my birthday so ill have to pay it a visit and get a photo taken.

Yes Collective

nothing as of now has happened with us displaying work at YES collective or any other public gallery, but i have talked to a multitude of artists who are all eager to collaborate with us which is excited, looking forward to the crazy things we get up to the in the future!

[castlepirate]

For our 'Sound, space & Image' paper we have tasked ourselves several things to help get our work out in the public arena as well as working on something for the in studio Installation.

Progress so far is as follows;

We have a T.V set up in Alexs garage on Gundry street that is looping the steel shadow series part 1 and 2.

We have some of our work(graveyard reviews) being shown on the viewfinder at the public Auckland library from the 15th of November

I have located an old beat up desktop PC that might require a few rudimentary repairs as well as a reformat and a new install of windows XP. But i think within a few days i will have this thing up and running and we can start setting it up to be used as a way to show our work. I am keeping in mind what Clint mentioned about making sure that people interact with it the way we want, we want it to look interactive so that people mess with it rather than just stare at it. I have a few ideas of filling out the desktop with different files full of work we have collected and made. I think we will be able to use an old beat up PC without it detracting to much from the main point of the home cinema/ self shot footage type feel of our main project. All we need for the physical part of the PC is a working screen, I am still hoping we can find a working CRT monitor but i will settle for less. as long as it goes with the retro-junk style

[castlepirate]

Closer and closer to the end

About a week ago we started to finally compile most of the usable footage we have at this stage into a final piece to get a sense of pace and length that each part needs to be. This will help us with any footage we need to urgently shoot and help us work on connections between scenes and shortening or cutting of useless work. We still have our separate final videos that will be on display on the installation space computer for anyone to have a look at, but the final 14 min piece will be the center of attention at least for the main studio project and will be the main focus of the exegesis.  currently we have more footage than we need which is a good thing and allows for editing room and being picky with scenes and what we show, we still have time to gather footage from our subjects last minute to try and see what works best. At this time we are trying to edit it together so that it flows nicely and has a compelling 'story'.

Recently i have been trying to get more footage of one of our lesser thought about characters (my brother sterling) as a last ditch effort for more content, Jack gave me a really good idea to tie it in to the rest of the work and that is to record him watching some of the content already in the final. I would also like to try and get him to record some of his own content that shows off his personality like the rest of the characters in the project.

I have been more than impressed with jacks editing of the final project so far and i have been trying to think of ways i can contribute more to the end result. I have been trying to think up a way of using after effects for particularly strange/otherworldly transitions between shots that involve the same characters faces morphing from one shot to the next. I will have to do some more research into AE methods and try something out to see if it works in the video.

I took Marks advice and went to the library to get some film literature, although i didn't find the book he told me to specifically get i took out a few others that have been helpful. Books such as "Mining the Home Movie" have been extremely helpful to giving the academic substance and context to our work.

[castlepirate]

As part of our studio project we set up a date scenario for three of our characters, for this we used two different cameras, one on a tripod and the other a shoulder mount. I think we did a good job setting up appropriate lighting considering the space and the time/resources we had and were given. I think the scenario we set up gave good insight into the characters personalities and did show off somewhat their reaction to each others archetypes. This is one of the few scenes we have arranged and shot, as well as being the only scene we planned to shoot that involved more than two character archetypes interacting. We acquired some good footage that i think will have a good place and use for the final project for tying in together other seemingly unrelated or random content. I have been doing research into Jung archetypes in film as well as studying up on Eisenstein's theory of montage which is highly relevant to the project we are trying to complete, especially when working with completely different content shot for different purposes by different people.

[castlepirate]

Sound Space & Image idea breakthrough

So far working on this project we have not put as much thought as we should have into our final in studio presentation of our work. Finally Alex came up with an idea that i think ties everything we have done/are doing nicely together. The plan is to have an old 90s/00s home PC setup with the windows 2000/ME theme or operating system which will then have the final video in the middle of the desktop along with folders labeled after each of the different characters in the film. these folders will then contain all of the raw footage we have collected from them including pieces that were unused or things that they did that we did not find a place for, e.g voice recordings or pictures taken by these people.

