Task 4 – Critical Rationale

With the assignment “Make it seem…”, Lucas Foglia gives some basic exercises that consist in photographing something making it look different from how it is normally perceived. The goal of this task is all about playing with light, getting to know how it influences our view, so that we can use it to reinterpret and transform the original meaning of subjects.

This “manipulation of reality” is obviously possible with photography, but also trough other media. Video, in particular, allows us to have control on many different aspects, like movement and audio, and it also involves time.

I chose to answer to the third part of the task, which is “Make a photograph of something that is normal and make it seem shocking”. The normal subject that I selected is a clock, since I wanted to express a certain idea of time running away. I used stop motion technique, moving the pointer and the clock itself, since the effect I wanted to achieve was having the clock moving around the still pointer. The final result is a very jumpy and imprecise but I think that adds more to the feeling of anxiety. I played with the audio also, merging together many ticking sounds, making it noisy, and also adding different crowd and parties noises, all merged together.

Task 5 – Critical Rationale

Sipke Visser
White Walls

For the assignment “white walls” by Sipke Visser I was asked to spend an hour alone with a stranger in an empty room, taking pictures. I was very happy about that, both because I love portrait photography and also because, having a shy and close personality, I found it very intriguing.

Finding a stranger wasn’t very hard. I explained around what I needed to do and finally a friend of a friend said that she was happy to help me, so we arranged a meeting and we spend some time together.

As I said I love portrait photography and I’m not new to photographing people, not even strangers, but normally I would have directly started to shoot. This time, instead, I started making conversation with the subject. I suddenly noticed the difference: she was really willing to talk about who she is and open herself, she was more comfortable while I was taking pictures and I understood her a little bit better as a person. We kept on talking while I was shooting.

I used an analogic camera. In a normal situation I would have been very saving with the films but this time I just kept on shooting, using almost all of them. I find Visser’s style quite close to mine, and inspired by him I decided to keep it simple, just portraying a face in front of a white wall with many little variations. I almost didn’t give her any direction, to let her be as honest as possible.

Task 3 – Critical Rationale

David Hurn
Giving the Mundane its Beautiful due

David Hurn’s assignment “Giving the mundane its beautiful due” is strongly linked with his photographic production and it consist in describing a community through everyday life moments, making interesting what is normally not.

Being a foreigner in England, I quickly realised that I was about to portray a culture with which I have cohabited for a while, but that was not mine. This was maybe helpful in a certain way, since it was easier for me to notice many details that characterise British society, as for example the great varieties of ethnicities living together.

I chose Coventry because, first of all, one of the main points of the task was involvement and research, so I focused on a place where I have been living for a while and that I know. The subject that I selected were the more popular as possible: I didn’t want to be pretentious and I wanted to depict Coventry for what it really is. I took photos of barber boutiques, fast foods, mini markets, …

The development of this task was very though for me. I had to get in touch with many different people, mainly locals, using a very direct approach that could have been misunderstood. I also realised that I am more comfortable when the subject is aware of being photographed, for this reason I often gave up on the “catching the moment” philosophy, preferring instead to ask people for permission to photograph them, or even to pose for me.

Task 2 – Critical Rationale

The assignment “Out of your head” by Shawn Records is about photographing a subject not for what it is and for how we normally perceive it, but more for its design, in the attempt to extend the personal notion of photogenic. Executing it, I was led in front of a building in Coventry city centre, very dull and decadent, which captured my attention with its patterned iron structure. I took a series of pictures around this construction, also playing with symmetry trough the mirroring effect. As a result, I obtained a series of abstracted and futuristic edifices.

Developing task 2 I stuck to this concept and I used architecture to express a post-futuristic and detached reality. Visually, I reinterpreted the main themes of the previous series such as geometry and repetitions: most of the images are characterised by the presence of strong parallel lines. I applied distortion again, this time with tricks like choosing extremely low angles or isolating the subject. I was so able to deprive the subject of his real role, giving him a more abstract connotation.

As I wasn’t only interested in architecture and I wanted to develop more the body of work, I also decided to describe a hypothetical life inside this buildings, and I so introduces the human figure. I made a sub-series of 3 portraits with which I tried to transmit a similar kind of feeling of the architectonic part.

