Everyday Media

An everyday blog about media by everyday blogger Louise Alice Wilson.

Category: Capturing Creativity

Reflections

I’ve learnt a great amount throughout this studio, first and foremost I was taught: how the art world functions, how specific galleries such as Gertrude St Contemporary run and how artists earn a living. The studio also provided me with basic filmmaking skills such as how to: create a shooting schedule, write a shooting script, set up three-point lighting, conduct an interview, utilise visual storytelling and edit a short film. Throughout the shooting process with my artist I also developed my abilities regarding how to use a: Sony Zoom H2N (and other such handy recorders), a lapel mic, my own Canon EOS 60D and Adobe Premiere Pro editing software. Overall I think the studio functioned quite successfully, it was great to be in a studio with nineteen people who all were interested in the same topics as you. I felt that overall, the studios had a very happy and supportive environment, and you walked away knowing a great deal about the art world and how to make short documentaries.

 

The project itself taught me a great deal about how to work with talent, as well as my group members. Having to work independently forced me to be completely all over every aspect of the shoot, whether that be choosing which questions to ask, deciding what to focus on, where I wanted the shoot to happen, deciding what gear to use, getting to the shoot, carrying all the gear, what I wanted to shoot, managing the audio, managing the lighting, managing the camera set-ups, managing the talent, editing the film, and finding a great soundtrack for it.

 

I’m a pretty self-conscious person and I often doubt the decisions I make or ask someone else for their opinion (should I shoot this angle, or what do you think of this question etc.). Working independently pushed me to go with my gut instincts, to make decisions and to not seek others approval. It forced me to develop my aesthetic as a filmmaker and to own the work that I ended up producing, so ultimately I was really glad with how everything panned out.

 

Overall I think the artist portrait I created is pretty successful, we get to hear Claire discuss creativity, what it means to her to be an artist, what inspires her work, what her work often focusses on and what she plans to do next in her career. Which gives great insight into her as a person, her as an artist and her work itself and we also get to see shots of her work and her studio. My creative portrait constructs a great narrative, with enough pauses in between to provide audiences with breathing room to digest what is being said, ultimately leaving audiences looking forward to Claire’s next endeavours. The shots themselves are set up nicely and are of high quality, similarly the audio from the SONY H2N sounds amazing. It was really fun to look around Claire’s studio and decide what to shoot, then weave them into the narrative of the interview. I think my artist portrait leaves you with an understanding of Claire, an understanding of her process and an understanding of her work, which is what I ultimately set out to achieve.

 

Edited version of my reflection, full reflection available via Google Drive.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

Anti-Social Media

This week we discussed what the social media strategy would be for our artist portraits. As a class Louise divided us into two groups: one would work on the final presentation of our artist portraits to the other studios, whilst the other group would work on a social media strategy for the artist portraits. I ended up going with the social media strategy group, which is quite exciting because I’m interested in getting some insight into how people promote their own work.

 

We eventually decided that we would create a Facebook page and an Instagram page called ‘Exhibit A’ to exhibit our artist portraits, as well as accompanying photos and artist’s biographies that we’d come up with. Our group decided to get everyone in the class to upload at least three publicity photos to the google drive, as well as a short biography on their artist. We then decided to use these photos by uploading them to our Facebook and Instagram pages. We decided to use excerpts from the artist’s bio’s or from the artist’s portraits themselves to match with the publicity photos. I think it is such a great idea to manage the social media for the artist portraits collectively as it allows us to have a wider audience and build up a greater amount of momentum.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

Draft Punk

Showing my artist portrait to others after working on it by myself for so long was quite a nerve racking experience. However, everyone seemed pretty happy with the piece, I think everyone really likes Claire’s work, which really helps to engage them with the artist portrait. The only consistent feedback I received was that I should think about adding slightly longer pauses within the audio track, to allow viewers to fully digest what Claire is saying before moving on to a new topic. I totally agree with this sentiment and have expanded my artist portrait slightly to give it more breathing room. When you’re working on a project by yourself for a long time, it’s things like pacing and visual rhythm that become hard to analyse as you get used to the pace that you applied at the start of the piece.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

