First Film Draft.

This was the first draft of our film, which we showed to the class today, went down rather well and our feelings of un-comfortable and un-ease were communicated well throughout it, this is what people mostly commented on. Also the idea of using point of view through the camera was enjoyed.

Stop-motion.

Tonight we put together some bits of the film through using stop motion, we took the bit of the guy unconsciously being put into the cupboard, which then leads to the dogs surrounding him.

But also photographed bits we wanted to flicker into the film to give the feeling we are trying to communicate the whole way through which is this feeling of uncomfortableness and disorientation.

We made sure the camera was up high and looking down for the cupboard bit as it looks more like you are witnessing this poor guy, and makes you feel uncertain and a bit weird.

We also tried out these shaped which you can fit into and extended lense of the camera to block out all image except what you can see through the shape, they worked amazingly! Make it look even more surrealist and really special...it disorientates you.

'Keyhole'

This shows the stopmotion of the cupboard door opening, but through a keyhole, making the audience feel uncomfortable and wonder what it is?

'Twins'

These are the stop-motion photos we took through a circular shaped frame on the camera, the one person morphs into twins...

Filming, the drag.

Today we filmed the pilots point of view shot, when he is being dragged away from the woman and seems to be dragged to another world. Below are a couple of the shots to show example...

Filming it was pretty fun actually as I was dragged by feet at a high speed along the corridor with a camera strapped to my chest!

The camera was amazing, tiny and captured a great picture, it was HD as well so was an expensive camera! It was strapped to my chest the first time, but I couldn't hold my shoulders high enough when I was being dragged and so Rachel had to run back with me holding the camera.

First Film Shoot.

Today we enjoyed our first shoot of our surrealist film, there were things we came across and things we all learnt through using lights and being in a small space. Also having to think carefully about how all the footage would come together, or bit we needed to film when we came to edit it together.

Below are some notes on how I found the first filming experience and problems which arised...click on it to make it bigger!

Title Sequences?

How did the surrealists do it?
Seeing as the deadline is just under two weeks, been thinking about how are credits or title sequence will look when put onto dvd, I took a look at the title sequence for 'Un Chien Andalou'. It seems to be done in an abstract style, with old typography and almost collage like shapes, mostly the triangle is used.

Treatment Re-draft.

We've got together and looked at the treatment and first storyboard that we did, form the time we have left to film, edit and finish everything we went through how we would and could have done things, with the time left we adapted the treatment:

TREATMENT 2.

A delirious pilot is trying to make sense of what he sees before him after falling from his plane.

His vision blurs and his breathing becomes gradually heavier. Beams of light stream past him as he tumbles toward the ground.

His vision kaleidoscopes as he sees past events from his life. A woman on a beach, it is his mother. He calls to her, but she does not hear. His childhood, sand, holidays and happiness flash before him, he sees contentment.

He regains conciousness to find himself looking and trying to make sense of a woman’s torso, he is attracted to her and wishes to touch her but is unable to see her face.

He is pulled back violently as a force draws him away from the woman. He feels alone.

He finds himself in a dark enclosure, it is cold and he hears the sound of dogs barking.

He looks up and a dog surrounds him, he is scared despite how harmless the dog looks, he throws liver to the dog which he finds in his pocket.

His vision blurs, the dog duplicates and he is aware of memories from his past again. As if a book or cupboard is being opened he is flooded with these memories, all to fast to comprehend.

His mind takes him back to the beach and standing there is a young girl, much like the girl resounding in his dreams. He is unable to figure out how many of these girls there are.

He passes out.

More Film Research...

Battleship Potemkin - Bronenosets Potyomkin 1925

The film is composed of five episodes, if we had more time, this could be a good idea in making tiny episodes, especially if we were wanting to film dream sequences, it would separate the dreams well.

Eisenstein wrote the film as a revolutionary propaganda film but also used it to test his therioes of montage. Also used to experiment with the effect of film editing on audiences.

'Meshes of The Afternoon'

I was particularly taken with this film, although the length made it hard to watch! I think it's just brilliant how eerie it is, dis-jointed and how it confuses and amuses you. This is important and something I want to communicate to the audience.

The piece itself, made in 1943, is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The films narrative is circular and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, one of which is as key falling. In our film we want to do some sort of thing where you show a 'literal' image of something instead of filming it. For example, for a cyclops just showing one eye, this carries the confused surrealist theme through.