PHONAR – Task 1

FINAL IMAGES

Excerpts from Vision Quest Assignment Cards, Douglas Beasley

Number 10: Go for a walk without your camera. Go back and make one photo of something you noticed along the way. 

 

Number 14: Use negative space with “wild and reckless abandon”, making your main subject a very small part of the composition. 

 

Number 20: Walk an area you would normally drive past. Bring your camera and make photos of what you might normally overlook. 

 

Number 28: Make a scenic photograph. Eliminate one element and retake the photo. Repeat until there’s noting left to take out. See how many steps you can make. 

 

CRITICAL RATIONALE

Developing this task, I followed Douglas Beasley’s idea of Zen and photography, which is mostly based on portraying the intimate relation with the subject instead of creating aesthetically beautiful but spiritually poor images. To do that, the photographing moment itself is vital: time and concentration must be spent. Also, less importance is given to the objective magnificence of places and more on the connection with them. This concept was crucial while completing assignments 10 and 20, which explicitly invites to explore both familiar and new environments, involving a different and more attentive use of the eye and memory. I focused on a natural and an urban objects and the way I perceived and recalled them.

After treating natural subjects alone, I proceed approaching with also human ones. It’s important to give directions to the model but also to consider its spontaneity and the unpredictable aspects, in order to feel its energy and create a connection with the environment. For task 14 I directed my participant to set the atmosphere of the shoot, she then became comfortable with her surrounding creating a flow, which I followed. The absence of direct interaction between her and the camera allowed me to walk around looking for the best angle. I’ve used a lot of negative space to underline the nature surrounding the subjects, trying to make them one with the space, and I did the same with task 28, in which I experimented the difference between a landscape with the presence and the absence of a human figure in it.

 

Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/annatrashie/

 

Post Blog 2 – Say Cheese!

As director of Say Cheese! I took part on many different layers of the production, starting from work closely with the scriptwriter.
Since the beginning we knew which kind of mood we were looking for, romantic and slightly comedic, but our ideas regarding the narrative weren’t clear. We kept working strenuously on it, changing the original storyline extremely, going through many brainstorming sessions and feedbacks. I believe that we finally managed to give to the plot a precise direction as soon as we fulfilled the character’s sheet, thanks to which we were able to figure who were our protagonists, understanding their interests, attitudes, psychologies,… Having two real characters instead of two puppets was very helpful since we were finally able to know how they would react in certain situations, in fact we completed the script shortly after that. I don’t think that any time spent on the writing stage is wasted and I am particularly happy with the characters we created, different but  good together.

While the script was taking shape, I started working on the visuals with the DoP. The entire storytelling is characterized by a playful and naive mood, romantic but not sloppy. To represent visually this kind of feeling we referred to the cinematography of Wes Anderson. We didn’t expect to create images so precise, detailed and voluntarily fake, but we kept his cinema as an aspiration and we agreed on creating colorful pictures, well-centered, still and symmetrical. We also wanted to show Prague in all its beauty and for that it is important to mention Woody Allen, as in some movies he tends to depict cities under their most dreamy (and slightly unrealistic) profiles. The intros of Manhattan and especially the one of Midnight in Paris were inspiring for our opening montage.
Looking at the final film, I think the visuals are one of the strongest aspects and I believed this research really helped.
As soon as the script was done we proceeded adapting it into a storyboard, enriching it with all the information needed. I then analyzed it with the 1st AD to create a shooting schedule, logical and flexible to our needs.

Midnight in Paris

Say Cheese! Opening

 

Having built solid characters, I had a clear idea of what I was looking for in actors, so it wasn’t difficult to choose them. We went through many online-casting sessions, most of the participants were good but only two of them bewitched me proving to be perfect for the role. I started explaining to them the characters. Since the audition, I kept in touch with them and they also received the characters’ sheet: in that way, even without physically meeting me before, they arrived on set prepared about what they needed to do. In the future, when possible, I would prefer to work more face to face with actors before the shooting, but overall everything worked well. On set I managed to explain to them fully who they were about to impersonate, as a matter of fact we discussed it together and some of their personal reflections helped the characters come to life. I believe it’s important to consider the actor’s input when it’s good, so I sometimes let them add improvised lines and change little parts of dialogue, correcting them with a more perfectionist approach when needed. Usually the more free they were, the better the acting was. Directing actors was my weakest part at the beginning and I’m proud of the work I’ve done.

