'Non-narrative: Digital textures. Use live action sequences superimposed with text
and sound/music to produce a unique viewing experience. 2 -4 mins.'
NON
NARRATIVE FILM: DIGITAL TEXTURES
Research
I
began this assignment by researching online for examples of
non-narrative videos in order to increase my understanding of this
genre of film-making. I found several such films – mostly college
or university projects and was interested to note that watching them
left me with a feeling of disquiet – my mind seemed unable to
accept them purely as works without a narrative and wanted to attach
meanings and sequences to them.
The
first video that I viewed was made by ‘MrPinewood’ and entitled
‘Non-Narrative
(What does this film mean to you?)’
 |
‘Non-Narrative
(What does this film mean to you?)’ MrPinewood
The
next film I watched was made by Hela
Kane and Anna Lambis (IMxAxBUNNY)
and titled ‘Non Narrative Film Assignment’
 |
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvx-2vAiOw4 |
'Non Narrative Film Assignment' by Hela Kane and Anna Lambis
The film began with black and white footage of an empty classroom filed with computers. A girl is seen to enter the room. She sits at a computer and the film then goes into colour as she types, although the viewer does not see what she is working on. Her clothes - shown as brown and blue in the first clip change in the next clip to beige and her hairstyle alters also. Footage of the room reverts to black and white footage of empty classroom when she leaves. The audio for this film consisted of slightly melancholy minor & augmented minor guitar music at the beginning and the end, punctuated by silence as girl enters and leaves room, with upbeat whistling music played during the section when the girl uses the computer.
I
liked watching this film more than I did Mr Pinewood’s video,
perhaps because the music and use of colour made this video easier to
attach a narrative to, implying that the unused computers in the
empty room cheered up when used. I felt that the continuity jump in
the girl’s appearance didn’t really add anything to the video
and looked slightly overthought. The sequence had a definite
symmetry, which was reinforced by the musical punctuation.
The
next video I watched was called ‘Intra
Cubus - Non Narrative Film Piece’ by
Joel Bell and Floris Van Gaalan, film students from New Zealand, who
said of their video that they had intended to explore interior and
exterior space.
 |
‘Intra Cubus - Non Narrative Film Piece’ by Joel Bell and Floris Van Gaalan
This high quality film was shot in full colour and a tripod was used throughout. It began with the camera moving smoothly upward and downward, revealing a different scene on each sweep. These scenes then changed from a contrast between interior and exterior spaces to different and unexpected views revealed each time the doors of a lift opened. The audio was provided by a repetitive guitar loop. I really enjoyed watching this skilfully made and surprising film and felt excited by the ideas that they were exploring. I especially liked the repeated motif of the lift doors opening which created a suspense in the viewer, wondering what kind of scene it would open on next. This film encouraged me to develop positive ideas with regard to my film since it demonstrated that one could create a surreal non-narrative sequence that was soothing and pleasant to watch.
 |
‘Yellow,
A Non Narrative’ by Emily Hughes and Alex Fichera
The next video I watched – ‘Yellow, A Non Narrative’ by Emily Hughes and Alex
Fichera was set to the Coldplay song ‘Yellow’ and used yellow balloons – singly and in groups - as a central motif throughout the film. The rest of the footage in this student film had been desaturated so that the lemon yellow balloons readilly commanded the viewer’s attention. To the extent that after seeing the first minute or two of this video I was able to predict with some accuracy what would happen next I’m not sure how closely it fulfilled the notion of a non-narrative film, but it made for pleasant viewing and the contrast between the hard concrete edges of the cityscape in which it was filmed and the lightness of the bobbing balloons worked very effectively to maintain interest throughout. The most interesting sequence was one in which the continuity had been edited to allow the balloons - fastened individually to railings and seen at a distance – to disappear and reappear in a random fashion.
As a contrast to the student videos above, I also found a professionally produced one: sting for MTV Hits, directed by Julien Vallée entitled ‘Open title for MTV-Hits Australia’.
