MEDI 126 (Critical Evaluation: The Envelope Project)

Critical Evaluation:

Perspective 

For our Envelope project we were given; a slide with a leaf in it, some charcoal, an audio file that everyone got as well, a link to a video called violin power and a text about war and technology. These I feel we worked into our film very well as they not only appeared or were referenced in the film but also flavoured the feel of the film.

Our initial ideas were to have a very post apocalyptical feel to it that was mainly inspired by the ‘rusty leaf’ in the slide and the text about war and technology. I feel we did keep some of the bleak post or near apocalyptical feel with the final film as we kept the main character very isolated. Also most of our initial ideas involved a single character that was faceless and therefore supposedly unimportant to the world. We kept with this very strongly as you don’t get to see the girls face. She is important only in her world which is a separate reality.

We wanted our film to really challenge people’s perceptions and get them thinking and have stuck fairly to close our script. Within our film there is an ongoing clash of nature and technology that we wanted to convey that I think was fairly successful. It is important to the materials that there was both a balance and a clash of these things. Or so we felt.

We used charcoal a lot as we liked the idea of the character drawing things in her world as drawing is very escapist and charcoal is both a natural thing and a metaphor for destruction given that it is burned wood. Also this meant that we could focus solely on the girl’s hands adding further to her anonymity.
We wanted the voice over to sound innocent and slightly melancholy in a wistful way, a bitter sweet blend of happy and sad to reflect her isolation but also her contentment with it. We thought also that her relative innocents is important because she could remain happy in a bleak and uncaring world.

I liked the technical side of this project but I did more filming really than anything else. I enjoy filming as it is akin to photography and all about the best angles and perspective to get the best shots which I feel for the most part was achieved. It was great using a tripod as it enabled us to get the best shots and hold them steady. I would love to have a bigger role in editing next time as I have yet to fully flex that side of things and tend to prefer being behind a camera rather than in a computer lab. However to widen my skill set this does need to be remedied.

I have really enjoyed working with my group as creatively it was a lot of fun and we generated a huge amount of ideas and bounced off each other very well. So much so that it was hard to narrow the ideas down! Also our group gets on well and has a fairly broad skill set. I think we achieved our aims with the film. The only few things I would do differently is have maybe a more permanent actor since I do notice the difference in hands, hopefully this doesn’t spoil the film however.

MEDI 116 (Dartmoor Poem)

 I wrote a poem that could be used for our Dartmoor project:

The standing stones are watchful on the hill.
Casting shadows to the valley bellow,
The long sung magic whispers through the grass,
Along the wind and in the streams,
Winding forever out into endless green.

-Nights

MEDI 116 (Dartmoor Ramblings)

So after two days intence photo shoots, video capture and audio gathering our group have a tone of data and so far no concrete idea of how exactly to present it.

We all went up together to the moors and then wandered off with different devices in different directions sometimes swapping and changing as we bumped into eachouther again. I got some very good shots on the digital camera the first day and on the the SLR the secound day.

I think all in all we may have at least 1000 photos to pic from and I shall be uploading all those I personally took to my flickr account as soon as they can be uploaded.

The fact we have a lot of photos as well as some film and some sound bites does lead me to think that constructing some kind of story through the use of both wirtten and adio poems or prose would be good. If we can in some way make the pictures interactive and maybe have them either generate a sound, a spoken story or a film clip would be good.

I am sort of back on the database cinema idea agian. I just hope my coding skills are up to scratch.

MEDI 126 (The Envelope Project)

For our envelope project we got given some charcoal, a text on war and technology, a slide with what we agreed to be a rusty leaf in it and a link to a video Violin Power 
The video is haunting and spooky and also surreal so we really wanted to work that in.

I took a picture of the leaf slide on a slide projector: 

We had a lot of initial ideas to incorporate these materials and talked them over extensively.We liked the idea of sort a dystopian feeling world like our own and in the subsequent filming have tried to balance old and new to create and artist sence of grandure but still have it fairly bleak and dirty to reflect the perspective of the main character.

We have ensured all the sourses are in it as well as influencing the feel of piece.

I enjoy working with my group and its been a lot of fun creativly speaking.

MEDI 116 (Website Initial Ideas)

In our group we came up with a lot of ideas for spaces we could represent on the web. They ranged from very obscure things such as the back of a sofa to more ordinary things like towns and places.

After doing a mind map:

 
We narrowed it down to three ideas we liked most:

Dartmoor:  

• Journey through Dartmoor 
• Places
• Poems
  
• Ghost stories
• Painting
• GPS
• Google Maps
• Audio and visual story telling
  

Sofa:  

• Whats in the back of it?
• Real and imagined objects; keys, change, remote, little men, fluff, cats, Jesus etc.  
  
• Dark material and textures
• Flash based animations
  
• Sounds
• Writing
• Audio and visual story telling

Clock:  

• Moving clock
• Inner mechanisums
  
• Revolutions of gogs bring up text
• Animated menu
• Artistic
• Original poetry
• How government manipulates peoples thought (propaganda)
• Actual space is time - paradox
• Steampunk in feel.
  

In the end we went with Dartmoor!

• Choose river or forest area & take pictures.
• Possibly do a lot of different areas or focus on smaller areas.
• Dartmoor as whole?
• Google maps
• GPS
  
• Photographs
• Video footage.
  
• Sound recording; rivers, wind, crunching leaves, nature sounds etc all on location.
  
• Animation - Still in keeping with the site so maybe photo based.
  

We have chosen to take an arty stance on it, maybe including poetry and image or narrative of some sort. Our main idea is to gather as much raw data of the place as we can and then see what bits we think are worth compiling into the experiance. 

I have a friend that is in love with the place and I know he has written some good poetry about it that could be good to include. I also personally am very taken with the notion of emulating something a little like Lev Manovich's data base cinema as that is something that I find interesting.  I also in terms of sound like the idea of The Tonematrix from 'aM laboratoy' and think that maybe we could do something similar with a map being the grid or possibly pictures of Dartmoor. It is a really cool toy but may be a bit complex. 

I would like the website to be interactive and have a wide range of media types including sounds, image (still and/or moving) and text. To fully capture the essence of a place and display it in a 2D setting I personally feel there has to be a wide range of information.