Group feedback

I felt kind of comfortable with my work, but also a bit stuck as i didn't know what else i could do to further it. Through having group feedback i gained some useful ideas.

• Images and film together
• Try reversing the film/sound
• Slow the voices down to see what effect that gives
• create my own conversations from segments of other conversations
• try filming on a roundabout
• film getting on and off the bus
• down and up the stairs
• film out of the back window
• reward the audience with getting off the bus, a narrative

                           Michael Holden

I was told to look at Holden due to his coloum in the gardian about conversations entitles 'All ears'. I find it so interesting! I like the idea of overhearing these sentences said by people that are kind of taken completely out of context and just left there on there own to make of them what you want. 

Printing sponsored by:

Michael Holden's All ears

'I had a week of it, scuttling about, laughing at me. So I went to the pound shop and got some traps'

• Michael Holden
• The Guardian, Saturday 9 July 2011
•  larger | smaller

 

All ears. Illustration: Andy Watt

There's a lot of stuff in the ether lately about trying to vanquish animals. Maybe it's a

 recession thing, that our confidence is down as a species. Perhaps we're not the

 evolutionary big dogs we thought we were. Certainly the man sat by me in the pub was

 struggling with his status as an apex predator.

Man 1 "I had a week of it, scuttling about, laughing at me. So I went to the pound shop

 and got some traps."

Man 2 (feeding a child in a pram but listening in) "You wanna try peanut butter."

Man 1 "Well the cheese didn't work. I wanted one of them old-fashioned traps, you

 know?"

Man 3 "Your classic mousetrap – bang!"

Man 1 "Exactly, but they didn't have any, and it turns out these things I've bought are

 for rats, so the mice don't trigger it."

Man 2 "Peanut butter."

Man 1 "I went back to the shop and in the end the fella gives me these glue traps, says

 they're the ones. I've spent about 11 quid in there now, and this is the pound shop."

Man 3 "How do they work?"

Man 1 "Humanely, they say. But this is the thing. In the morning the thing's just laying

 there, looking up at me, its little feet stuck fast in this glue, like when you get a CD stuck

 to a magazine, and it was shivering."

Man 3 "So what do you do, kill it?"

Man 1 (wincing at the memory) "I couldn't. I had to peel it off."

Man 3 "And then what?"

Man 1 (appalled with himself) "I chucked it in a bush and walked to work."

Man 3 (in the "I told you so" style) "Peanut butter …"

• © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

• 
  

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/series/michaelholdensallears)

                         

                           

                             Melanie Manchot

Melanie Manchot is a London-based artist who explores portraiture as a performative and participatory practice. Working with photography, film and video, her projects often propose constructed events or situations in public spaces and from engaging explorations into our individual and collective identities.

Kiss, 2009, 16mm Film, 10'18", Stereo Sound

''‘Kiss’ is a 16mm film, which concentrates on one of the gestures most intrinsic to cinematic language: the kiss. The work is filmed as an uncut ten-minute observation of a seemingly endless kiss on the topdeck of a London double-decker bus. Disengaged from their immediate environment, a young couple begins an intimate game of desire. The camera follows waves of desire, at times verging on pain and aggression then again full of joy and lightness. Kiss forms part of a trilogy of 16mm films each of which focuses on one gestures that occurs between two people temporarily isolated within the public environment they find themselves in. Each of the films is based on a real life experience and is reconstructed with non-actors in the original locations, consciously playing on the ambiguity between a documentary mode and a staged event''.  - http://www.melaniemanchot.net/category/kiss/

I couldn't actually find the video of this, but from the screen shots i can see and see the intense emotion from this couple. The simplicity of the scene adds to the normality yet fairy tale like atmosphere.

Rhythm

Here i mainly focused on creating rhythm within a journey. Through using about 2 seconds of footage and looping it to create a continuous image, along with the repetitive sounds of the journey within the bus i created this videos.



                  

                  

                  

                  

Research

As i am going to be continuing my development of Bus Journeys, i'm researching reference artists to learn how to better my work.