Through creative editing, distinct camera angles, and slow motion, the surrealist film depicts a world in which it is more and more difficult to catch reality.

Understanding Lights!

We explored a little bit with lights and got to grips with how to use them effectively inside. My group went into the lecture theatre and played out a devil/angel themed act. The lights were set up to show the devil in a evil light and the angel in white light. There was lots to consider, especially as there were stairs to contend with, we struggled to fix the lights on certain people.

The film, entitled 'Devil Wins' which is very short, won't upload, but showed a good use of lights and camera angles, as the devil and angel are up higher than the actual person at the bottom, this was a struggle, but was fun to work out how to achieve the right lighting.

Modern Surrealism.

Although we are fixated on this idea of producing our film in the image of 'old' surrealism and techniques, I thought it would be important to compare these to the modern day surrealist films we see, then to identify the coherent themes throughout both eras of surrealism?

This film below, is a montage of modern surrealism, made by Asylum SFX studio. Using clips from their TV and feature film work, they wove an interesting, thought provoking and emotionally moving artistic statement. I think that the ideas of old surrealism do come through in this video, through strange objects being associated together which seems un-normal. My favourite bit is at 3 mins and 31 seconds, the metaphorical idea of being born and then the idea of flight through to your death is brilliant! ...and the visuals for it are excellent! The uncomfortable feeling we get when watching this man in high speed is like the first bit of our film. What makes it modern is the colours and clearness of footage.

I thought the film below was really interesting as it's a recurring dream that somebody kept having...

Short Stories.

Surrealist. This is the topic that our film is based around, we have discussed ways in which we want to put a narrative together. The best way to do it and how we wanted to put it together, is by using all the old techniques that the earliest of surrealists film writers used.

Such as free association.

However, with the time scale we have been given, it seems as though we are going to have take some short stories and put them together as a dream sequence possibly. Or do things such as take the first line of each short story and write a treatment about them/combining them, which was our other option.

surrealism |səˈrēəˌlizəm|

noun

a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release thecreative potential of the unconscious mind, for example by the irrational juxtaposition of images.

Below is a link to a website, in which there are lots of short stories put together by lots of different people.

http://www.bibliofaction.com/read/Search.aspx?category=Surreal&category2=Romantic

Below are some stories I picked out:

A GIFT:

http://www.bibliofaction.com/read/ViewStory.aspx?story=0a391d77-4992-4218-bfdb-ad246aa47ad5

THE DREAM:

http://www.bibliofaction.com/read/ViewStory.aspx?story=04283581-4521-4c0d-ae62-fe77dd05cd27

THE CLOCK:

http://www.bibliofaction.com/read/ViewStory.aspx?story=78229f29-e9cc-490e-896e-f796223802a1

THE FORREST OF BEAN:

http://www.bibliofaction.com/read/ViewStory.aspx?story=bc3704ec-3a3c-4450-9caf-f65747a7b658

UPON WAKING:

http://www.bibliofaction.com/read/ViewStory.aspx?story=39f657a6-e11a-4b5f-9e4a-924fa1c77baf

These titles for short stories also kind of represent what I would want to see in our film. A kind of outline of what kinds of things I want to include.

Surrealist FILM. Techniques.

Surrealist Techniques are the next thing I've been looking at in ways to come up with a concept and how to go about filming in a surrealist way...

In every form that surrealism takes place (art,literature,poetry), numerous techniques and games are used to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of surrealism.

Here are some quotes about surrealism:

'No idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.'

'Nothing, in the film, symbolizes anything. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis.'

Taking these quotes and thinking about them we need to decide as a group how far we really want to take these ideas/techniques. We could apply it to all aspects of the filming, eg. when deciding what gels to use, asking a random person to pick a colour. Although this could just end up looking and being crap.

I also came across this alphabetical list of surrealist films to look out for!

Surrealist FILM. Salvador Dali.

For this project it is imperil to be looking at how the surrealist used the camera and produced their work If me and my group want to put together a surrealist film.

I started by looking at Dali's work:

Spellbound.

Below is an extract from the dream sequence In the film...

Spellbound (1945), is a psychological mystery thriller by Alfred Hitchcock and it tells the story of the new head of a mental asylum who turns out to be not what he claims. Salvador Dali designed backdrops for a 20-minute dream sequence.