This will make sure that we have a way of showing everything we have collected as well as being able to have a clear distinction as to what is the final video. The benefit of having these folders is that we can put almost anything inside them unfiltered. We are not expecting everyone to view them but to have the opportunity to go through every piece of raw footage we have had to go through if they do so desire.

The old PC symbolizes to the beginning of the era when people started to have personal computers in their homes, which relates to the idea of these normal people trying to capture and archive parts of their day to day lives.

I really like this idea as it is different from our previous works, allows us to have an element of interactivity while still being able to have it as a medium to show our final work in a traditional viewing sense.

[alexfoxbct-blog]

[castlepirate]

This is some of the footage shot with a tiny camera mounted on one of our subjects heads, this footage differs greatly from the others

[castlepirate]

Mediated Performance

The mediated performance side of this big project I am working on is the area surrounding working with our subjects as an abstract way of sourcing and collecting footage, we have also brainstormed with ideas surrounding character archetypes. By having each person assigned to a character archetype we can more easily know who to align them against to have footage that are direct opposite type vibes or to put it with footage from a person who has similar character traits to them. By having these different roles for people we can more easily formulate a story based around their archetype and what they talk about or do in their footage, for example documenting interaction between our ‘Hero’ and our ‘Sensualist’ you would expect the hero to be this charming prince but it depends how these real people react because we can only put them in situations and influence so much. But they are still real people who make their own choices. All of this will finalise in the project to show how the character archetypes have worked or how they have not properly encompassed the people. When the project is completed we will have a final summary for each character with what we selected their archetype as. To see if they fit the archetype and how they reacted with other archetypes. It will also be interesting to see the contrast in types of footage and filming we get from each different person. We still have a lot of work to do regarding getting footage but I think we are on the right track so far.

[castlepirate]

Studio: Embodiment - Half semester reflection

For this half of the semester we have made some progress in experimenting with sourcing abstract footage from our ‘subjects’, Originally the experimentation was to have all the footage sourced from the ‘characters’ themselves be about said people, but after a few weeks of letting people film whatever they wanted we came to realise that people needed specific direction, some lacked creativity to do whatever they wanted and others had it but didn’t produce footage in the area of what we were expecting. So after the original experiment of letting these people film whatever they wanted needed some changing and adapting we started to give our subjects more direction and advice on what sort of footage we specifically wanted, trying to avoid the mundane and tame. The footage we were looking for was thought provoking or just bizarre and strange yet capturing these people’s lives uniquely. So the original experiment which we did not have any specific goal for came back not as how we had hoped but what we realistically expected and so some development of ideas and direction was required.

Along with giving our subjects more specified direction, we also have started to film them ourselves, keeping with the motif of them being their real selves as much as possible for them on camera. We are still trying to capture the essence of their character and person but trying our best to bring it out in different ways by putting them in different scenarios such as interview settings or having them interview people. We have found starting dialogues with people is the best way to get to know someone much like how getting to know someone is easier if you were to have a conversation with them.

In terms of research, originally I looked into Dogme 95, which is where we started thinking about indirectly directing and influencing our actors while keeping their characters genuine and real.  Having a set of guidelines for people has helped to funnel the people into filming more the sort of footage we want, influencing the abstraction of sourcing footage from these people. As we get nearer the final stages of the project we are starting to experiment and conceptualize ideas around connecting the different footage of characters we are getting, We want the entire project to be a series of interlocking footage, not having more than 2 minutes of a person at a time, depending on the person and the subject of what they are doing. For example we want to keep things fast paced and quick cut if the segment is not extremely interesting, so that we can keep people interested and quickly over the space of maybe 6 minutes easily show that this project encompasses a variety of different characters and shows how they connect and relate to each other.

I recently watched the movie Four Rooms, an experimental film that had four different directors direct a segment each and then the whole thing was tied together with the use of a bellboy character, I think this movie was okay but left a lot to be desired. The movie needed more interconnectivity between the different scenes to make it feel more alive which is something I have taken into account and something I plan on working on when we begin to finally put together the project.