Accompanied by a pop-rock track, this fast paced video only lasted for 2:22 but was packed with energy and inventive ideas. Using a colour theme of black and pink against a white background and a mixture of techniques including stop motion, timelapse, greenscreen, SFX and simple rigging, the action began with black balloons bursting to release pink feathers before rapidly moving to a young man dressed in black whose pink bubblegum bubble humorously burst over his face after which he dived through a pink frame suspended in mid-air, pink debris emerging from the far side. These three scenes alone took place within the opening four seconds of the film and aside from a brief section where multi-coloured paint with a strange texture sloshed onscreen, the pink, black and white theme continued at a constant, dizzying speed throughout the video as familiar objects rapidly underwent a wide variety of unexpected transformations, ending with a return to the black balloons.This was a non-narrative video with a clear message aimed at its predominantly youthful demographic about the exciting and unpredictable entertainment available on the popular MTV channel. The rapid-fire editing, colour co-ordination and stream of clever ideas in this film were innately fascinating and I viewed it several times in attempt to understand how the director had approached his subject matter.
 |
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioq177dg3ck&feature=youtu.be |
'South London Ordnance - Revolver'
The final video I watched for research was the South London Ordnance - Revolver (Official Video) released on 7th March 2013. This video was apparently filmed entirely on a handheld mobile phone and provides a recent example of an official music video in the non-narrative genre. This music video features industrial vistas of South London - predominantly Battersea Power Station seen from within a passing train - and night footage of streets taken from the front seat of a car. I was impressed by the way that the partially desaturated, blurred and unsophisticated visual components complement the techno track both in terms of subject matter and overall ambience. Of the videos I viewed, this one resonates the most closely with some of the ideas I would like to convey in my own.
Evaluation
of Research
Whilst all of the videos fulfilled the brief of ‘non-narrative films’, their
approaches to this genre differed markedly, not only in the expression of ideas but also in the ambience thus produced. The films that used the most random footage were the least appealing to watch and left me with a sense of unease, whilst those with some kind of structure in place – be it a colour, a motif or a concept – were far easier to view and more enjoyable as a result. Additionally, the speed at which the footage changed from one scene to another in these films seemed less important than the steadiness and regularity of the clip lengths. From this I have concluded that in order to create a film that others may find enjoyable to watch I will need to provide my viewer with a sufficient number of clues to allow them to impose some kind of structure upon my movie, such as theming by colour or providing a central idea that underpins the scenes and regulating the duration of the clips. Non-narrative films are counterintuitive by their very nature, but since the human brain seems to like continuity, I will try to provide a flow of connected ideas at the very least although doing so without slipping into a narrative genre will be a real challenge!
Planning
Below are a shortlist of themes that I have considered for development as a non-narrative video:
Theme One Electric Impulse: |
Pylons, plugs, cables, phone masts, structures, satellite dishes, tunnels, rails, light bulbs, fans, equalizers, oscillators, generators, substations, telegraph poles, water, movement, passages, things moving impulsively, wind events, shadows Mood = focussed / quirky / energetic |
Theme Two
Joy:
|
Sunlight, children, ocean waves, sunlit leaves, lambs, animals playing, people laughing, water, blue skies, white fluffy clouds, candles, pets, running, birds flying, green grass, flowers opening, people socialising Mood = blissful |
Theme Three
Urban
Decay:
|
Twilight, grime, dirt, dustbins, graffiti, menace, litter, dereliction, concrete, bus shelters, empty streets, gutters, drains, decaying doorways, hoodies, fights, neon, Mood = dark / relentless / harsh |
Theme
Four
Liquid:
|
Ocean, waves, taps, sinks, cups, rain, puddles, rainbows, hoses, splashing, oil, coffee, tea, soup, alcohol, streams, lakes, rivers Mood = neutral |
Having
thought carefully about these ideas, I have decided to develop Theme One - Electric Impulse - because it presents a challenge. It would be fairly straightforward to create a set of purely visual textures into which I could work colour and tone (such as the ideas in Theme Four), but I would prefer to stretch the concept a little, if only to maintain the interest of my viewers. What I am aiming to achieve in this video is quite difficult to put into words which in itself tells me I am on the right track, since if it could be verbalised I would have no need to make it as a video. It is not so much a 'journey' as a set of visual references - occasionally dark but also sometimes humorous - to energy events which themselves indicate the underlying stuff of existence.
On
7th
March, my son Ash completed his latest audio track and sent it to me
– it will be ideal for this video because it is upbeat, very
melodic and has a simple but quirky structure, all of which will help
to lessen the disjointedness of the visual components and help to provide my viewers with an energising experience.
