About location:
I have choose the locations for shooting the second screen project work. It is a studio for photograph and it was decorated with traditional Chinese style.
pic from: xiaohongshu
Month: August 2019
Blog#15
About the style of next screen project work, i think that it can be like a documentary or a music video or a narrative movie or just fashion movie.
This is a music video I have watched about peking Opera, it combined with the modern elements and traditional Chinese style.
Blog#14
Blog#13
About festival:
All the photographers are welcome to take part and the theme can be responded to playfully or to the letter. And photographers retain full and exclusive rights to their work. This is the same slogan of every festival.
LIFE FRAMER mostly have four parts: exhibitions, cash prizes, exposure and feedback.
About requirements:
> On top of the cash prizes, exposure and international exhibitions, all entrants can create a personal, public profile (we feature some in The Collection), and get published in the Journal.
When submitting you can choose to submit to one of the open themes, or to submit your images across any of the three open themes in the combination of your choice. Each image is reviewed as a separate entry.
1. SHARE YOUR ART: Choose how many images to enter, or if you’d like to become a member
2. TIE IT TOGETHER: Pay the admin fee securely with a credit/debit card or PayPal, and upload your image(s)
3. And finally: Receive confirmation and access to “my LF” for exclusive content
About membership submission:
- Access to a member portal where you can enter up to 10 images per theme for the next 12 consecutive themes of Life Framer (including across Editions).
- Exclusive access to the Series Award, where you can enter a photographic series on any topic and receive your own solo show in a prestigious contemporary photography gallery.
- Feedback on your submission – Detailed and constructive comments to your Series Award submission are provided by our guest critic team – an exclusive for Life Framer members
About different tags (style/theme):
Abstract, Aerial, Analog, Candid, Conceptual, Digital Art, Documentary, Fine Art, Humanism, Landscape, Portrait, Still life, Street, Studio, Travel, Urban.
Blog#12
About expressionism, I think the most important thing is the character’s facial expression. The character should show his/her fear by face and some actions. A good natural acting needs lots of practice and the good attitude to the work, attitude is always more important than any acting skills.
Then, an expressionism film needs the ability for controlling the camera. For example, the appropriate shooting angle will make the character’s acting better. Many close-ups can express the emotion of the film. Besides, The editing is also important for the film. The quick moving from one picture to another picture can add the tension in the picture.
I found a video about how people reactions when they watch some horrible things. Because I think even if we cannot act like a real actor/actress, we still can imagine how we meet horrible things in the real life. We can imitate those people who was frightened by ghosts. Art comes from life and we should observe more.
Blog#11
This is film I watched before, and it records the whole process about how to do the Beijing Opera makeup and some modelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWRREd4T_B4
I think it will be helpful for next screen project work.
Blog#10
In one of previous blog posts, I watched the film <Farewell My Cuncubine>. I want to add Beijing Opera and some other traditional Chinese elements into my next screen project work. I plan to shoot it more like an ancient customs magazine film. The video style will be like the video I show below.
Blog#9
About group work:
After we doing the assignment1, we found that our work cannot achieve the effect we want at the beginning. And we shoot another version about expressionism. In the new work, we try to make this work less narrative and use many close-ups. The emphasis is on the expressiveness of the character. The whole video was shoot in a static location, the character was watching the horror film and eat something. After he was frightened by the film, he found that blood started to appear on his food, glasses and mirror. He cannot believe it and started to wipe the mirror crazily. When the film ends, everything return to the normal, blood is gone.We use two cameras to shoot these scenes, one is a camera fixed on a tripod with zoom lens and the other is hand-held camera with the 50mm focusing lens. Given the ambiguity of previous videos, we choose the place with some soft light to improve the quality of videos. Even this video still exists some deficiencies, I think it is better than the previous one and I will do more practise in controlling the shooting angle in the next work.
Blog#8
Research topic: Expressionism in the Cinema
Concept :
Expressionist movies usually reflect the loneliness, brutality, terror and madness of the characters in their hearts by means of horror, disaster, crime and other subjects, using distorted and dark world materials, inclined and inverted images and special shooting angles rarely used in conventional movies.
About shooting: Character close-ups and symbolic empty scenes are commonly used in expressionist films. Close-ups can be used to “magnify” the performance and enhance the drama; while the rendering of the environment can be seen as an “explanation” of the characters’behavior and soul, trying to reveal the social incentives behind the characters’ behavior. In addition, subjective lens is also a commonly used technique of expressionism. Expressionist artists despise the objective realism and emphasize the expression of “subjective reality”.
About characters’ performance: Their performances are usually exaggerated, basically abandoning the realist way of performing and replacing it with showing rapid changes, dance-like movements, deformation or distorted expressions.
Types of representative works: horror, disaster and crime (these are most common types)
Content: The content is absurd, sometimes the structure is scattered, the plot changes abruptly, the story characters are typed, often ghosts and living people appear at the same time (like vampire and so on), there is no clear boundary between life and death, dream and reality.
Expressionist film directors pay attention to the psychological abnormality in abnormal society, those anxious and tense emotions, try to penetrate the deep motivation and reasons behind those crazy behaviors, and use subjective image style to prove social facts. Therefore, the works have social significance and social value.
I recently watched a film <The host> made by Bong joon-ho from South Korea. The film is about a traditional Korean family facing the monster in Hanjiang River. Although it was defined as a horror and disaster film, in fact, the director used it to express a kind of satire on politics. This monster is power and American culture. You can see his strong anti-American sentiment from all Bong joon-ho’s movies. While the whole Asian culture has become weak, Bong joon-ho is still going upstream in the torrent of Western culture, waving his flag sadly for his native culture. For example, when the main character Kangdou received the phone call from his daughter (who has been considered to be eaten by the monster), he asked the government for help but the government did not care about what he said. This is the director’s satire on the government at that time. As I mentioned before, this expressionistic film use subjective image style to prove social facts.
Blog#7
<Light>
When I go home from outside, I recorded the lights I saw along the way. Some are decorative lights at the entrance of the shop, some are lights on the ground and so on. Some scenes are also used for our group work because we think that lighting is very important for a film and it even can directly affect the visual effect of the film. I recorded a scene in this video which has both bright and dark light, which can be found in the video.
As we known, For example, comedies have bright lights, few shadows and high-profile styles. If the comedy dims the lights, there will be some irony in the comedy. Suspicion films and thrillers tend to be low-key, and many shadows are transmitted. Tragedy and Hollywood blockbusters generally prefer a high contrast style. That is also the reason why our group decide to choose a dark place to shoot video.