                          John Smith


John Smith is an award winning avant garde filmmaker noted for his use of humour in exploring various themes that often play upon the film spectator’s conditioned assumptions of the medium. he effortlessly mixes innovative use of moving image, often playing with the way that the soundtrack and images combine. His work is very strong conceptually, and contains a lot of passion. Noted works include The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), Om (1987), The Kiss (1999) and Blight (1999). 

                                                     United Kingdom 1987 24 Min Color English

“In The Black Tower we enter the world of a man haunted by a tower which, he believes, is following him around London. While the character of the central protagonist is indicated only by a narrative voice-over which takes us from unease to breakdown to mysterious death, the images, meticulously controlled and articulated, deliver a series of colour coded puzzles, jokes and puns which pull the viewer into a mind-teasing engagement. Smith’s assurance and skill as a filmmaker undercuts the notion of the avant-garde as dry, unprofessional and dull and in The Black Tower we have an example of a film which plays with the emotions as well as the language of film.” — Nik Houghton, Independent Media.




                                       Bill Viola

He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For 40 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. - http://www.billviola.com/biograph.htm







                               Candas Sisman


Involved with spur of the moment event, Sisman incorporates abstract narrative language, his works contain a naivety and simplicity in contradiction with the commotion and ideology of life in general. These ‘events’ that emerge are tossed into the open by passing them through an emotional and perceptual filter of data and situations in the external world without preponderance. His works are a momentary / flow related audiovisual process

People start recognizing they are nothing when depth of their awareness enhances.’’ Its the nothingness within the most intricate details that allow for his complex simplicity. - http://vimeo.com/csisman


                  
                                                        Retory
                                visuals : candas sisman - http://csismn.com/
                                 sounds : mix - candas sisman

The emotional changing process of a concrete and mechanic structure gradually becoming organic and abstract.With together this process , retory is searching for how to explain that beauty of contrast emotion at the same time in audiovisual language .


                
                                                     Edicisum
                   directed by Candas Sisman - http://csismn.com
                            soundtrack by Isambard Khroustaliov


                               Patrick Bergeron 


''Video artist and researcher, I modify and manipulate the image and its details. Exploring the concepts of speed, time and memories, my work is a mix of animation, experimental film and documentary''. Patrick Bergeron

        
                                            LoopLoop from Patrick Bergeron on Vimeo.

Using animation, sounds warping and time shifts this video runs forwards and backwards looking for forgotten details, mimicking the way memories are replayed in the mind.
LoopLoop, 5 minutes video loop.

        
                                      Cars ... from Patrick Bergeron on Vimeo.

Cars ... global financial crisis, Cars ... global warming, Cars ... emerging countries, Who are driving those cars?

Seoul by night, the cars appear, disappear, merge, ...
creating an hypnotic and recurring movement.

I like here the use of looping a lot of films together along with the sound track of what he is recording.



Here is a video i found from a person called Mustardcuffins. What i like about this video is the way it makes you feel as if you are physically moving through the city, and you are viewing what the camera is viewing. Its a very physical experience and this is what i find very entertaining about this.


        
                                                Drift from mustardcuffins on Vimeo.

I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to.
"Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality, of engendering dreams"  - Ivan ChtcheglovThis film was made using a digital stills camera to create a stop motion animation. -  http://vimeo.com/7231932

                         Sergio Albiac

A visual artist using traditional media and generative computer code. Beauty, contradictions, search of meanings, the illusion of control in a world much governed by randomness and the elusive nature of emotions are recurring ideas in my work.


          
                                         Content is Queen from Sergio Albiac on Vimeo.


"Content is Queen" is a video art series of generative portraits that reflects on the foundations of democracy and the resilient nature of structures of power. At the same time, it is a paradoxical dialogue and strange marriage between the banal and the utterly majestic: to create the series, the most popular (in a truly democratic sense) internet videos of a given moment are used as the input of a generative process that "paints" with action the portrait of the Queen.

