Creative
Media Practice Project End of Semester
2000-word
Individual Self-Evaluation
Explain
the concept for your work, try to outline your idea clearly and concisely and
indicate where your influences and inspirations for this piece have come from?
Consider the intended audience for your work and consider how you would like
the project to be received; is there a particular age group or background for
example that the work is aimed at?
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The group’s initial idea for our
experimental project was a bathroom, the plan was to follow to create the
sense of place through daily bathroom activities such as; showering, brushing
teeth and shaving. To support this idea me and Josh planned to record
vox-pops questioning people about their daily bathroom routines, in hope to
come across some humorous scenarios that have occurred in the bathroom. This
would have been inserted into our work and re-enacting through sound and
video to fit the given scenario. The inspiration behind the bathroom came
from the significance of the bathroom in films. In Psycho, the revered shower sequence happened in the bathroom. In A Nightmare on Elm street, a potential
would have taken place in the bathtub.
The main issue with this idea is
that the brief requires us to produce an abstract piece. One alternative
would be creating a murder a scene in a bathroom, however this would limit
the group’s creativity to dark sounds and atmosphere.
The contingency the group formed
was to create a dream or dreamlike sense. We decided that inserting a dream
into a normal journey would give us creative reign over what kind of journey,
the immersion into the journey and the dream. The group agreed that this
would fulfil the requirements of the brief. Further idea development led the
group to use the idea of a coach journey or train journey. Reasons being that
these journey fall slave to their environments, it is almost certain that the
sounds a person hears on the coach journey will be exactly the same as that
person’s next or future journey, the same applies to trains. Due to each journey
having always a slight difference such as; which traffic lights a coach stops
at, how many passengers are boarded, if the toilets are used or not. These
are just some of the variables that can change, further variables might be
passenger-related such as; a film watched on a laptop, music from headphones,
a phone conversation. Although these variables are out of the control of the
group, this makes it even more interesting as the group will able to utilise
these differences to represent diegetic transitions. This includes; time,
progress in journey or location.
The structure of our project
will as follow; begin with the journey in motion, submerge into a dream,
immerge out of a dream and end of journey. The project will begin with either
a train or coach journey, enter a dream world, leave the dream world and come
to an end.
To emphasise a clear
differentiation between the two worlds, the group plan to use still images to
represent reality and video to represent the dream world. The perspective of
the video footage will be further distorted and altered to create a more
dream like feel within the project. The plan is utilise either Final Cut
Pro’s video filters or After Effects VFX to achieve this.
This product is aimed at an
audience that are familiar with public transport and interested in abstract
thought of place. That narrows down the target audience to people who fit in
the classes between D and C2 on the socio-economic scale, aged between 16-30,
with interests into creative arts on a minor to major scale.
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Give a detailed critical analysis
of the finished piece of work for this project, try to consider your work as a
member of an audience and recognise what has worked well and what has not been
as successful in your project. Try to be objective and weigh up the pros and
cons focusing on the positive outcomes as well as the areas that have room for
improvement. Reflect on what you would change if you could make the work
again?
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The finished sound meets the
intended ideas of our project. The intended idea was a person falling asleep
on a coach and entering a dream. The audience will definitely perceive that
is a road journey and not one taken by train. Possible interpretations may
believe it to be a bus, however the distinct sound of the coach engine should
suggest to the audience what kind of vehicle was intended. The EQ’d and
reverb effect really helped to create a wet dream, as it wouldn’t be expected
to have sounds that can be easily identified. The sounds we have used feel
very ambient and soothing, which further emphasises our intended message to
the audience. The submerge into the dream is made clear with the same sound
being played with the higher frequencies being removed, this produced a
lowering representation, which the group hopes the audience will perceive.
