Production/Editing

On Saturday I filmed Evan, and when I went back to my computer I had realised I actually didn’t get that much of footage, nonetheless I did not have time to re-shoot, I have to work with what I have. I am comfortable using iMovie the most, and therefore I made the footage for each window on that, and enhanced the colour on all the videos as the lighting came across very dull and lifeless in the footage. This way I was able to utilise the slo-motion effect and the reverse effect in iMovie, and then I dragged the items across to Premiere to put it all together with the “Crossbars” template that someone had placed on Google Docs for all of us to use to match our work correctly to the windows at Signal. I really tried to accentuate the idea of questioning gravity, and having a lot of flight in all of the footage. The audio was the toughest part, I didn’t think that my spring sound was good enough, so I avoided it and used Garageband to create an audio track with some chords to accentuate flight and a repetitive beat to enhance the idea of jumping.

Screenshot of work in Premiere

Screenshot of work in Premiere

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Media Studio | Thurs Wk. 11

Today, I brainstormed what I was going to film and record for my Signal – Project Brief 4. I’ve asked my close friend Evan, who is high level tumbler (person who can do flips) to come into the Gymnastics centre I work at, so perform some tricks for me, and then I’ll aim to do all the main work for my film on the computer. I’ll capture it with my Nikon D3000 and the lighting in the gymnasium isn’t very good so I’m going to have to edit that on the computer as well. I’ll film in 3 different places, 1 on the main trampoline, 2 on the full gymnastics floor, 3 against a plain wall. I want to film the same set of tricks on each place with different angles, so a low angle, a mid-shot, a upward angle, and film the bottom half of the body, then the top half, so I have the ability to move around the same action across different screens with different angles. I’ll also get my subject matter in white clothes so he stands out against the equipment as the multiple colours in the room may be distracting, as well as it will represent life, and flight.

Media Studio | Wed Wk. 11

Today in class, I sat with Robbie and we finally sorted out my theme, from balance, to movement, I feel like I like to expand off movement and work with gravity, and question the art of gravity and how it functions, working with slow-motion, and rotating and mirroring of images, films etc. As I didn’t have any footage to work off in class, I decided to do some research on the RMIT library to help me out, I found quite a couple good articles on gravity and relating it to art. Vladimir Kantor’s journal article, “Overcoming Gravity: Pushkin on Freedom and Art” had an interesting perspective on comparing gravity to life as he states “the kind of freedom and ease enjoyed by Pushkin do not come easily; they are the result of overcoming the gravity of earthly life, its injustices.” He relates gravity has a sense of stabilisation in one’s life, and I found that very intriguing, as without gravity, everything on Earth would be crazy, and therefore, challenging gravity would create a form of chaos. During this tutorial, Nicolette also helped me download the program Premiere, and taught me how to use it so once I had my footage I would be able to edit with ease with this Adobe program.

 

Media Studio | Wk. 10

I missed this whole week of Uni as I was representing RMIT at the Australian Uni Games in Queensland. However, I did message my classmates, and had a look at their blogs to see what I had missed out on. From what I could tell, everyone is expanding from their themes and creating ideas for their film and audio pieces. I am still stuck on what theme let alone which videos and what type of audio will accompany them. I think at this stage I like theme of “movement” and incorporate tumbling, gymnastics, and moving shapes so far, but I’m still brainstorming. I noticed Jordan had done a tutorial on how to use Premiere to create our films with the right dimensions for the Signal Exhibition and they have named it “Obsession”. I guess I’ll have to ask someone when I get back to explain how to export the videos in the correct format, but first I need to brainstorm and film!!!

Media Studio | Wk. 9

This week we had our first meeting at Signal on Flinders lane for our Project Brief 4, it was a lot harder to find than I had anticipated but I eventually got there. We were all upstairs discussing our themes, and ideas each individual we had, and then someone from the Signal team presented to us how we would display our artworks through the building. There are four projectors set up around the upstairs room, that work to flip the the images and project them through the windows, so that viewers on the outside can see the films. There are speakers set out along Flinders lane and around the building, and all of it is controlled within the building. This means that we need to set our films in a very wide screen with minimal height to work across all four screens, it’ll be interesting to see how this works out.

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Media Studio | Thurs Wk. 8

Today we were introduced to our final collaborative project of the year, Project Brief 4 at Signal.

“Signal is a creative arts studio for young people 13 to 25. At Signal, you work alongside professional artists in a collaborative way. Located in the heart of the city, Signal is a place for making, showing, inspiring and developing Melbourne’s creative young talent – in every medium.  Signal is open to young people from all walks of life and ability – you don’t need any experience to take part at Signal.”

We have decided to have our exhibition for the Specific To Site class hosted here, and we will create four 8 second films, accompanied 30 second audio piece. At Signal we will project very wide-screened films across windows on the cornered building on Flinders lane all in align with a particular theme for each individual, I’m very excited to work on this project, it’s something I haven’t done before and I’m also excited to see what everyone else will produce.

As this is an exhibition run by us, we have divided our class into teams to help the production of this event, there is a PR team, documentation team, tech team and more. I was placed into the PR team with Rose, Linda and Marissa, and we are going to be involved in promoting the event and getting it recognised by the public, which includes advertisements, invites, press kits, and creating a website.