In postproduction I personally chose the best footage to be used and I supported the editor
giving him constant feedbacks. During this stage we faced continuity problems, we trashed several takes, we changed the order of others and we merged two scenes, but in general we managed to stick with the original idea. The biggest issue that still affected me is the music, since despite me explaining what I wanted to many composers giving them examples, I’m not satisfied yet.

This production certainly allowed me to grow professionally: I can say that I was able to build a complete and clear concept, a vision coherent from the beginning to the end. The final product it’s far from being perfect but it works as a short movie. A big part of filmmaking is about finding the right balance between the creative input and the concrete possibilities, both in terms of technical capabilities and economical restrictions: I think that my choices were simple but also artistically motivated and sensible.
Furthermore, as a leading figure, I was able to impose my opinion, showing confidence and not letting me or the rest of the group down in hard situations.

Obviously I also did many things wrong. One of the biggest false steps was organizing some scenes lacking of practical data about locations and other environments factors. For example, I planned the dialogue on the top of astronomical clock tower without having any information about width or conformation of the space we would have filmed in, but just supposing it, so once there we found out it was narrow, crowded and not suitable for the scene. I had to trash part of it and quickly improvise a new way to shoot it. Another similar error was planning many scenes with a crowd considering it stable and unchangeable, when of course it wasn’t and it caused many continuity problems.

Another big mistake was not being able to keep the same quality tone through the whole shooting. Looking at the finished film, there are some beautiful parts, but there are also other points in which the level gets lower. I think it’s about me not giving the same amount of importance to every shot. The set is a place where time plays an important part, and I feel like I sometimes was willing to sacrifice the quality of certain takes just to stick with the schedule or because I was afraid of running out of time. In the future I would try to not be excessively pressured by timing.

As I said, the movie’s quality dips in some points, but in general, the visuals are great and the chemistry between the characters is there. It’s a nice looking, simple and romantic fable, as it was supposed to be from the beginning, and I’m genuinely happy with what we created.

 

 

Blog Post 1 – Vincent

Starting the production of a short movie implies, first of all, having a solid idea. It is pointless to begin such a long and arduous journey without a good base, settling for a weak concept and hoping to relate the whole success of the final product on other aspects, like the visuals. It’s instead fundamental to build a strong narrative since the very beginning, shaping a script as good as possible. It’s also important to have a director involved in each stage of the production, able to follow all the departments and make sure that everyone’s work is coherent with the overall creative concept of the film. He must co-ordinate all the different fields making them work together trough the creation of the movie.
It’s vital that everyone accomplishes his tasks in a satisfactory way, since the smaller lack could effect the whole collective work. At the same time, everyone must stick to his own role: in a professional production it is important to respect hierarchies and no one should try to make decisions outside of his competence field, since this would imply confusion and time wasting. That’s why the producer, and then the director, always have the last word.

Short films have represented in many occasion the debut for many directors, like Martin Scorsese, David Lynch and many more. It’s clearly easier to start the filming career with a short movie since it is less ambitious: costs and production times are lower and because of that there is more freedom to experiment with cinematic techniques.
In a director’s first short movie it is often possible to recognize some of the traits that will be going to characterize his whole filmography, even if just mentioned or still immature.

This happens, for example, with Vincent, first work of Tim Burton. Vincent (1982) is a 6 minutes short movie, realized with stop-motion animation and shot in black and white. It’s based on a poem written by Burton himself, originally composed to become a children book, and it’s about a disturbed seven-year-old boy who fantasizes about being Vincent Price, imagining himself in many horrific situations. We can clearly find in it many of the main points that will characterized Burton’s film making during the rest of his career, like the dark and gothic style, the use of stop-motion animation, the influence of german expressionism and the recurrence of classic horror elements in the storytelling.

Before Vincent, Burton was working at Disney as a conceptual artist. His style wasn’t in line with the one of the studio but two executives got interested in his potential and decided to support him giving him 6000$ to produce a short, that would also have been useful as a stop motion test. The budget is not high if we consider that it was given by Disney and it was supposed to cover the cost of an entire animation production. Therefore, with Vincent we have an example of funding in which a big production studio finances one of his employes. Unfortunately it’s a very peculiar situation, in independent productions a budget is more commonly obtained by crowdfunding, by private savings or using sponsors.

