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.