I managed to get a good fine cut done on Friday, which means I am ahead of schedule. I expected to only have a rough cut by then. It has really come together in the process. It was always the case that the editing is what makes this piece interesting. It is more abstract, and the way i ended up putting it together is having bursts of time-lapse, and breaking it up with pieces of the interview. So now, the most important part is the get the colour grading looking really nice, as I think getting attractive looking film is what is going to make all the actions stand out. Plus I think I have more leeway to do something more creative with this one, so if I go overboard with the filters it doesn’t matter too much. If all goes well, I should have ‘remnants’ finished by tomorrow, which reminded me; I was never fully content with the name remnants. It was good as a working title, but I am looking for something better to name the piece by tomorrow. I just think the word is too general, or maybe its too common and I want it to be more hipster sounding. Either way, I have consulted the thesaurus for a few ideas.

Vestige: I like this one, as it suggests the architecture is left over but the people that used it are gone and the building is more of an empty shell these days. It also suggests impermanence, right now the building is being used for something, but in the future the space will not be used in this way.

Motley: I was considering this as it communicates the idea of collage and layers, but I thought it was kind of insulting to the architects as it suggests the building is incongruous, which it isn’t.

Mélange: This word sounds and looks nice, and gets across the collage idea, but not so much the history idea.

At this point ‘Vestige’ or ‘Vestiges’ seems the best option. It communicates the idea of trace elements and remnants, but also the idea of history and loss of functionality and use.

I have been diligently documenting all aspects of the individual project, ‘remnants,’ that i forgot to write and reflect on the virtual tour that I have been working on. Admittedly, I recognise the bias I have toward the individual project, and have been spending much more time and effort thinking about that.

So far, I have mostly been involved in the pre-production of the virtual tour. Researching different avenues, gathering sources and testing potential hosting websites, creating prototypes on pinterest’s map feature and youvisit to get an idea of how each work and the possibilities of each.

I took a back seat during the production stage, but hopefully in Friday’s class I can assist more with the assembly and polishing of the product. I will also be organising the google cardboard for the presentation. I will probably have to do more research for this and will probably talk to Jake about it as he seems to have a better idea of how it works, what kind of phones would be required etc.

On Friday we had a guest freelance editor, Jeremy Bowtell, giving us a crash course of how to edit in adobe premiere. At the beginning of the session I didn’t think I was confident with premiere and editing because it had been a while since I had used it. But I realised all the things covered were things I already knew, and gave me more confidence in my ability to edit this piece. It was useful to get a refresher on the functions of premiere and how to set yourself up for an effective and efficient process. Organisation and making sure everything is in the right place before  you begin is vital, and i found it made the process go a lot quicker for me as well.

My piece relies on editing to a large extent, as the effective imagery and sounds will come from quick flashes of action and time lapse. I found the sounds were quite interesting as they were, sped up without the pitch affected, and I managed to get a really rough version of the bulk of the piece done. However I decided to supplement this with more consistent and repetitive sounds of cutting, ripping, gluing, crumpling etc to make it more cohesive and rhythmic. Almost like a musical piece. I will record these myself, though they are not difficult to source online if I require further sounds. Since I have a rough version of he imagery together, today I will begin editing the interview to see if it will work with the piece. Then I can alter them both together. The focus will be on the imagery and sounds of the construction, so the interview will be used minimally, if at all. Once this is together, I will have a rough cut. Then I can add in my recorded sounds and tighten up the edit. I hope to have an almost finished, relatively together piece by Friday the 29th.

Discovered a creepy decrepit building underground in the old justice district at RMIT. It was full of old documents, antiques and blacksmithing equipment. Usually that entire area is locked off, obviously nobody had been down there for a long time. I love finding things like this. #rmit #nofilter #butwhenthelightswereoffitwasthefreakiestplaceiveeverbeenin There was a huge armchair in the middle of the empty room pointed directly at the door when you enter. Going underground and pushing open an old door into pitch darkness, only to turn on a torch and see that was creepy af