Inspired
by the music I found myself able to sketch and notate many of the
shots that I’ve had floating around in my mind for several weeks. Subject to change - both whenever better shots become
available and during editing - a rough idea for my main shotlist (not that they will be shown in this order) from which the digital textures will be derived is
written below:
- MS – Zoom in on a three pin plug lying on the floor, pins uppermost, socket behind it.
- MS – A stopmotion sequence of the plug engaging with the socket behind and the switch being depressed.
- ECU – Zoom in on one pin of the socket and enter black tunnel, possibly with SFX ‘swirls’.
- MS - CU – White light / end of tunnel zooms into view.
- MS – Panning past the flickering bars of a substation.
- CU – Zoom in on technical parts of the substation and follow some of the cables.
- CU – A cable in a completely different setting, with the wires exposed. The camera could pan along the wires or the wires could appear to writhe in some way, possibly by being twisted at either end, out of shot.
- LS – Underside or similarly oddly angled view of a mobile phone mast.
- CU – Close up of a phone mast, concentrating on the grid-like supporting structure.
- LS – Phone mast from a distance.
- LS – Pylons from a distance, ideally the ones in the Penrhyndeudraeth Estuary.
- ECU – Human eye gently closing.
- MCU – Wires and cables on the pylons.
- MCU – the negative spaces on the pylon grids.
- CU - Multiscreen images of the coloured lights from electrical devices against a black background, coming into view one by one and flickering on and off.
- CU – The server outside the staff offices in Regent Street.
- ECU – A human eyelid opening slowly to reveal a large pupil.
- ECU – Zooms into the pupil and follows another tunnel, with the word ‘where?’ looming into view as text, yellow or white.
- CU – Tunnel ends as a soup blender tool comes into view, seen whirring from beneath the blades.
- LS – A female figure dancing in silhouette, possibly upside down, swirling and turning her hands. Film will be edited to cause unexpected jumps and freezes in the movement.
- CU – Swirling hands dancing in silhouette.
- MCU – SFX - Two fingertips exchanging electricity (like Sistine Chapel).
- CU – A butterfly-in-a-jar possibly in silhouette.
- CU – Fan blades rotating or electrical fire rotating.
- CU- Bulb slowly illuminating.
- MS – A cat with an itchy back turning round to wash it.
- CU – Cat’s eye.
- Multiscreen – timelapse footage of traffic lights changing against black background.
- CU - Halogen hobs lighting up.
- LS – a stationary chair suddenly lurching across a room.
- SFX – Pylon shot from before with lightning running down it.
- ECU – The flashing display from a radio alarm that has not been set.
- SFX treatment of shot 11 involving ‘horizontal-hold’ style flickers and posterising of pylons.
- MCU - Leaves blowing in the wind
- LS - Shadows - perhaps on a brick or concrete wall - of people dancing.
- LS - Shadows of many hands dancing and swirling - perhaps like a flock of birds.
- LS - Timelapse shadows lengthening on the ground.
- CU - A face seen from behind rainy glass.
- CU - Zoom in on the 'face' visible behind the textured glass in Regent Street (entrance to building near Inspirations Cafe / staircase).
- CU - Small waves swirling and lapping.
- CU - Things swaying under the water such as weeds and debris.
- MLS - Knobbly, forked, bare tree branches which can also be manipulated to look similar to lightning.
- LS - Birds in flight - scattering from a rooftop for example.
- CU - Water swirling down a plughole.
There are more images to follow, but here are two photographs of the pylons in the estuary at Penrhyndeudraeth that I took a few years ago from the train. I have edited them in Adobe Photoshop to give a sense of what certain sections of the film will look like:
Two photo-edited images I took of pylons, indicating the intended ambience of my non narrative film
After
messaging Ash with the above shotlist and a brief description of the
elements from his 6:30m track that I wanted to use, he edited a 3:00m section for me to use, which is the perfect length and allowed me to
plan my sequence in greater depth.
Allowing 16 bars for the opening title sequence, my film will begin at 0.17, alternately building and consolidating the action toward a peak around 1:34 to coincide with the introduction of the vocal samples, a recapitulation of some of the action at 2:07, a resolution around 2:38 and the closing credits appearing between 2:54 and 3:08, with a brief return to a piece of earlier footage after the final credits as the final sound is played.
