Assignment 4

Wounded

“The love that helps heal wounds”.

The struggles servicemen and women face returning home from war zones can be debilitating, but one therapeutic tool has proven to have the ability to not only help recovery but change lives.

Reflection

Studio

This semester I have really enjoyed this studio and the flexibility it has given me to experiment with various different approaches to film making. I have been able to explore different ideas and through that exploration develop and enhance skills within After Effects and other post production tools to execute my visions. The studio has also reinforced the importance of detailed preproduction work such as scripting and storyboarding.

What I gained a great deal from though was my peers. Despite the restrictions of having to move to an online environment we had very engaging discussions each week and a high level of enthusiasm. Watching my fellow students work presentations throughout the semester was incredibly beneficial for me as each one of us interpreted the briefs very differently and produced vastly different bodies of work. This gave me inspiration in areas which I hadn’t previously thought to explore and different methods with which to create things, especially considering the constraints we were all experience when going through our creation processes. I thought this studio was great, the subject matter was incredibly interesting and was a lot of fun creating work to reflect it.

Collaboration

At various point throughout the semester we worked in group environments, before we moved to distance learning there were several occasions where we would break up into groups with a variety of tasks to complete and since moving to online there has been a number of times where we have been split into breakout groups from the main video session to have discussions about topics and present work to one another. As mentioned earlier I gained a lot from my peers this semester and this is another area in which I benefited. Working in these group environments especially with the current learning format gave me an opportunity to engage with my fellow students and bounce ideas around and get there perspective on things, furthermore as a mature age student I haven’t previously had much experience with online communication and video conferencing at all and have a very different learning style to a lot of my peers though through discussion and collaboration with them I feel a great deal more confident with myself and my ability to learn under these conditions.

Production

This particular assignment was a bit of a difficult one for me as I struggled to come up with a clear concept that I felt met the brief and additionally how I would execute it with the current restrictions. My first idea was to look at the availability of clean drinking water to remote communities around the world and how the use of desalination plants could help with this issue, then resigning to the fact that it was a topic that was going to be incredibly hard to convey with the filming limitations I decided to explore wide spread solar energy as an alternative to the use of fossil fuels, and again I had great difficulty visualizing and coming up with a plan on how to represent this. At this point I unfortunately had an unrelated decline in my mental health which gave me the thought to focus on that as a global issue and began forming ideas and concepts based on my own experience as a veteran suffering from PTSD from overseas operations and what has assisted me in overcoming my conditions.

When thinking about how to execute this it was very apparent that sensitivity was the most important factor here, I simply put myself in the mindset of the audience throughout the entire process constantly asking myself, how would I react watching this, is this triggering in any way and is the subject matter broad enough as to speak to all returned servicemen and women and not alienate any. Furthermore, I did not want this to be a documentary of sort and certainly did not want it to be an advertisement which I was originally thinking of doing with the previous concepts as I felt it would have been disrespectful, I’m not really sure what it turned out to be or what you would classify it as to be honest.

This thought process had influence on some of the creative decisions I made for this project, for instance I purposefully did not show a title at the beginning because I wanted the audience to absorb the information without any preconceived notions or expectations, additionally I left my name until the end, creatively I wanted the visuals and score to grab the audience’s attention.

I wrote a script for the narrated element and storyboarded the shots. Out of all the footage I took in line with my storyboard most of them ended up on the cutting room floor. I had thought to have shots of my battle vest being put away into a trunk and my parade uniform complete with medals being stored into a wardrobe with the door being shut all to symbolize a transition or end but it just all felt too much on the nose and did not fit the tone I was intending. The footage that did end up coming together in the final work is very simple and understated, there are some long shots designed to be somewhat uncomfortable but they are in keeping with the overall message.

I was faced with some technical difficulties during the filming process one of which was horizontal banding across my interior footage. I wanted it to be shot at night and under warm light however I had two trade lamps positioned to give further fill lighting and even when adjusting my shutter speed the footage continued to have banding issues so I unfortunately was only able to use the existing lighting within the room. I also had some overexposure problems with the exterior shots however that was due to me not setting up the camera sufficiently for that day.

My feelings are ambivalent with the final product and how it’s turned out but I think it might be a case of me being too close to the subject matter.

Peer Feedback

In relation to the presentations from week 9, the students whose work I’d like to reflect on is Neville’s. Neville has chosen the same topic as I have landed on however where I have been very specific focusing on returning soldiers with mental health issues Neville is looking at the topic of mental health more broadly as an issue. I think it’s really great that he chose to do this because mental health issues are prolific within all societies and discourse around the topic definitely continues to raise awareness and remove the stigmas surrounding it. I love where he has drawn his influences from being Blade Runner 2049 and Her and how he intends on framing the relationships between those suffering from mental health issues and the artificial intelligence assigned to assist them. It will be interesting to see how he decides to portray the different element of his project especially what type of A.I. he decides on and how he conveys its interactions. I am really looking forward to seeing the final product as his previous work was quite abstract and somewhat cerebral and made for fantastic viewing.