The production lasted two months, in which Burton worked with a little crew composed by the animator Rick Heinrichs, the stop motion animator Steven Chiodo and the cameramen Victor Abdalov. The directorial choice of using the stop motion technique affects much the entire production, since there are deep differences in costs and planning, for example real actors are not used but all the movement must be studied previously using stand-in. Burton explained the choice of using this animation as it follows: “I had written Vincent originally as a children’s book and was going to do it that way first. But then I got the opportunity to make it as a stop-motion film. I wanted to do that kind of animation because I felt there was a gravity of those three-dimentional figures that was more real for that story”.

Vincent was presented in many festivals, it got several critical accolades in London, Seattle and Chicago and it also won awards at Chicago and at the Annecy Film Festival in France. Anyway, despite the good response, Disney didn’t put much importance on the final product since, even if good, it was not suitable for the mainstream audience, at least not as much as the typical Disney feature films. Also, it was very distant from the usual themes treated by the studio.
“Disney seemed to be pleased with it, but at the same time kind of ashamed. I just think they didn’t know what to do with it. There’s no really a market for a five-minute animated film, and the company was in a strange state of flux, so it didn’t rate really high on their priority scale.”
– Tim Burton

Burton had a similar distribution problem later on with an other of his early projects: Frankenweenie (1984), which was originally intended to be shown in cinemas with a re-release of Pinocchio, but it then received a PG rating and for that reason the distribution was delayed. Vincent itself was released for only two weeks in one Los Angeles Cinema, to proceed the movie Tex.
Even if this particular case is not really explanatory, distribute a short film in cinemas as a support of a feature film can be common when we talk about big production companies. It is actually one of the most effective way to bring the final product to a big audience. A famous example is represented by Pixar, that releases a movie each year and every time it is supported by a short. In these circumstances, short and feature film should share a similar concept and mood.
On a more indipendent level, shorts can be distributed to festivals, which exist in many different typologies and target level, from the film student to the higher levels ones, like Sundance Film Festival.

 

References

Burton, T. and Salisbury, M. (2006). Burton on Burton. London: Faber and Faber.

Harryhausen, R. and Dalton, T. (2008). A century of stop motion animation. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications.

Vimeo. (2012). Tim Burton’s Vincent (1982). [online] Available at: https://vimeo.com/48980974 [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016].

Awn.com. (2016). Tim Burton’s ‘Vincent’–A Matter of Pastiche. [online] Available at: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.9/articles/frierson1.9.html [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016].

Burton, T., Burton, T. and Price, V. (2016). Vincent (1982). [online] IMDb. Available at: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084868/ [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016].

Film Shortage. (2013). The Short Guide to Making an Awesome Short – Part 3: Production. [online] Available at: http://filmshortage.com/the-short-guide-to-making-an-awesome-short-film-step-3-production/ [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016].

Mic. (2014). 16 Short Films That Launched the Careers of Famous Directors. [online] Available at: http://mic.com/articles/92951/16-short-films-that-launched-the-careers-of-famous-directors#.K0QYDKVm0 [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016].

SunRain Productions – Rain Breaw & Charlene Sun, 2. (2016). the films of Tim Burton: Animating Live Action in Contemporary Hollywood – by Alison McMahan. [online] Filmsoftimburton.com. Available at: http://www.filmsoftimburton.com/chapter3.html [Accessed 10 Mar. 2016].

 

Viewfinder – 260MC final task

Presentation

Lighting the face

Task 1 for 260MC. Doing this exercise I tried to create differents atmosphere playing with the lights and colors, focusing only on the frontal image of one face.

FOOD BANK | individual reflections

Research

Frame from the original project visual essay

My initial idea for the Transgression assignment was to create a documentary about the use of narcotic substances by adolescents in a small provincial Italian town. However it would have been hard to realize it due to the distance with the locations, as such I had to select another project.