During a tutorial on the 12th March I ran the above ideas past Stewart Edwards and his helpful feedback allowed me to see that the ideas I have been developing for this film are beginning to veer a little too much into the narrative genre: my viewers must not be able to predict what they are going to see next.
Stewart cited the famous 'blown bag' scene from the 1999 film 'American Beauty', where the fact that the solitary bag - blowing randomly above a swirl of leaves - allows us to indirectly construe something about the mind of a character is a secondary product of its inclusion as a non-narrative element.
Allowing 16 bars for the opening title sequence, my film will begin at 0.17, alternately building and consolidating the action toward a peak around 1:34 to coincide with the introduction of the vocal samples, a recapitulation of some of the action at 2:07, a resolution around 2:38 and the closing credits appearing between 2:54 and 3:08, with a brief return to a piece of earlier footage after the final credits as the final sound is played.
During a tutorial on the 12th March I ran the above ideas past Stewart Edwards and his helpful feedback allowed me to see that the ideas I have been developing for this film are beginning to veer a little too much into the narrative genre: my viewers must not be able to predict what they are going to see next.
Stewart cited the famous 'blown bag' scene from the 1999 film 'American Beauty', where the fact that the solitary bag - blowing randomly above a swirl of leaves - allows us to indirectly construe something about the mind of a character is a secondary product of its inclusion as a non-narrative element.
 | |
| http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVuq7L9IEr8 |
'Plastic Bag Scene' from American Beauty
Stewart also indicated that I need to increase my shot list considerably and he emphasised the 'texture' element in my chosen assignment, whereby clips will be laid over one another and light can gradually emerge from darkness. Our conversation this morning has now given me a clearer idea of what to aim for in this video and new ideas are already arriving as a result.
Later on in the week tutor Simon Hall spent some time with me demonstrating plug-ins and filters in Adobe After Effects that can convey the flicker, bars and slipping horizontal hold reminiscent of an image seen on an old, analogue television set. This was very helpful and he has pointed me the right direction for the effects that I want to introduce. As the small amounts of footage I had already filmed and edited earlier in the week would not load correctly in After Effects at uni that day, I spent the evening re-editing them in a fresh project with different sequence settings and will test them out next week at uni to make sure they work. They consist of shots 1 -> 3 and 37 from my list.
In the weeks following my tutorial with Stewart I began to build up a collection of clips for my film, using the shot list (above) and sketches I had made (below) as a guide.
I also created two initial moodboards to try out alternative colour schemes for the film. The one below utilises utilising cool, metallic gradients and hues. There may be some brighter colours running through this such as from the LEDs and red 'on' switches but for the structures and pylons at least I would like to keep the hues sombre and cold-looking:
Two months have now passed since I wrote the above entries. During this time I filmed a lot of footage for this project, 22GB in total! The biggest problem that I encountered related to the quality of my footage; since 'electricity' is largely invisible and the objects which carry and transmit it static, live footage would have to consist of panning shots and zoom shots of pylons and substations, most of which are so heavily barred and surrounded by barbed wire that such shots would not only be difficult to obtain but also require me to film with a hand-held camera, something I am not very good at.
I knew of a spot in the hills where a couple of pylons stood unprotected in a field, meaning I could film them from beneath, but due to the snowy conditions over Easter it was only possible for me to travel there to film them during one day. My hands are pretty shaky at the best of times and as the weather was bitterly cold and very windy my shots were quite wobbly. The day I travelled to film the pylons at the estuary as planned was also so cold that I had to turn back after a short while of filming them from a distance; in my planning I had banked on us having similar hot weather to the previous March but a four mile walk across a wet and freezing wasteland in Arctic winds proved beyond my power to accomplish.
Closer to home I tried to film the local substation but the bars surrounding it made for uninspiring panning shots and attempts at upward sweeps to track the wires leading away from the substation to nearby telegraph poles simply looked amateurish. I had better luck using a tripod indoors to film small household objects that worked by electricity, but this footage actually looked pretty boring.