Spellbound was filmed in black and white except for one or two frames of bright red at the conclusion when a gun is fired. His job through producing this sequence was to conceive certain scenes of mental delusion. We have written the first bit of our treatment and the man it features at the beginning is in a weird state, almost passing out, so watching this scene of trying to communicate mental delusion in Spellbound is important in trying to gain ideas for our piece of work and understanding how to go about making the audience feel a certain way and understand how this man is feeling in our film.

The Surrealist.

Below is a piece by Dali, called the Surrealist, apart from being brilliantly weird, I think it shows how all these ideas in Dali's head were always about and I also think this is a good example if the sorts of ways to bring together sound and film in a surrealist way...

Un Chien Andalou

Below is a bit from Un Chien Andalou, it's a sixteen minute silent surrealist short film produced in France by Salvador Dali and the Spanish director Luis Bunuel. It was infact Dali's first film, and is one of the best known surrealist films of the avant-garde movement of the 1920's.

The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial 'once upon a time' to 'eight years later' without the event or characters changing very much.

This idea of dis-jointedness is key in what we want to communicate to our audience through our piece and is really important in this idea of surrealism.

The piece below is he original film but someone has done their own music over the top of it, right at the end is the same look we are kind of going for in ours with the woman giving evil glances. The idea of the simplicity and special techniques they used is what got us really excited about the idea of making our own surrealist film, the eye cutting bit is true of this.

Below is another really famous bit from the film...

Some Surrealist Influence.

I've been talking to Rachel and Charlotte about the idea of surrealism and we're all pretty keen on trying to reproduce something along the lines of the idea of maybe a dream sequence piece, although we want to come up with a 'story', but we'd also like to take a surrealist approach to writing the treatment. Taking bits from short stories and maybe ding a free association game between ourselves. Examples: Taking first sentences from books to develop concepts, or possibly sat listening to music and writing a response of what we imagined to be happening, this would be good in then being able to apply some sound over our piece as we'd know what sort of things we needed to be hearing.

The options it seems we now have are:

- Take a short story and adapt it to be surrealist.

- Put together our own story through word assosiation.

- Take little bits, sentences from short stories and write some our selves.

The problem with free association is that it quite time consuming and we don't want to get bogged down in working on the story/treatment.

Our Idea for A Short Film...

I've always enjoyed watching black and white film or dream sequences done in a surrealist way, particularly the dream sequences by Salvador Dali. I want to explore these old camera techniques, which are stunningly done as I really enjoy how no CGI or modern techniques are used. The simple ideas in which are done through the filming and not through the editing process are really special.

Could possibly base the short film on a short story or a few short stories? However produce like a dream sequence, dis-jointed and use these old camera tricks.

I need to get some re-search together, I'm going to concentrate on:

- Surrealist techniques.

- Dali's Dream sequences.

- Short surrealist stories.

Initial Ideas for a Film...

My initial thoughts for any kind of film based piece would be stopmotion animation. But after exploring on youtube a bit and being shown old film and other bits and pieces, I have started thinking about producing some sort of surrealist sequence or story.

The things in film I really like are:

- Stopmotion

- High speed camera effects.

- Illustrated Animation.

- Cut away shots

- Using stills or little bits of film to represent a word.

Although I am really into the idea of stopmotion and illustration, I really want to understand the idea of film and cameras more and so I hope that in this project I get to work with the camera more and get a better understanding of it.

Strawberry Hills:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lb9X5jMofEo

This is a video I came across...

Jape- Floating - Like the idea of slowed down movement. Epic.



The musics awful! But I like the way this is filmed.

Plastic Selves.

This is a short animation I put together at the end of my first year in Vis Com.

The brief I wrote was to challenge peoples perspectives and stereotypes of The Barbie Doll. Is she all good?

The idea for my animation came from my negative attitude towards the doll culture and how dolls and 'The Barbie' can bring fun and comfort to young girls, but how they can also create or be victimizing to females.

My animation challenges whether Barbie is a good influence on the young people that purchase them and provokes the idea that many young girls who are fed this unhealthy body image by Barbie, then go on to aquire eating disorders and even plastic surgery to get that idealistic look.

Looking back at it now....it's shockingly shit, but this was my first attempt ever at any kind of video. I learnt a lot throughout the process, like final cut express, after effects, how to manipulate the video equipment and how to approach a stop-motion animation in the correct way.