On a technical level, this piece is a result of my research in breaking the limitations of the static image in a contemporary revision of the tradition of painting. The portraits are created using an innovative generative technique that I have developed called "generative video painting". It differs from previous attempts of video collage (like the techniques developed by David Hockney, mixing simultaneous points of view of an action) or video mosaic (where still images are represented by whole videos acting as pixels when properly reduced in size). My technique uses regions of video content to effectively represent or "paint" heterogeneous regions of the image. Both the partial content of the videos and the whole image are fully visible at the same time, widening the possibilities to deliver meaning in a contemporary aesthetic language. - http://vimeo.com/24065726

Group Feedback

Through taking part in group feedback i have gained some ideas as to where i should take my work. I have decided to leave the idea of plastic bags and just focus on my work with journey and buses.


Through the feedback i have learnt that my work was more successful when just focusing on the sounds of the bus and the rhythm. Through looping footage and sound into a rhythmic piece, seems to be the most successful approach.


The more successful pieces: 


                
                            
                            

At Night

I have been trying to expand my experimentation when it comes to showing a different side to plastic bags. Here i decided to change my lighting and photograph at night, while experimenting with different materials to gain different effects.

With a fast shutter speed to let as little light in as possible, to give a dark, murky effect.

To add different textures to the bag, and to create depth in the water i added the following things:

                          

My main light source: 

I just used this as my main light as i didn't want too much light flooding my subject.

               

                 

               

               

               

               

I then went on to photograph the bag out of the water: 

I do feel all these pictures were successful in there own way, but still they are a bit blurry. I need to pay more attention to focusing my lens and making the aperture a bit bigger so everything is in focus.

The Loop

I have been combining my videos and sounds of my bus journeys together, looping them and creating an almost rhythmic effect.

                                 
                             Here i looped a video i took as a part of my journey, and then 

overlapped a recording of a previous journey as my soundtrack.

                               
                        Here, i wanted to show the repetitiveness of a never ending journey,
                                               the sounds, the feeling, the annoyance.


                               

Below, i began to work on the conversations we here on the bus, and the different personalities we come across.

                                   
                                   
                                   

Out of the window...

I have been working on developing some video pieces to bring together the sounds of the bus, and the things we see and experience whilst on the bus. 

To compose my video I took the first second of the video and pt it on a loop for about 30 seconds, and then added a sound clip from the journey i recorded on the same bus journey.

                             

                                   

I'm going to do more videos and see where this will take me. I want to add more with the actual sounds, so i may edit the sounds and also put this on a loop, to portray the repetitiveness of a bus journey, especially one you take everyday for a long time.

Night Photography: Plastic and light

Here i decided to try and experiment with photographing plastic bags at night, using different techniques to see how effective it would be.


I was inspired to try this after looking back at my city walk pictures and seeing this:

So i decided to try and emulate this in a controlled environment and just experimenting with settings and lighting to see what effects i could achieve.

I placed two plastic bags outside at night, with the wall light on as a spot light.

Here i used fast shutter speed with a spot light on the bag. I feel it was somewhat effective but wanted to capture more movement from the plastic bag.

              

                   F/4.5 1/125 sec ISO 400                                                  F/5 1/125 sec ISO 400                                                                                                                                                        

             

                        F/5 1/200 sec ISO 400                                            F/5 1/320 sec ISO 400

             

                       F/5 1/500 sec ISO 400                                               F/5 1/30 sec ISO 400

             

                         F/5 1/40 sec ISO 400                                                 F/5 1/25 sec ISO 400

Here i decided to experiment with zooming in and out and  moving the camera to create the feeling of movement.

               

               

                

                 

                

                

Lastly, i took images with no spotlight, and just using the street lights as my lighting. Because there was little light i had to use a higher exposure and a slower shutter speed.

               

               

               

             

             

             

             

             

             

                            
                                                 

f/9 15 sec ISO 800

Here i was photographing the bag and then after 5 seconds i moved the camera to look at 

the street lights above. I feel the effect is interesting but not one that i wanted to achieve.

These images were done on the settings of  f/9 15 sec ISO 800.