It began to dawn on me that I was going to have to take an entirely new approach to making this film. With this in mind I started filming close-ups of clocks and stopwatches, torches flashing on and off, routers, snow falling on the window panes and things that appeared on my computer screen. Using stopmotion I filmed the batteries hopping into a charger that plugged itself into a fourgang and once the weather warmed up a little I took quite a lot photographs of phone masts and similar structures in the hope that I could animate them or use them as collage layers further into the project.
Back in Wrexham after the Easter break, I began editing together the various pieces of footage and photographs that I had collected. At the end of this process I had several interesting little films to work with. The household objects that had looked dull on their own made a nice statement when used in a multi-screen format - which I had learned how to create during my previous semester's project - creating a structure which echoed many of the grids that I had come across whilst filming and photographing the phone masts and pylons. Multiplying and reducing these grids was also successful. For something softer to contrast this I made use of the bokeh effect produced when snow was falling on the window pane through which I had filmed the neon streetlamp outside and I felt that this might provide a good introduction to the film. The most unusual piece of footage that I had acquired was the film of an online Flash gadget on my laptop screen that plays notes from the pentatonic scale when black squares are depressed:
By 'playing' it in time to Ashley's track I could make it flash in the correct rhythm and found that by overloading it I could make it strobe and then crash, which I shot with the intention of running the film backwards.
I put together a sequence of still images of pylons and steel towers and these too looked quite effective and conveyed the technological sense that I was aiming for in this film.
The live outdoor footage of the pylons - both distant and close up - was of a distinctly poorer quality than the rest and although I kept it on hand I couldn't envisage myself using it because it was so wobbly. The final element to put in place was the text. Two samples are used in the music, one says 'where' and the other 'to my life' (from 'into my life' according to Ash). Tutor Simon Hall had shown us how to attach text to objects, so using Adobe After Effects I made a path by creating an invisible mask and the animated text then followed it. I also attached an artificial lightning effect to a transparent tiff of a pylon (one of my stills from the mountain field over Easter) and animated a cloudy background racing by. Far from being a sombre, uncanny non-narrative film I could feel that this was turning into something quite cheerful and at this point I therefore elected to go with my second, quite garish moodboard palette.
Having spent a week assembling my components, I began putting a storyboard together from screengrabs of these 'mini-movies' and apart from a couple of minor changes that became necessary as I went along was for the most part able to adhere to it.
The next step was to put these clips together to create my short film which took a further five days, plus one day for minor tweaks to the finished product. The most enjoyable part of the editing for this project was making the layers using the Adobe Premiere Pro Colour Key to determine the alpha channel of the clips. Beneath them I then ran two coloured tiffs; a spectrum in the case of the chequerboard style 'music swf' (for which I chose black as the alpha) and a single body colour for the rest, over which I set a hue that gradually varied during the timespan of the clip.
The flashing torch worked well to emphasise the drama of the percussive element and I discovered that using it exactly on the beat had a somewhat deadening effect on the film and I offset it slightly from several of the beats to reduce this. I used a lot of effects in this film to try to create an interesting visual event that keeps the viewer's interest and implies a theme without creating any kind of logical story, although of course one cannot help but try and make some kind of narrative sense of it all.
Please find below my finished music video: 'Electric Impulse'
I think my finished film works quite well and I have learnt a great deal whilst making it, which has improved my confidence with the software involved, particularly Adobe After Effects which is still unfamiliar territory for me. I have enjoyed creating the effects and manipulating the footage to do the things I want it to do; there is something very satisfying about 'painting with video' and over the summer I hope to experiment further with abstract shapes and colours to see what can be produced.
All footage other than the five animated sequences (the two texts, the charger plugging itself in, the lightning striking the pylon and the pylon tiffs sequence) was actually filmed from a tripod, although with the amount of effects in place it probably doesn't come across as such. It is a shame however that I was unable to use so much of my live footage of the pylons and the substation. My inability to hold a video camera steady has meant that in the past I have always filmed from a tripod, avoiding even panning shots since they invariably 'judder' on my economy-level equipment. This coupled with the fact that I chose a static, largely invisible subject - necessitating my camera to create the movement - was a mistake I should have spotted much earlier on in the project. Had I thought it through more deeply I would have taken a different approach to the whole thing and perhaps chosen a different subject altogether, such as liquid or fire. In the next video project that I undertake I will therefore plan out not just the creative aspect and a shotlist but also look deeply into the basic practicalities of obtaining the kinds of shots necessary so that I can be confident of meeting the filming requirements.
