The sight - David Clement Davis

I've started reading this book 'The sight - David Clement Davis', it's awesome. Wolves have been my favorite animal all my life and they still are, this book is told in the point of view of wolves. i think it's amasing how Davis has managed to capture the essence of a wolf pack from the alpha male right down to the pups and even wolves attitudes to wolves outside the pack, at the same time managing to create his own story at the same time. The story follows a wolf pack, that are running from an evil she-wolf named Morgra who turns out to be the drappa's (alpha females) half sister who is after her newly born pups. Most of the pack believe Morgra is trying to fore-fill the prophecy of 'The Sight' which tells of wolves being born with the ability to see through the eyes of birds, the ability to see visions of the past present and future, to be able to summon the wolf god fenris and aalso summon the dead to do it's bidding and the last power (which is the one Morgra is trying to forefill) is the power to look through the eyes of a human and control its will.

i think this book is very exhilarating and Davis has done a spectacular job of keeping the reader nose deep in the book. if i had a choice i wouldn't put it down until i was finished.
one day if it hasn't been done, i will make this book into a film

John Williams

I never actually realised how many films John Williams has composed for until now. It seems that he has composed the theme for every one of my favourite films, all the films i grew up on he was a part of. This man was composed the soundtrack of my entire life. Is it possible to be sub consciously drawn to films that he has composed for?

A quick list of some of my favorites that he’s done:

Star wars 

E.T the extra terrestrial

Jurassic Park

Hook

These 4 films are the reason i got into films in the first place. they are so magical and they have influenced my entire life, how coincidental is it that one man composed the soundtracks for all of them?
 the list doesn't stop there though:

·         Indiana Jones

·         Home alone

·         Schindler’s list

·         The patriot

·         Harry potter

Memoirs of a Geisha
war of the worlds 2005
The Terminal
Catch Me If You Can
Minority Report
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
The Patriot
Saving Private Ryan
Superman
Jaws

I know not all of them are from my childhood but they are all or have been my favorite films at one point or another and have influenced me greatly.
All you have to do is sit, close your eyes and listen to the music, let it fill you up, and you'll feel yourself traveling back to all your greatest memories. feel yourself get inspired like i have from his music, it's because of this type of music, that no matter what can make you, happy, sad, inspired and nostalgic all at the same time that makes me want to make unforgettable films.
and one day John Williams will compose for one of my films.

John Williams is a genius!!!!!!!!!!!!

Finished Editing

Fraser and I have Finished Editing our sense of space project today. We’ve called it “Night Night”. We edited for about 7 hours, so its safe to say we're a bit tired, we finally decided we were going to use an inner voice as though the character was taking to herself. To do this we took some inspiration from a ‘Friends’ episode. As strange as it may sound, In this episode we see a scene of the 6 characters in the coffee shop listening to Ross tell a story. We then hear each of the characters thoughts which are slightly echoed to show that they are thoughts instead of spoken words. This is what we have done to distinguish between the inner voice and the spoken voice. to do this we've used a Platinum Reverb and increased the room size to add the echo effect (see right).

Here is the friends clip we looked at:

We also took inspiration from the legendary film "the exorcist - William Friedkin" there is a scene where the mother walks out of her daughters room and hears a noise coming from above her in the attic. she stands looking up for a moment, then there is another sound as though whatever is in the attic runs across the floor. here there is a pan used to show the sound going from left to right. we have used a similar effect in our 'attic' portion of our sound clip (many thanks to that film for scaring me so much it stuck in my mind haha). unfortunately i couldn't find a clip :-(. to make things sound like they were coming from a different room such as the attic or outside the house. We added a channel E.Q control and lowered the higher frequencies which made them sound 'bassey'. 

here are some more screen shots from the editing process: 

I Remember

The worst thing in the world, the one crime that everyone commits without ever meaning to, without ever wanting to, is the crime of growing up.
It's troubling to think about how much you lose from being a child and growing to become the people we are meant to be for the rest of our lives... empty, robotic shells of human beings. Where did all the magic go? where did our imaginations go? I remember being a child, i remember the days when anything and everything was possible. i remember When you could go from being superman to batman in one afternoon, i remember when climbing a tree was the greatest adventure you could possibly imagine, i remember when you could talk to the stars and they would talk back. I remember the excitement of eating all your vegetables knowing ice cream would follow. I remember learning to fly.....

I remember a time when nothing in the world mattered, there was a time when all you would do was imagine you were someone else, someone magical and heroic when all our dreams came true... a child can be whoever they want to be whenever they want to be them. all we had to do was imagine.
But somewhere in time all of that fades away, until all we have left is a drone, someone that along the way was chosen to be.

we grow older, we grow taller... but why do we have to let the magic that is life and imagination slip through our fingers???

Don't ever let go of your imagination!!! don't ever let go of your childhood!!! because once it's gone, it's the hardest thing to get back. and you'll regret it forever.

