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

This morning I had my interview with Peter Elliott, and asked him questions from my list, but found that he kept the interview going himself. I found I didn’t even need to ask all of my questions as he covered multiple topics within his answers.

I like the way it sounds. The recording is a bit quiet, but there is no noise or anything as we were in an empty, quiet meeting room, so I can just turn the volume up easily. So the clean recording is great, but also his speaking voice is very good. He speaks clearly and I feel his voice and tone matches the building. It’s very relaxed, low, quiet. I can already imagine ways to enhance this and layer over sound effects and such in the finished piece.

I listened to the 15 minute piece and took note of the main topics he was discussing, as well as interesting comments. I found there are some elements of the building I have neglected which he kept mentioning, so I think it would be important to include these, such as the L shaped courtyard, Courtroom 2, and the Dome; which I included a little bit of but probably not enough. From here I will collect some more images, possibly on Monday afternoon. I will then work on my Photoshop documents to make them expansive and to include more elements which will give the piece more visual interest and will allow me to make the piece longer. Hopefully tomorrow I will buy a surface to work on to give me an idea of the dimensions I need to be working in. Something practical, but still large. Then I will try printing these out on Thursday, so if there are any hiccups in printing, I can rectify them on Friday. From there I should be ready for filming on Sunday.

Alongside this, I need to be thinking about shot lists, and planning my shoot so it can be successful and efficient. I will also be beginning to  edit Peter Elliott’s interview from now, so when I have the footage from Sunday, I can get straight into editing that and polishing it all, plus gathering a library of sound effects I can use. I need to pay special attention to this on the day, as the ripping of the paper and the tools and such on the piece are going to play a huge part. I can supplement these with recordings from a H4N later if I need to, but I would like to avoid this and keep the sound diagetic.

Full Interview: https://soundcloud.com/matthewsj-1/peter-elliott-interview

I listened to the interview and wrote down what times each topic occurred at to help me edit:

After contacting the Architecture school I was directed back to Peter Elliott. At first I was defeated by this because I was going in circles, but I realised the email they had provided me with this time was different to the one I had tried. The initial email was just the one on their website, which went to the office, but this one was addressed direct to Peter Elliott. I shot him an email and he replied immediately. So now, it looks like I have an interview subject! Hooray! It’s so great that he could help me out, now I just need to make sure I do a good job to make it worth the effort.

I’ve been drafting some questions for the sound interview, and hope to have it on Friday or even earlier, just so I can get it done this week and begin editing it before I jump onto the collage next week. The important thing I need to focus on now is having good interview questions that cover all the bases. I also need to complete organisation of an interview time/ date/ activation which will fit into my production timeline, but importantly, is least taxing on my subject. I want to do this efficiently, as he would be, essentially, doing this as a favour to me and RMIT.

Filming of the collage is going to take place on the 17th of this month. That is the day when we have the Building to ourselves, and I just need the one room. Hopefully I can spend a few hours in there making sure I get every shot, as the way I am imagining it, there are lots of little shots and I have to move the camera a lot between each one due to continuity. I can’t shoot to edit, I have to edit while I am shooting, unless I get multiple cameras which I don’t need and don’t particularly want either.

Before I have this interview, there appears to be a lull in production, as I am quite prepared, but just need to wait. In this time I will collect sounds I can use over the piece if i need to, and will do some tests of the collage creation, printing, making, materials, etc. I am thinking the best surface for ripping at and building on is MDF. Maybe I will get a big sheet of thin MDF, so that I can use scraping tools etc on it.

Here is my list of questions:

Today in class, Abigail Belfrage  from the Public Records Office came to discuss our ideas with us further and how we can go about finding sources. My project doesn’t really lend itself to a lot of those types of sources, but we discussed things such as parish plans which i could include in my collage. I love this idea and feel it would be a great way to ground the work, and make it even more ‘Melbourne.’ I think this opens the piece up nicely, because it gives a sense of pre-supreme court time also. Originally, the composition began with the supreme court, but this is more focused on the land and space.I found a few of them on the state library database, my favourite one is this one from 1854, around the time the supreme court was first built. 

Some other suggestions were about who I could contact for my interview. The National rust and Australia ICOMOS were suggested. I was about to contact them when Peter Elliott got back to me and agreed to an interview. That is a relief.