A photo posted by Jackie Matthews (@jaquesii) on May 17, 2015 at 7:37am PDT

While i was setting up the camera for a shot yesterday, Cassie came in from outside and told me about this creepy dark room out there. She said she pushed the door open a little but it was pitch black so she left it. Curious, i went and had a look myself. Through a door in my courtroom, there was a space with an old holding room, but further outside, down a narrow overgrown stairway there was a set of large brown, rotten, wooden doors. They weren’t close-able, you could just push them open, so i did. It was pitch black, and pretty creepy. Especially knowing there was a huge concrete wall behind you so you can run away. I jokingly said ‘this is how you die in horror films,’ to be honest it was legitimately creepy and i didn’t know what to expect. I turned my phone torch on and pointed it around inside. I saw boxes full of old metallic objects and a really decrepit building. As i moved the light around there was a huge, tall green leather armchair. It was really structured, not plush at all, but it was by itself, pointed directly at the doorway i was standing in. I found that imagery really creepy, it was like someone was expecting me or someone to come through the door I encouraged Cassie to come down and look at it also. A bit freaked out, we went back up the stairs.
Once back in the courtroom, our tutor, Rachel, and Linh came in and we told them about it. Then we all went down together, this time turning the lights on. It was so interesting. 3 rooms Underground, underneath what would be the ‘L shaped courtyard,’ full of old antiques, documents and blacksmithing equipment. We spent a while looking through all the curiosities inside. I looked thought he files, and opened an old box to see that was inside. There was lubricant for guns and metal inside. And a huge anvil sat in the corner. The bricks were destroyed and there were holes in the wall and rust everywhere. The air was so thick with dust it smelled like a ceramics studio, but even stronger. If i knew it was there, i probably would’ve made my whole piece about it. I am always so taken by things like that, they excite me. What i would like to do, is do some of my own work based on it. Perhaps a series of paintings to capture the atmosphere.

It would be cool to go back down there if i get the chance, but i don’t know how often it is accessible. The only reason that area was open is because we got security to open the building for us. It looked like nobody had been down there for a long time, why would they. All the documents were even dated from the 90’s and earlier. I know there used to be blacksmithing courses at RMIT when that was a relevant trade, maybe it was left over from that? Who knows. But it is all so interesting to me.

Yesterday was the film shoot for ‘remnants’ (i still have to think of a better name for this…).  I began the day at 10am, bringing over equipment and setting up, and started shooting at about 11am. I was careful with all my set ups, my camera settings, everything i could think of. I even put the tripod on the big conference table more than once, thank god i didn’t scratch it. (In retrospect, if I had another camera that would’ve been a really interesting shot, me setting up the tripod on the table, looking down at the piece…) I think it all went smoothly. There were people coming in and out of my room, which i guess had been decided as the communal meeting place. I worked around this as best i could though, and it made for a less long and lonely shoot. I was very aware of my shots throughout the day so i don’t think anybody got in the back of any of them that i don’t know of. The shoot finished at about 4:30, but the collage remains at uni so if after looking at the footage i decide i need to collect more shots, i can.

I am keen to look through all the footage and put it onto the server, which i will probably do on Thursday. One thing i think i may need to do is get a H4n and gather some really clean sounds of paper wrinkling, being handled, cutting, glueing, scraping, ripping, etc. Maybe it came up well on camera, I will have to see, but I want the sounds to be really prominent and fill out the piece as I don’t really like the idea of music. I just don’t think it works with the space i am trying to represent which is old, timeless, quiet, empty, ghostly, etc. Something unexpected was because of how the glue dried on the paper, the large images were crinkled and curled. This was visible on camera and some of the crinkles reflected the light because of the glossy paper, but i honestly didn’t really mind. I liked how it added to the texture of the image and the sounds of the paper were more crisp and interesting. Hopefully the images still read well on the footage, but I liked the textured effect it gave, as opposed to if the images were just flat and pristine.

Though I haven’t had a chance to really sit down and think about this in depth, because the physical constructing has monopolised my time, I do have a bit of an idea of how i will approach the shoot today. Through the planning of the photos, i already had an idea in my head of how it would look and how i would create it. The difficult thing to work around will be continuity. In order to get varied shots next to each other, I will have to move the camera position between just about every shot. This is because the construction is a linear progression and i cant go back a step during it. It is like filming a performance.

My game plan for beginning the shoot will be to first get general establishing shots of the board and the room. Then the sky layer, and continuing on from there until I reach the end of the ‘supreme court’ composition, shifting the camera and angles as I go. While that is drying, I can get the other shots i wanted to break up the construction with. I have the idea to have close ups of cutting out paper, pouring glue, brushing it on paper, etc. For this reason I have left the ‘dome pillar’ element as separate print outs and will put it together on camera.  Once the collage is dry, I can do the ‘money shot’ as I call it. Which is ripping off the supreme court layer from the board. From there i will continue building the collage and shifting the camera as necessary.