The visuals are loosely related
to the sound, the coach sounds are directly represented by coach stills,
however the surreal sounds are where the crew’s imagination and creativity
were required. The lack of colours works well in order to create a hypnotic visual,
because each image requires the audience to interpret what they see, this
keeps the audience engaged in what is happening in the visuals. The image can
be seen as tedious and difficult and this could cause some of the audience to
lose attention in the film. The colours of the film play an important part of
the film as they provide visual hints of where the camera eye is meant to be
and the intended mood. The colour purple and blue are very vivid throughout
this production, which can be interpreted as insecurity and ambition. The
film, The Color Purple follows the
life of a young ambitious woman trying to succeed, which could lead the
audience to believe that the dream is of somebody who wishes to reach their
dreams as it relates directly to the title of that film. Another expected
interpretation is that the person dreaming is descending into madness. This
firstly is supported by the structure of the film, it starts off with morning
and slowly turns dark. The morning represents the good persona and the evening
represents the dark persona. The transition begins with the colours of the
coach darkening and the image being choked to portray the grip of the dark
side it has on the person’s eyes who we see it out of, this sprouts the
question, is what the audience see all from the person’s dreaming eyes or who
could be watching the dream? Another supportive point is the transition back
into the reality, the light slowly fades to represent the good fading from
our character’s eyes, which the audience see the world from.
Together the sound and visuals
work off each other to emphasise a dream. The surreal colours of the visuals
and the wet sounds are successful in creating a dream. What could be improved
is the order and structure of the film. As a dream has no structure, more
images should jump out at the audience to promote an expectancy of the
unexpected. The colour ranged should be furthered, although two colours works
well to represent a dream, this isn’t the only method of how a dream can be
presented. In La Jetée, the
dialogue provides narrative to guide to when the guy being experimented on is
dreaming and when he isn’t.
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Describe the
process of making the work and your individual contribution. Did things work
out differently from the way you had visualised them at the planning stage? What production issues did
you encounter that caused problems during the creative process?
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The process of this production
has been a bit rocky. From having to change our ideas slightly it has been
successful, but a bit rocky. The excitement of this production and the other
has greatly lowered since the beginning of it. Most of it being drained by
the continuous suggestion of other members attempting to try to please lecturers,
which isn’t tasteful. As I am familiar with sound design and recording I am
comfortable and confident in my current ability. Recording and editing have
been fun, however with a more detailed and thorough plan, this project would
have been exciting rather than taxing, which was due to lack of idea
development. Things have differed slightly from planning stage, the plans
have guided the group, but the plans should have been much more detailed.
Some production issues faced
were; simple preparation presets before recording like formatting and
settings, abusing sound effects that made minimal differences to sound and
timing.
Timing was definitely a main
issue, as our plan wasn’t concrete the group never had a definite time
planned for editing. In result, putting massive amounts of pressure on
editing quickly.
Other constant issues relate to
the post-production process. The visuals that have been achieved in the final
film have been so heavily edited and manipulated that it caused a lot of time
to be wasted on rendering. In result left less time to progression and became
a hassle to edit around. The sound process wasn’t any easier, with some of
the sounds recorded containing too much background noise or being too loud,
this limited our selection of the sounds that the group had recorded. As the
edit is very spontaneous, like the dream, it shapes the ideas that the group
had.
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It is important to write in detail
about what you have learnt during the project both technically and creatively.
Outline specific skills you have developed because of making the work and new
methods or approaches you have experimented with.
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The seminars we had and
workshops from other modules have assisted myself technically, the noise
reduction technique in Soundtrack Pro was a great help in removing unwanted
background noise. The colour corrector in Final Cut Pro is a great aid in
producing mood. Filters such as; Colorize, Vignette and Gaussian blur have
helped to distort images beyond recognition. Additionally JPEGs are widely
compatible with editing software, however RAW files are not. For future
practice, compressing a RAW file to a TIFF format might enable Final Cut to
access the file, this is something I will test, as it would allow even more
control over images.
My skills in Pro Tools are that
of a novice and I need to become more familiar with the program as I am with
Soundtrack Pro, this project has relied heavily on Pro Tools, which has given
me a bit of insight into the program. A continuous technical obstacle I have
repeatedly faced is the use of effects in Final Cut Pro. As a solution, it
has been required to either remove or replace effects with similar effects.
The initial idea for editing was to map RGB channels to different channels to
create the dream effect, however running into error window “Out of memory”.
The decision was made to use the Colorize effect instead to present the
dream.
Through this project, I have
become more familiar with Final Cut Pro, Soundtrack Pro and have begun
understanding Pro Tools.
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Reflect on how you worked as part of a team. Did all members
contribute equally? What are your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to
teamwork? How can you improve your teamwork skills?