Getting Rough

This week I’ve managed to finish my rough cut, the only thing left to do now is to complete the colour grading of the shots and to make Claire’s voice more seamless by taking out any long breaths or umms and ahhs, that appear sporadically throughout the audio. I’ve attempted to make my artist portrait match the aesthetic vibe of Claire’s work by filling the entirety of the frame with visually rich, colourful images. I’ve also colour graded the piece so that it is quite high contrast and relatively saturated. This adds a great vividness to the piece and allows Claire’s paintings to ‘pop’ like they do in real life. Showcasing physical artworks via the medium of film is quite a hard task, but hopefully I’ve managed to display the true visual qualities of Claire’s work.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

The Edit

Editing has been going well, I’ve managed to pick out what footage I want to use for the three-minute narrative. Now I’ve begun colouring the piece with various associated footage that myself and Riah shot at Claire’s studio. Originally when we shot at Claire’s studio I felt like we had shot A LOT of footage, almost too much if anything. As I go through my piece and begin colouring shots in, I realised that I’ve used almost every shot that we got, so I glad that we shot the amount that what we did. I’ve tried to match the shots of Claire, her studio and her works with the statements that Claire is making throughout the piece. As Claire speaks of the influence of Climate Change on her works I’ve used shots of her paintings that reference this topic. Or as Claire speaks about working on new projects I show shots of her painting or moving around her studio. It’s really enjoyable to be able to use footage to bring Claire’s story to life and to allow the viewer to literally see what Claire is speaking of or referencing.

 

Originally I intended to get my partner Chris Frangou, to write a piece of music specifically for Claire’s artist portrait, but his intense tour schedule is making it almost impossible for Chris to have enough time to write any new pieces of music. I have however managed to find a really nice piece of music, that I think fits in with Claire’s artist portrait. It’s called ‘Weird World’ and it was created by ‘Colored Mind’, who provides the track free of charge, for public domain via their Sound Cloud. So far it’s coming along really well, I’m looking forward to watching the entire finished piece.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

My Work In Progress

My video on Claire Bridge is coming along pretty well, so far I’ve managed to have a look at the footage and start compiling the ‘narrative’ of the piece, which is essentially just a three-minute compilation of all the audio with matching visuals that I want to use. Like friends of mine who are currently editing their portraits I’ve been finding hard to decide what makes the cut or not. I would really love to delve deeply into Claire’s process, but it seems that in a 3 to 5-minute video that it’s hard to fit in everything your artist has talked about.

 

I originally asked Claire six questions and had planned to use the best 30 secs of each question to compile into this 3-minute narrative, that I would later colour with other footage, music and editing. However, I should have known that there are some answers which go for say 45 secs, where everything is gold, which has meant that I’ve had to drop some questions out completely. I do think though, that my artist portrait has a clearly defined narrative and that’s extremely important to me, so that people, after watching feel like it makes sense and that they’ve understood everything Claire speaks about.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

The Shoot

This week I shot my Interview with Claire Bridge. Myself and Riah travelled, I would say all the way out too Wheelers Hill, but it’s really not that far away, unless you live on the North side, which we both do. Riah and I carried our gear on two trains and 1 bus to get to Claire’s studio out in Wheelers Hill. I can see why Claire lives here as it’s a pretty beautiful place, it’s still suburban but there are trills, hills and birds everywhere, and for someone that’s passionate about the environment I can see why she lives here. Meeting Claire was awesome, after having spoken via phone or email for so long, it was nice to speak to her in person. The filming of the interview went extremely smoothly, I’d put this down to having planned out everything, such as all the questions I was going to ask prior to the interview. By this stage I had helped Riah film as well as Elise and it was noticeable how much smoother Riah’s interview went because she had pre-planned her questions. Rather than spending an hour asking various questions that you might not use anyway, it’s much more efficient to spend 20 minutes covering exactly what you want to cover. By this stage I’d also had practise setting up lights, doing sound and getting camera shots for people’s portraits so I already knew everything I wanted to shoot.