After yesterdays hiccups in printing, I returned to uni today to print my images. Last night I spent some time manually tiling them, just so they were small enough and more manageable for the printer. I did this in Photoshop by just saving a grid of each layer in A4 sized squares. This also minimized the overall size of the files as the white space of each layer was discarded. There were 26 layers, and i ended up with 131 A4 jpeg images. This was much easier to print, although it still took some time to send them wirelessly to the printer and get them all printed out. It was a lot of paper, and took about an hour and a half to get it all printed properly.

I have been spending tonight cutting out the images and piecing them together, but this will probably take much longer than i anticipated. I have been using a ruler, a retractable paper knife, and a cork board to cut everything out (its actually an old science lab dissecting board. hardcore.) This equipment is making the process much quicker than if i was using scissors, however the sheer amount of paper to cut and past together is overwhelming. So i will be working on this tomorrow night also. Hopefully I can plan out a shot list or at least get a rough idea of what i need to include for the shoot also, as I want to know exactly what i need and what order would be most efficient.

So, printing didn’t go as planned. Photoshop doesn’t appear to have a tile function, which is bizarre, but illustrator does. So I put the images into illustrator and tried printing them, but for some reason they just weren’t making it to the printer? It would say the file has been sent and is ready to print, but when i went to the printer to release it, it hadn’t arrived. Possibly the files are too big, but I assumed it could handle it as it IS the design building. I’m sure I’m not the first person to print something like this. Either way, I had to leave because it was getting late and after 2 hours of attempts I was pretty frustrated. I’ll go back in tomorrow and try again. My current solution will be to manually tile the images myself and then print them all individually. Thankfully I have already saved all the layers as jpegs individually, so i can just cut them up into separate, A4 sized images. It will mean I have to print, probably close to 200 separate documents, but it’s fool-proof, and there is no reason why the printer couldn’t handle that. There wouldn’t be anything complicated about the images, there would just be a lot of them.Fortunately I have tons of printing credit, here’s hoping I don’t run out… This print job shouldn’t be more than $80, right?

This is the first real setback during this production so far. There will always be setbacks in projects like this, in the grand scheme of things, its pretty minor. Last semester I had far worse situations (like an entire days worth of footage being ruined due to technical issues etc.). Comparatively, this is okay. If i can rectify this tomorrow and if the shoot goes well on Sunday, I’ll be happy, and back on schedule. I can rest assured, at least the sound interview sounds really good. Sound is really important, and I’ve found that bad video is salvageable, bad sound is not. We will see what tomorrow brings.

I bought a huge sheet of 3mm mdf board, 1200mm x 900mm. This is what I am going to put the collage on, as the wooden texture will produce the best sounds and scrapes, while also being robust so I wont accidentally rip more than I intend etc. I tried to scale up my Photoshop document to the correct size but the sheer amount of large high quality layers full of large high quality pictures was too much for my laptop to handle. So I took it to the edit suites in building 9 and scaled it up to the right size as well as adding the finishing touches.

For printing, I intend to use the printers in building 9, and i need to print all of my Photoshop layers separately. I need to figure out the best way to do this, whether I need to make one layer visible at a time and print, or whether i save each individual layer as a jpeg and print all of the documents. All the images I need are in the document, even the ones that get covered up by others, so if i can just print the individual layers I will have all the images I need. This is an image of the whole document with all of its layers as it is now (I compressed the image file a lot here for uploading purposes):

Today I collected the rest of the images I needed for the piece, informed by the composition and Peter Elliot’s interview. The images I have now include:

• Sky
• Parish Plans*
• wooden roofs
• wooden canopy
• supreme court*
• old tram*
• horse and carriage*
• old justice district police building*
• L shaped courtyard
• Magistrates court
• Old Courtroom
• People*
• dome area wall details
• wooden seating
• dome area pillar
• dome area arches
• W-class tram
• old car*
• modern tram
• 2 new cars
• updated courtroom
• alive, green tree
• conference table
• exit sign
• RMIT sign

*Images not taken by me, sourced from copyright free photos in the state library collection