________________________________________________________________
YouTube (2008) Non-Narrative (What does this film mean to you?). [online] Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKM--z9LU
[Accessed: 05 Mar 2013].
YouTube (2010) Non Narrative Film Assignment.. [online]
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvx-2vAiOw4
[Accessed: 07 Mar 2013].
YouTube (1920) Intra Cubus - Non Narrative Film Piece. [online]
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d3kdH8f6s8
[Accessed: 07 Mar 2013].
YouTube (2010) Yellow, A Non Narrative by Emily Hughes & Alex Fichera [online]
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbSDnOl-CG4
[Accessed: 06 Mar 2013].
YouTube (2011) MTV-Hits. [online]
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmvR4uS2uvk&playnext=1&list=PL635DA266CF335578&feature=results_main
[Accessed: 08 Mar 2013].
YouTube (n.d.) American Beauty - Flying bag scene (true HD & well sync'd). [online]
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVuq7L9IEr8
[Accessed: 18 Mar 2013].
YouTube (2013) South London Ordnance - Revolver (Official Video). [online]
Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioq177dg3ck&feature=youtu.be
[Accessed: 11 Mar 2013].
Later on in the week tutor Simon Hall spent some time with me demonstrating plug-ins and filters in Adobe After Effects that can convey the flicker, bars and slipping horizontal hold reminiscent of an image seen on an old, analogue television set. This was very helpful and he has pointed me the right direction for the effects that I want to introduce. As the small amounts of footage I had already filmed and edited earlier in the week would not load correctly in After Effects at uni that day, I spent the evening re-editing them in a fresh project with different sequence settings and will test them out next week at uni to make sure they work. They consist of shots 1 -> 3 and 37 from my list.
In the weeks following my tutorial with Stewart I began to build up a collection of clips for my film, using the shot list (above) and sketches I had made (below) as a guide.
Sketches for shot ideas:
I also created two initial moodboards to try out alternative colour schemes for the film. The one below utilises utilising cool, metallic gradients and hues. There may be some brighter colours running through this such as from the LEDs and red 'on' switches but for the structures and pylons at least I would like to keep the hues sombre and cold-looking:
After a few weeks of thinking about this I am also considering using a much brighter palette of rainbow colours, to warm the whole thing up. The reason for this is that most of my footage will be of grey metallic structures such as pylons and phone masts, often seen against a grey (or whitish) sky. I don't want the film to look drab - like so many other non-narrative films I have seen during my researches - so layering bright colours across these images might work quite well by providing a contrast to the greys, browns and blacks. A sample showing what this might look like is shown below, but until I actually begin to edit the film I'm not certain which palette to choose.
Filming
Two months have now passed since I wrote the above entries. During this time I filmed a lot of footage for this project, 22GB in total! The biggest problem that I encountered related to the quality of my footage; since 'electricity' is largely invisible and the objects which carry and transmit it static, live footage would have to consist of panning shots and zoom shots of pylons and substations, most of which are so heavily barred and surrounded by barbed wire that such shots would not only be difficult to obtain but also require me to film with a hand-held camera, something I am not very good at.
I knew of a spot in the hills where a couple of pylons stood unprotected in a field, meaning I could film them from beneath, but due to the snowy conditions over Easter it was only possible for me to travel there to film them during one day. My hands are pretty shaky at the best of times and as the weather was bitterly cold and very windy my shots were quite wobbly. The day I travelled to film the pylons at the estuary as planned was also so cold that I had to turn back after a short while of filming them from a distance; in my planning I had banked on us having similar hot weather to the previous March but a four mile walk across a wet and freezing wasteland in Arctic winds proved beyond my power to accomplish.
Closer to home I tried to film the local substation but the bars surrounding it made for uninspiring panning shots and attempts at upward sweeps to track the wires leading away from the substation to nearby telegraph poles simply looked amateurish. I had better luck using a tripod indoors to film small household objects that worked by electricity, but this footage actually looked pretty boring.
It began to dawn on me that I was going to have to take an entirely new approach to making this film. With this in mind I started filming close-ups of clocks and stopwatches, torches flashing on and off, routers, snow falling on the window panes and things that appeared on my computer screen. Using stopmotion I filmed the batteries hopping into a charger that plugged itself into a fourgang and once the weather warmed up a little I took quite a lot photographs of phone masts and similar structures in the hope that I could animate them or use them as collage layers further into the project.