I decided upon the Food Bank, as I felt it shared some thematic similarities with my first idea: both subjects deal with strong social issues of which people don’t tend to talk about, because they ignore it and because they don’t want to see. Being an international student, at first I wasn’t fully aware myself of the concept of Food Banks and of the poverty that troubles so many people in the United Kingdom. I found the research process for the documentary to be an enlightening and an highly educational experience: our initial visit to the Food Bank was made for the purpose of take some usable footage, however with increased observations we started understand better the inner workings of the Food Bank system. The director of the project, Hugh, was also helpful since he explained us the structure of this system by illustrating the operation in detail.

Development

Hugh

The Food Bank

Initially we did not have a clear idea of how we wanted to structure the documentary, the only thing we were certain about was that we wanted the audio to play an important part: we wanted a voice over narration, partnered with ambient noise rather than music. After our visit to the Food Bank, we began to discuss which aspects of the project we wanted to focus on and how we wanted to develop it visually. We all agreed on focusing on the human narrative, giving space on people stories instead that on statistical data. This decision was largely influenced by the fact that the majority of volunteers we met at the Food Bank were once consumers here and they all had engaging stories to tell. Also, like this we would have gave the project more emotional resonance.

Example of video portrait combined with audio interview from “Pina” (Wim Wenders, 2011)

Example of video portrait combined with audio interview from “Pina” (Wim Wenders, 2011)

We decided that the interviews would have been audio rather than video. We wanted to keep the sound and the visuals disconnected and we also believed that people would have been less willing to open themselves in front of a camera. However, we felt it was important to give a human face to the audio anyway, so we planned to include some video portraits of them, looking into the camera. The rest of the visuals would be images of the Food Bank.

Analysis

We decided to shoot the documentary in two locations within Coventry: the Food Bank and the food distribution centre. We visited these locations multiple times, however during the initial shooting we didn’t have a clear idea of what we were looking for stylistically. After several visits to the locations, we settled upon still wide images of ambience, both with and without people working. We also took many details of the food boxes.

The biggest problem we encountered whilst filming was the reluctance of the people to share their stories. Initially it was extremely difficult to even convince them to appear briefly on camera, and nobody wanted to talk at all. For this reason we were almost forced to put several changes in our original shooting schedule. We decided to using only Hugh’s interview, which was the only one who accepted to talk to us, so that we could have had one voice for the narration at least. So we basically decided to scrap the idea of merging many stories and also we deleted the visual portraits part.

However, when these decisions were already made, we hopefully decided to try the previous plan one last time. We came back to the food bank and and we insisted, asking again to people if they wanted to be filmed. This time we were successful and we managed to record many people who wanted to talk about their stories. I don’t really know what made them changed their mind but I think that in the first place they weren’t really aware of what was going on and they saw us as strangers.

Evaluation

In terms of editing, we did not have any specific ideas before shooting because we were not aware of how many volunteers would have agreed to participate in filming and what kind of material we were going to collect. As such, we were only able to create a hypothetical editing plan to use as a visual aid. 

We started creating the audio track and then we built the imagery around it. We listen to the material we collected and we selected the more interesting sentences from each interviews (we were only able to use few material due to time constraints), putting them together with ambience noise in the attempt of creating an emotional flow, following the human narrative. 

We initially wanted to start this voice over track with an explanatory introduction, to give to the viewer technical informations about food banks. It was scrapped due to the time constraints but I think we managed to have a good beginning anyway since it is Hugh’s voice mentioning the Food Banks and the fact that a large majority of people use them, but at the same time feel ashamed that they have to rely on them. I think that it works as an effective and efficient introduction. The majority of the interviews were interesting, but there were also other which was not so strong.

A problem we encountered during the visual editing process was maybe the lack of visual solidarity with the footage of the food bank we had acquired. Although we had initially agreed upon a visual style for the documentary, the filming was done individually and as such, during the editing, it became apparent that two distinct styles were present and this made it appear disjointed, and I think this problem is still a little visible in the final product.

On the other hand, one of the most effective choices we made was the using of portraits. It conveys a sense of mystery as the viewer is unaware of who is narrating the documentary, but it also suggests that this is not a story about any given individual, but about a whole community of people, so that anyone is able to identify himself. I think that the fact that they stand looking at the viewer straight in the eyes while their stories are told is a message of strength and bravery, against the shame that rules in this environment.