1ST TUTORIAL

I was feeling excited and confident with my next project already but after my tutorial with Greg I'm even more positive! We discussed ways of clarifying certain elements in the filming techniques. Greg suggested I film myself in place of Sindy in some of the scenes. I like this idea because the idea behind the film is questioning the difference between reality and dreaming. This is a good way of portraying this; I had thought of filming maybe a real hand but not actually putting myself in the film. Certain scenes where I think this may work best are: Getting into bed at the end...I could change from me to her, like bagpuss, when he goes back to being a toy. Also the dream sequence, sex scenes, using real limbs in place of the dolls, a real man. This will bring the play between reality vs surrealism together. I decided to use the Sony HD cam for this because of using animation with the doll combined with real people. I spoke to Nick about using a stills camera or DV cam for the stop framing but he recommended the HD for quality when sizing it up. 

 Greg said to think about how I control the style of the film so I need to keep the era/style continuous. I need to think about choosing either 1960's, 70's or 80's wardrobe for her and keep the style consistent. So, whichever i choose, i have to think about fashions. There is a quick drug scene so I will have to think about small things like whether to have her on ecstacy or acid for example!! The narrative needs to be looked at and decided on who is narrating. I had thought of my voice originally, talking about Sindy, but as she (unreal) reflects me (reality) I will have to show in the narration the relation between them. I thought that me talking could be her reflecting about herself and analysing her thought processes. I could have a man's voice, which I like now having spoken to Greg; it could stand for the constant torture she feels, which is because of men and how women are dominated by them. Camera angles need to be considered and constant... do I want a voyeuristic feel, Hitchcock style, a metaphor for how Sindy feels trapped in her own self-analysis, how she is always aware of herself, like she is watching someone else? I am seeing someone next week about Maya software and how to build characters within that, which will be useful for building backdrops maybe and definitely for my final project. 

We spoke about my photographic project and showing 2 different perspectives of the same photo, but digitally enhance it. Greg mentioned also viewing the photo from the other side, revealing something hidden to completely change your view. It makes me think of Lumet's '12 Angry Men' and how Juror 3 changes his vote when he sees a picture of his son. We all see things differently, I was going to focus on this between men and women's point of view. Greg mentioned the Japanese film Rashomon, which shows a rape and murder. There are 4 completely different accounts as to what really happened. This should give me some good ideas so I'm looking forward to watching that.

Now that I have written my script, I will draw a storyboard and start on the filming.

IDEAS FOR NEXT PROJECT

Now the previous film is complete I have started on the script for my next film, which I think is going to be a Sindy animation. I want to use the stop frame method, using Sindy as the victim of a nightmare of insecurity and jealousy....I'm hoping to provoke sympathy for the doll from an audience but want to include some funny parts too. I'm thinking that I will use cinema 4D to create a surreal world for Sindy in a few of the scenes, also I may use Sindy furniture for the set along with the 'real world' to create a diverse setting for the film. 

Linking this project to the idea behind my essay I am writing: 'ICONIC SINDY: BODY IMAGE AND FETISHISM' the project will be created using ideas on jealousy, nightmares, insecurity, negative thoughts, lack of control, sexual fantasies, etc. I see this as a way of portraying real emotions, personal to me, through the subject of a childhood toy of mine, which has now become a treasure, which I collect. 

I have an idea for a photographic project too which I may do simultaneously. I want to photograph some images of a man and woman in different scenarios, then digitally enhance a copy of the same ones to see how I can alter the perspective of the scene. The originals and the enhanced ones will be displayed side by side. Themes such as sex, weak women who allow dominance from men will be looked at. I see the 2 different  photos representing the opposites of male and female and how differently they can see the same thing.

LAST TOUCHES

I logged and captured the 1st scene from the video cam. Nic and i chose the clip we thought was the best and one which could accommodate the full moon. It was a long shot of the lake, trees either side with plenty of sky. I then zoom into the trees into a blur, ready to fade to the 2nd scene.
It took a few hours for us to get the moon in and looking ok. Keir showed us how to get a moon image we had chosen off the net, cut out in photo shop using a tool which basically cuts it for you, rather than doing it by hand. Once we imported it into FCP we fiddled around with the placement, movement, and size. As the scene zoomed in we had to make the moon move in the same way and go off the top of the screen. It looked comical, to much for what we wanted. Once we had put other effects on the scene and added the viniette around the edges of the scenes, the moon looked really good. The viniette created the judderman image of the smudged frame, we had to have it a lot more subtle than the advert because we hadn't left any room around the edges of our shots, so didn't want to lose any props. We experimented with most of the effects in the FCP menu but they were hardly noticeable and not what we wanted. We did change the graininess to make it look older, the HD quality was lovely but to clean for what we wanted. We tried an effect called bump-map to create the jitter but it just wasn't right. We altered the contrast and colour balance setting the highlights reds quite high and the greens and blues lower in comparison. we wanted to keep the reds high but not have the scenes as bright.
To get the judderman effect we really wanted, Nick showed us a program on a different computer. This took ages again but it was an old fashioned style effect, exactly what I'd envisioned. It had the broadcast lines coming across the screen and we could change the jitteriness to more or less. We also did the title and the credits in a font, which was very stylish and old. It was a relief to have finished and after watching it back several times i was pretty pleased at what i had achieved as my first collaborative film.
We have the studio booked to get the final mix before adding this to the vid and burning a dvd.
Nicola is putting some reverb etc on the vocals and I am going to mess around with some photos I took of us filming the wolf-bed scene, in Adobe photoshop to get the cover for the dvd. We are in the studio on Tues so all will be complete by then. It's a relief to have almost finished, I feel that it was the right amount of time for a collaborationa nd I'm really eager to get on with my next project. I have really enjoyed the film side of this project ( I loved doing the vocals and recordings too) and can't wait to start the next one.