 

Our setup was pretty simple, two large lights, one on Claire’s front right and one on Claire’s front left, two Canon EOS 60D DSLR’s at different positions (one straight on, one to the side), a Sony H2N handy recorder and a lapel mic. Everything ran super smoothly, we did the interview first then myself and Riah shot various things in Claire’s studio. Whilst shooting various things in Claire’s studio we also got a chance to both speak to her which was nice, discussing what it is like to be a woman in Melbourne’s art scene and finding out who some of her favourite artists were. Overall the experience was also, I have a lot of friends who are artists so I hope to do more artist portraits in the future.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

Reflection On Video Portrait

The collaborative process between me and Claire Bridge has been good so far. Upon finding out her email address we had a brief email exchange culminating in me sending her a list of potential questions for the interview. Claire quite liked a lot of the questions, but overall there were too many, so we proceeded to reduce the number of questions to six main questions. These questions would then form the basis of the artist portrait, with an attempt to limit answers to no more than a minute, so little had to be cut for the final edit. The six questions we arrived at are as follows:


  1. How would you define creativity?
  2. What does it mean to you to be an artist?
  3. Do you feel a painting or piece of art can house an energy/a feeling from the original artist? Do you feel that your own works house this energy?
  4. Change and transformation are recurrent themes in your work. What are you exploring and why do these fascinate you? And recently we saw a change in your medium too, incorporating video works and photography.
  5. You seem to draw on many influences in your work, from quantum physics, astrophysics, to environmental ecology, psychology, philosophy and metaphysics. With titles like “Dark Matter”, “Touching Infinity”, “We are made of Stars”, “Rising tides” and “A drop in the ocean” or “Alchemy”. Can you tell us something more about the convergence of these ideas and influences?
  6. What continues to motivate and inspire you as an artist?

We both felt these questions addressed the initial topic of exploring creativity, explored why Claire became an artist, gives insight into Claire’s work and practise and looks toward the future of Claire’s practice. After refining the questions, we proceeded to organise a day to film, which will be on the 16th September. Hopefully if all goes well we will both have an artist portrait that lives up to our expectations.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

Contacting Our Artists

This week was an exciting week as this week we got given the artists that we would be working with on our project. As soon as I found out who my artist was I began looking at her website and various places online that house her work. I was actually quite surprised to receive an artist like Claire Bridge, I’d never really thought that I’d receive a traditional realist painter. I run an online art blog, where I post random works of art that I really love and looking back over my archive it’s rare that I ever post any traditional realist works, so it was refreshing to learn about a style of art I didn’t know much about.

 

I spent a lot of time looking over her work and reading into traditional realism. Although Claire is a traditional realist painter she does mix this traditional mastery with more modern practises such as distorted figures, abstract backgrounds and a diverse array of colours. I decided to send Claire a brief email just letting her know who I am and that I’d be working on this project with her. I also then wrote up a list of questions for Claire that she could look over and refine for our artist portrait. So far I’m pretty excited to begin work on the project and hope that Claire and I can create something that we both really love.

 

Catch you later,

Louise Alice Wilson

Street Art

This week we were organised into groups and tasked with creating a street art video. I was put with Jasmijn and Dusty and the three of us headed off with our massive camera to go film some notorious street art laden alleyways around Melbourne. Filming the laneways was much harder than expected, as we didn’t realise how busy they actually get, it was almost impossible to get shots of the art without having people covering the frame. We decided to walk down a little alley off the main alley and we happened to catch a dude putting a piece. The dude happily let us film him as long as we didn’t get any shots of his face or his side, just sticking with shots of him from behind. It was cool to get to see art in motion and to be able to capture that on film.

 

Because I wasn’t that happy with the shots of the street art that we got and I know Melbourne has some really great street art to offer I decided to do extra filming by myself. I walked around my local area in Thornbury and managed to find some great pieces and also headed down to Collingwood as that place is literally covered in street art. It was kind of cool to walk around streets that you know super well and to look at them in a different light. Walking down different streets and alleys, keeping an eye out for a great piece of work. Overall I had a lot of fun with the project and I personally love street art so this project was a combination of two of my favourite things.

 

Catch you later,
Louise Alice Wilson

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