Media Studio | Wed Wk. 8

Today marked the beginning of our presentations for Project Brief 3. A lot of the class had some really great videos. This week we presented our group projects for Project Brief 3 to the class, with Joseph as a guest to help with some feedback. Overall, our group received great feedback, one thing to work on was our audio piece. We attempted to create a sense of ‘Arie’ within the presentation to imply that he has his own world for his art. However, they way in which we aimed to portray that did not come across as successfully, Robbie suggested we could have made that more obvious, and made it more abstract to suit his type of artwork. Joseph also suggested we could have included more about his work in Testing Grounds, unfortunately we did not have much footage of it given from Arie, nonetheless Joseph mentioned he had lots, so we could have extended our resources further to include everything that we wanted. Overall, I’m very happy with our group and how well we worked together as a team to produce our Project Brief 3.

Project Brief 3

Nowadays the world of art is much more diverse, artists have moved far beyond the traditional art forms of painting, drawing and sculpting into a digital revolution of photography, video formatting and more. The artist we formed a documentary on was Arie Rain Glorie, and his main art medium was video works, installations and curating for other emerging artists. Conducting an interview requires a lot of work. We had to seek permission first by emailing him, and then arranging a suitable time for us to meet to film. Elle, Nicolette and I planned our interview questions before we arrived, researched his work through his website, and then we hired a Canon DSLR, tripods and the Media 1 video recorders to capture our project. Elle and I did the filming and we originally had issues with finding a location to shoot as the photography rooms were locked and classrooms were too noisy. Thus, we decide to film his natural working place, in his studio at RMIT. We set up two cameras, one up-close to represent personal thoughts and emotiveness and the second further away to establish the location and quirks of his personality, such as hand gestures, and the way he works.

Nicolette focused more on the editing, she cut down all the unwanted footage and in class we worked as a group to put all of it together, making decisions on how we wanted to portray Arie, and what we felt was important to present in the documentary. Utilising the program Premiere we put the footage together, and we decided that we would demonstrate his love for the art world, and his sense of “place” within it as a main focus for our film. We utilised his artworks to explain his artistic ability and the way in which he works as well as his time with testing grounds. We had a couple issues with filming, as the camera was on auto-focus and therefore, kept adjusting while filming which caused a lot of distractions. Another was that Arie said “um” quite frequently during the interview and didn’t answer in full sentences, which caused confusion and repetition. Nonetheless, we worked on minimising these issues to being displayed in the documentary with cutting of footage, and putting external photographs and footage over the top of his voice, creating a narrative throughout the documentary.

Arie Rain Glorie is an amazing, introverted artist with so many intricate and creative artworks, as he states he likes to make his work “kind of familiar but the audience wont be able to quite place where it’s come from”. Arie’s work relates to Gaston Bachelard (1969) as he states, “imagination argues the values of reality”. Arie describes art as his lifestyle, it his “constant thought” and he wishes to produce his diverse place of thought of life through his work, especially video works. He is dedicated to the art world, not just as an artist but as a curator as well. He curated a trilogy series entitled “Love/City” which was set up at Testing Grounds. Arie enjoys challenging the place of the traditional art viewing, he wishes to defer from museums and galleries and create a new sense of place for artworks to be displayed and this is why he chose Testing Grounds to view his curated project. This is also accentuated by his work itself, Arie loves working with videos as it allows him to manipulate time, place and space, in which one cannot do with live performance. This also coincides with Michael Jackson’s book, “At Home in the World”, as he expresses that “life cannot be pressed into the service of language”. There is never conversation or narration in his works, he rather communicate his thoughts through art and have the audience decipher their own meaning.

Project Brief 3 was the most challenging so far, I say this as working in group dynamic does allow a little difficulty when it comes to task allocations, finding similar availability to meet up, and you have more people to rely on than just yourself. I have had a lot of trouble with group assignments this year, not one assignment has run along smoothly, and therefore I favour working individually. However, Elle, Nicolette and I worked really well together, and although our timetables clashed we managed to work around it. We assigned tasks to be done by certain dates, and when things, out of our control, did not go according to plan, such as, response from Arie, and extra footage needed to complete the film, we worked cooperatively to solve the issues. Communication within our trio was excellent; we met up at every class, twice outside university, and had a constant group conversation on Facebook. Overall, I am happy with the final result of our assignment and how we reacted to the problems we faced, as we produced an documentary that represented Arie, his work, his creative ability, and his sense of place amongst the art world.

 

References:

Jackson, M 1995, At Home in the world, Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 1-8

Bachelard, G 1969, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, Boston

Media Studio | Wed Wk.7

This week was mainly focused on the production of our final edits for our Project Brief 3, we had few external footage of his work and so we were researching to find more, we also had noticed auto-focusing issues within our footage, and Arie said “um” way too many times. We worked together in the studio suits on Nicolette’s laptop so that we could try minimise these issues. We found footage off his website that we put in, and we tried to only have footage where the auto-focusing didn’t occur. We also suggested to make our own audio that had an Arie aesthetic to it with all of his um’s, so that’s another thing we will attempt to do before the deadline. Overall it is looking nicely, his audio is very good, and he has a lot of interesting answers. We’re hoping he replies to us in time with extra footage so we can finish our assignment!!

Media Studio | Week 6

This week we were given time to go and shoot our artist for our Project Brief 3, and the artist we were elected was Arie Rain Glorie. We emailed him to meet us outside building 9 as conveniently he was working at RMIT that day. We struggled to find a location for us to film, as we had plan to use the Photography classroom but they were locked, and therefore, Arie suggested we could film in his office instead. The lighting was very low, and fluorescent which was hard to work with but we set up a Media 1 camera at a afar, and a Canon DSLR up-close and we begun to interview him.

Unfortunately we only realised halfway through one of the cameras had not been recording, so we only had up-close shots, therefore, we had to re-interview him again, it took a while but we received a lot of great audio from him, as Arie had a lot to say about the art world, especially about himself and what he wants to achieve amongst it.