Bring the magic back.

sense of space - Project ideas

for this project I'm working with Fraser. we met and started by brainstorming different things we associated with space. which would help us later on when deciding our final idea.

We decided to create a suspenseful piece. We plan to create the story of someone going to bed (by having a voice saying "goodnight" and hearing the mattress squeak and hearing curtains being drawn) at which point they start hearing strange ghostly noises.  

We chose this because the phenomenon of hearing noises while in bed is very common, and although (in most cases) the noises heard are simply regular house hold noises the darkness and fear can create a sense of entrapment and claustrophobia and the noises can very easily be mistaken for something else. Some of the noises we intend to use are:

·         creaking doors

·         wind

·         tapping

·         creaking floorboards

·         bangs

·         scratching

·         muffled voices

·         footsteps

To create the sense of fear within the character we are planning to create the sound of a beating heart and heavy breathing which will speed up during the piece to represent the emotions of the character.

Throughout the three minutes the sounds will become louder and louder eventually building to a crescendo until they suddenly stop.

The aim of this piece is to mimic the regular occurrence of strange noises that can be heard while lying in bed trying to get to sleep and the atmosphere and feeling that creates i.e. claustrophobic, trapped, scared etc.

At the end of the 3 minutes we have the idea of two endings:

1. The sounds slowly ebb away to be replaced with the sounds of birds chirping to represent that morning has come and that everything is fine.

2. The sounds build to a crescendo, there is a loud bang and the character screams. The sounds stop and the only thing that can be heard is the characters racing heartbeat.

After deciding our idea we drew out a time line of sounds.  

We then wrote out a list of the sounds we needed and how we planned to create them and what microphones we would use to record them. 

Jarmans Garden

I've recently listened to Jarman's Garden produced by Sherre DeLys, it is a piece about the late Derrek Jarman who built a beatiful garden in the last years of his life. the piece is very calming and relaxing, it explores the atmosphere of the village in which jarman lived as well as the garden itself. silence is used to show the that there is a change of location which works very well as it also shows passage of time. the soft sounds that can be heard throughout strengthens the calming atmosphere. Personally i do not like the piece, even though i think the devices it uses work well it's not the type of thing i'd choose to listen to. in my opinion the last 5 minutes of the piece are the most effective. even though it is simply the sound of the ocean on the beach. it emphasises how peaceful it was there.

shots and equipment list

 We finally wrote out a shot and equipment list. these were basically to do exactly what their name intends, a list to make sure we had remembered everything for the day and so as not to forget anything. We had originally planned on me taking my climbing harness and a rope to strap myself high in a tree to get the high angle shots of the forest. however this didn't happen because we could not find a rope that would support my weight (that we could afford.) 

Storyboard

The next step was storyboarding, for this we drew out the main shots we thought we might need, and decided to get a few different versions of every shot as to add variety. we start with a title and moved on to an establishing shot of tree's or a forest (this would show immediately what the theme was) we then moved on to many different shots such as high angle shots, pans, tilts etc.. we tried to add as much variety as we could think of. this storyboard made the filming stage a lot easier.

tree's representing emotion - mind-map

We next decided to mind-map our chosen theme (tree's representing emotion) for example the different things that we might see on screen that can trigger emotions or may resemble emotions or mean different things e.g. lighting, space between tree's, camera angle, distance from camera etc.. We did this so that when it came to story boarding we would have a very clear idea of what we needed to include.

Ideas

After the mind-map, we discussed some ideas that we believed as a group were "do-able" or "achievable". we listed these ideas and what would need to be seen to portray what we wanted to show.
the four main ideas we came up with were: Physical representation of the contrast between open and enclosed spaces, tree's representing emotion, emotional journey represented in a physical way, decay of nature.
out of these we thought that "tree's representing emotion" would be the best idea, We discussed what type of tree's would represent which emotions such as: Upright and Straight = happy, strong and proud, groups of tree's close together = frustrated, entrapped and angry.

Mindmap

We were set the task of creating a 3 minute long video, the project was called "portrait of place". we had to work in pairs. i worked with Luke Parker and Brendan Harper (there was an odd number of people so we worked as a three.) we started by getting together and mind-mapping everything that came to mind when talking about "place" the things we though of included: physical place, walls, buildings, trees, mental place, sadness, happiness etc. we did this so we could gain a better understanding of what our options were.

Editing Exercise

In class yesterday we did a quick editing tutorial, we were given the task of editing together some shots of Aikido, this is what me and luke came up with... hope you like.

Realism???

After todays lecture on 'Realism', i have some ... thoughts. although i understand the point of realism, i can't really agree with it 100%.. and I'll tell you why. The whole aspect of realism is to "represent reality within a film", but who is to say exactly what reality is? because reality is within the eyes of the beholder, everyone perceives reality in a different way. for example, someone with a "mental disorder" such as Alzheimer's or anxiety disorders or Psychotic disorders involving hallucinations, drug addicts, alcoholics i could go on and on and on, my point is that these people obviously see reality differently than say you and me, who's to say that you and me don't see reality different. because if you think about it... could people having separate opinions technically be classed as seeing reality differently? or even someone not being affected by the cold as much as the person next to them is someone seeing reality differently than someone else. So really if you think about it, isn't a realist film... or a film representing reality, really just seeing reality as the filmmaker see's it??