Editing: 'Electric Impulse'
Back in Wrexham after the Easter break, I began editing together the various pieces of footage and photographs that I had collected. At the end of this process I had several interesting little films to work with. The household objects that had looked dull on their own made a nice statement when used in a multi-screen format - which I had learned how to create during my previous semester's project - creating a structure which echoed many of the grids that I had come across whilst filming and photographing the phone masts and pylons. Multiplying and reducing these grids was also successful. For something softer to contrast this I made use of the bokeh effect produced when snow was falling on the window pane through which I had filmed the neon streetlamp outside and I felt that this might provide a good introduction to the film. The most unusual piece of footage that I had acquired was the film of an online Flash gadget on my laptop screen that plays notes from the pentatonic scale when black squares are depressed:
 |
| http://img44.imageshack.us/img44/6182/music.swf |
I put together a sequence of still images of pylons and steel towers and these too looked quite effective and conveyed the technological sense that I was aiming for in this film.
The live outdoor footage of the pylons - both distant and close up - was of a distinctly poorer quality than the rest and although I kept it on hand I couldn't envisage myself using it because it was so wobbly. The final element to put in place was the text. Two samples are used in the music, one says 'where' and the other 'to my life' (from 'into my life' according to Ash). Tutor Simon Hall had shown us how to attach text to objects, so using Adobe After Effects I made a path by creating an invisible mask and the animated text then followed it. I also attached an artificial lightning effect to a transparent tiff of a pylon (one of my stills from the mountain field over Easter) and animated a cloudy background racing by. Far from being a sombre, uncanny non-narrative film I could feel that this was turning into something quite cheerful and at this point I therefore elected to go with my second, quite garish moodboard palette.
Having spent a week assembling my components, I began putting a storyboard together from screengrabs of these 'mini-movies' and apart from a couple of minor changes that became necessary as I went along was for the most part able to adhere to it.
The next step was to put these clips together to create my short film which took a further five days, plus one day for minor tweaks to the finished product. The most enjoyable part of the editing for this project was making the layers using the Adobe Premiere Pro Colour Key to determine the alpha channel of the clips. Beneath them I then ran two coloured tiffs; a spectrum in the case of the chequerboard style 'music swf' (for which I chose black as the alpha) and a single body colour for the rest, over which I set a hue that gradually varied during the timespan of the clip.
The flashing torch worked well to emphasise the drama of the percussive element and I discovered that using it exactly on the beat had a somewhat deadening effect on the film and I offset it slightly from several of the beats to reduce this. I used a lot of effects in this film to try to create an interesting visual event that keeps the viewer's interest and implies a theme without creating any kind of logical story, although of course one cannot help but try and make some kind of narrative sense of it all.
Please find below my finished music video: 'Electric Impulse'
Evaluation
I think my finished film works quite well and I have learnt a great deal whilst making it, which has improved my confidence with the software involved, particularly Adobe After Effects which is still unfamiliar territory for me. I have enjoyed creating the effects and manipulating the footage to do the things I want it to do; there is something very satisfying about 'painting with video' and over the summer I hope to experiment further with abstract shapes and colours to see what can be produced.
All footage other than the five animated sequences (the two texts, the charger plugging itself in, the lightning striking the pylon and the pylon tiffs sequence) was actually filmed from a tripod, although with the amount of effects in place it probably doesn't come across as such. It is a shame however that I was unable to use so much of my live footage of the pylons and the substation. My inability to hold a video camera steady has meant that in the past I have always filmed from a tripod, avoiding even panning shots since they invariably 'judder' on my economy-level equipment. This coupled with the fact that I chose a static, largely invisible subject - necessitating my camera to create the movement - was a mistake I should have spotted much earlier on in the project. Had I thought it through more deeply I would have taken a different approach to the whole thing and perhaps chosen a different subject altogether, such as liquid or fire. In the next video project that I undertake I will therefore plan out not just the creative aspect and a shotlist but also look deeply into the basic practicalities of obtaining the kinds of shots necessary so that I can be confident of meeting the filming requirements.
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References
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