I think the general idea of having these people film for us being an abstract experimental way of sourcing footage has helped us direct inexperienced people to use cameras and helped them in finding the right things to film. At the end of the day the original point of people filming for us was that so we had an abstract library of footage which embodies each person from which we were meant to collaborate together to make a final film out of. I think with us filming certain scenes to help bring out character and to help make connections between people is a good step towards taking this film from the entirely experimental region to making it have a logical story to make it more easily understood. Overall we are trying to get people to film themselves or to film so that hopefully they are able to capture the essence of their character on film, so that we can collaborate that in with footage we shoot of them or with what we have selected from them. So that the final product is a clear portrayal of these people as human beings and embodies who they are as people, making it possible to get to know these people as real humans with their many dimensions of life through just watching a video and showing their interesting lives within context of a few others, showing off the many different areas of lives people live within our simple local vicinity of Auckland.

Like a lot of the previous work we have done, we usually gravitate towards the comedic side of film, having no trouble finding humour in a lot of work. One of the purposes of having these people film was to see if we were able to find humour in their lives or their style of filming no matter how non-comedic it is. We are not planning on avoiding comedy for this final project and I’m assuming that whatever the final product is will be very typical of us and will be reminiscing of our previous work.

I think that the work we have produced so far is a simple taste for what we have planned for the end of this semester, we have already a small library that is ever increasing and have already begun to edit the footage we have. But we have a lot more work in mind to be doing. I have some things in mind for the final film but we will see how it progresses as the semester continues.

[castlepirate]

Sound space & Image ideas

So far for sound space and image we have been thinking about prospects for showing our work outside of the BCT, both for our previously completed works and for future prospects. But for this semester we will also have to think about a final presentation that is part of the final end of year BCT show.

I think for our final in-house presentation we would want to situate it in a dark area, lighting up the space with nothing but what is playing in the video itself. This idea of working in a dark space leaves options open for using a projector instead of a screen. But it also begs the question of if we want to use one single screen/projection or if we need more. I will be doing more research into more contemporary screenings of video projects to look for inspiration for this specific installation. With out previous works having very messy installation settings, we would want to continue with appropriation of the work so that we would only modify the setting if we deem it appropriate and it connects or relates well to the video otherwise if it does not add anything productive to the project then it would become redundant.

We have sent in our proposal for our work to be put up on the viewfinder and have got some prospects of converting Alexs' garage into a small installation space. As well as this i have found through a friend of mine someone who is looking for all types of artists for a varying degree of purposes, nevertheless there is no harm in proposing our work just to get it out into the public arena and seeing how people react.

[castlepirate]

Four rooms

I watched this film as per Marks' recommendation, which involves a series of four short segments each filmed by different directors, connected by the bellhop character. It provided an interesting take on combining 4 short stories into one 'comprehensive' story. I thought the movie was fairly entertaining, Tarantino scene was very typical of his style and Robert Rodriguez was probably the better of the four.

In terms of research for our own project. This film had very clearly segmented sections which connected them via one main character, if i was personally to redo this film I would have a lot more inter connectivity between the different scenes to make the hotel feel more 'alive' but i guess that it has been done the certain way as per Tarantino direction. When it comes to making our final project i think it is important we take into consideration how we connect and combine the different characters segments while keeping a good pace and making sure to keep the story going and interesting but while not making the final a manic collaboration of fast cuts of different footage, it still needs to be comprehend-able. Having decent lengths of footage for each person to help create 'story' for each person and then being able to connect it to other characters footage is an important obstacle for us to climb when it comes to editing.

[castlepirate]

Self Shot footage VS 'Filmed' footage

In the case of our project having people shoot some of their own footage is a constant factor we wanted.  As expected we would not be able to predict what footage we would get back from people, being optimistic we hoped people would just have the camera on them at all times and capture little moments in life that would be great to get on film or capture things that summed them up perfectly. Sadly this is not the case although it does happen sometimes. Instead we got a lot of mundane footage of everyday lives and it seemed that footage was best when people weren't trying too hard to make interesting footage.

From this we are adapting and giving more constrictions as well as direction specific to each person for what they should film by themselves, which hopefully will yield better results.

With situations we shoot and arrange we can have our own influence on the scenario being filmed but at the same time keep the characters genuine by encouraging them to act naturally. There are some questions and topics a person will not discuss when they are filming themselves as there are topics a person will only bring up when filming themselves so I think it is good we are using a range of both styles of footage to help do our characters justice and portray their many dimensions as people in real life onto the screen/in our final project.