Salaryman - Jake Knight

Another film i watched today, this film really hit home with me, and I'll explain why at the end.
basic blurb - A Japanese man wakes up to find he has lost his memory of the past few days, so he rigs his camera to automatically take pictures throughout his day. 4 days later he reviews his pictures to find that everyday is exactly the same and he is living a completely repetitive life.
This film was very effective in the way it used it's shots. sticking mainly to wide shots to show the emptiness of the rooms around the main character. all the walls were bare and plain white, there was such a lack of identity within the character and spaces that he was a part of. there was no music and very little sound used in this film apart from a voice over, which exaggerates the lack of excitement in this mans life.
When his photos are developed, and he discovers what he does during the day. the question is posed, did he really lose his memory or was it simply that his days are exactly the same so he doesn't think he can remember, but actually he can?
the reason this film "hit home" for me, was because one of my biggest worries is that I'll end up having a life like this, no excitement, no creativity, no anything. could you imagine that?

Highrise - Gabrielle Russell

Watched High-rise by Gabrielle Russell, it's a very interesting short film. First impressions I'd say the film theme is poverty and desperation. It shows a mother and her baby living in a small claustrophobic space. from the very start the expressions of the mother show resentment towards her baby as she watches a game show on the tv, a connection can be made between the two here, the mother feels as though the baby is holding her back in life and because of this she resents her responsibility.
In the next few minutes the Gurgling sounds of the baby and the sounds from the tv get louder and louder, at the same time the shots get closer and closer towards the womans face - this is probably to represent her annoyance at the situation and also to show her confusion with everything thats going on around her. eventually the baby throws its doll, that lands on the sill of an open window. when the baby moves toward the window to retrieve the doll the mother does nothing at first. then she suddenly moves, falling to the floor and knocking over the babies milk bottle. for a moment the shot is focused on the milk bottle as it slowly drips milk to the floor. i believe there is something in this shot that is extremely relevant to the story, maybe the milk bottle represents the mother in some way, i have not managed to work it out. Then in the most shocking part of the film the mother gets up and leaves the room. shutting the door behind her she waits in the hall. i think this is the part of the film that would get the biggest emotional response from an audience - and the response would be disbelief that a mother would put her baby in that much danger. This is the point that shows desperation, the mother is so desperate, for either money or just a way out that she is willing to let her child die!! everything goes quiet, then a babies scream is heard and the mother rushes back inside the room to find her baby on the sofa playing with a different toy (emotional response - relief). the mother moves to the window and looks out to see the doll smashed on the pavement below, this shot simply represents the severity of the situation and the real danger the baby was in.
I found this film extremely powerful, in the way it uses shots and sound to convey emotion. the game show represents her longing and her poverty. it was definitely successful in extracting an emotional response from the audience.

Banksy / starwars

i stumbled across this picture on stumble.com (ironically) and i think it's hillarious, but also a very clever combination of popular film and a taboo art form. what makes it so different for me is that i haven't seen much in the way of Art and film combined in such a way.

Steel homes - Eva Weber

After watching Steel homes by Eva Weber today i have managed to make quite a few observations.
the film starts with an image of a metallic shutter being opened into a building while a metallic rubbling can be heard. we then see a series of metal doors with padlocks keeping them shut. over these images as well as metallic clanging sounds, voice overs can be heard, of people talking about "their rooms" and "their doors and padlocks" without actually telling the audience what we are actually seeing in the images. instantly we are given the impression of a prison which would then tie in to the title of "steel" homes e.g. prison cells. We then see people with metal carts walking around the building and opening rooms and taking out objects from the rooms. we then realize that this is a storage facility. it is noticeable that the people in the images have their faces hidden from the camera, along with the blank metallic walls and the numbers on the wall cause a lack of identity in the people that are in shot. the people seem upset, and the mood of these people is reflected in the surroundings of the shot. The mood of the voice overs also seems quite unhappy too. it's as though the confined spaces of the storage units are a reflection of the peoples lives, small and confined, everything packed into one small space, which i believe was the element to the film itself. The sounds in the film work very successfully, there is a subtle hint of quiet melancholy music heard throughout however the metallic clanking is more overwhelming making the film and the lives of the people seem very mechanical. the use of cataphoric referencing in the film is a very effective technique, as an audience we automatically draw assumptions about the people in the voice overs which turn out to be inaccurate,

Just driven down the motorway

I love driving at night it's so easy to get lost in the dark emptiness of the road. there's something really peaceful in the eeriness of silence. it's a great way to clear your head, when you're not going anywhere everything is much simpler.