This has certainly been a tough period and have struggled quite a bit of late. Despite my health issues I have completely changed my concept for assignment 4. I’m now focusing on soldiers that have returned from war zones with PTSD and how assistance and companion animals have an amazing ability to aid in the recovery process. I feel much more confident in this topic as it is one quite close to my heart and have a considerable amount of experience and knowledge about.

The one thing that I am concerned about is how I represent it as everyones experience is complete different and the last thing I would ever want to do is offend or ostracise anybody. I feel the best way to do that is to keep the narrative as broad as possible that way any individual that’s returned from overseas service can identify with it regardless of position or role.

So I’m playing with two concepts at the moment but have no idea how to execute them. The first is the lack of clean drinking water for those in remote communities and how desalination plants can be used to turn sea water into drinking water and the other is the wide spread use of solar energy to eradicate the use of fossil fuels. Furthermore I am considering portraying it as a tongue in cheek commercial style somewhat like the media propaganda used in Starship Troopers. The problem is how can I effectively convey either of these concepts in the current lockdown situation. I feel that perhaps solar is the better of the two options in this situation as I have solar panels on my house so at least have somewhere to start with that idea, I really have no idea where to begin with desalination.

During this project I learned the importance of time management and thorough pre-production. Originally my plan was was to have several other elements to the story demonstrating the A.I. interacting with various parts of the house and performing different tasks however when it came to the editing stage I simply could not fit it all in with the time allocated so I ended up cutting them. If I had have done a more efficient job of storyboarding in line with my script I would have had a better understanding of how long each shot was going to take me. That being said I’m actually quite happy with the way it turned out in the end and I think that if I had have left those shots in it would have made it a bit too cluttered and to be honest, probably would have cut them in the end anyway.

A man enlists the help of an A.I. synthetic for the first time to look after his house and dog while he is away on holiday. Unfortunately the man hasn’t calibrated the A.I. for his lifestyle requirements and it is not sure how to perform any of the required task and ends up just operating off its own curiosity of the world its just woken up in and trying to figure things out as it goes along.

My aim is to create a humorous sequence of event’s where the synthetic has the best of intentions to do the right thing but unfortunately just keeps getting it wrong as it has no basis for comparison. Slowly it begins to learn and get a grasp of things after a series of blunders and research to rectify where it has gone wrong, just in time for man to return none the wiser of the chaos that has ensued.

In this assignment I endeavoured to demonstrate how technology would be embedded into most aspects of our workplace in the future whilst additionally demonstrating that there’s always the potential that some systems might not operate at 100%. Furthermore, the interaction between operator and interface may not always be a smooth one. My inspiration for this concept came from Holly, the on board A.I. from Red Dwarf and I wanted to reflect a period where displacement due to advancements in technology is not particularly an issue anymore and A.I. is now a societal norm and required for effective productivity (Petropoulos 2018). Additionally, I wanted to illustrate how an A.I. within the context of the media industry operates continuously gathering information and predicting requirements for the user as well as editing and processing content (Caramiaux, Geurts, Lotte 2019).

Even though the images used throughout the project were taken by me, I wanted to show a scenario where the A.I. by its own decision-making process acquires the images either by taking them from an online database or creates them itself via synthetic media production as discussed by Falk Rehkopf in Attention Communicators: “Synthetic Media” Is on the Rise (2019).

The creation of this project was time consuming and difficult to execute to say the least as a lot of the elements that I did I had never attempted before. The footage I captured of myself was in front of a green screen so I could insert a futuristic background using chroma key framing in After Effects. Once I had created that segment I was able add adjustment layers, compositions and images on top of the footage in different ways to create an interactive holographic computer system where the interface moved and changed in various ways in conjunction with the ways in which I moved my body in the original green screen footage. Once I had completed the different sections that required manipulation in After Effects I exported them in separate MP4 videos then transferred them into Premier Pro where I added the text elements and various audio tracks to make it come alive so to speak.

In relation to the audio, I used a combination of my own voice recordings and sourced royalty free music and sound effects that I procured from designated internet sites. Some of those sound effects and my voice recording needed to be manipulated to create a futurist sound that was congruent with the visual elements of the piece. I did this by adding elements which altered in Audition, things such as pitch, tone, bass just to name a few. Once I had achieved the desired result I exported those altered audio elements and added them into the Premier Pro project.

I was quite happy with the concept and the way it all came together. I like how it demonstrates that the technology may not particularly work in the manner that the user intends and does so in a humorous manner. I also really like the way the computer interface turned out.

Areas of the project where I feel it falls short and I’m not completely satisfied with is the biometric scanner and the green screen clip. Even though the scanner certainly presents as that of a biometric interface, I feel I could have done more with it such as having a close up shot of the hand itself interacting with it, that way I could have shown the scanner in a more detailed way and added more elements to it. I relation to the green screen, it was my first time using this method but I found that because I don’t have proper lighting I was unable to remove all the shadows I was casting, and even though the chroma key process I used trimmed it all really well, because of the discrepancies in colour it created some warping and distortion in certain areas of the footage.

Due to the world falling to pieces all around us, we conducted our first online video classroom chat the other day. I can at times be a bit of a luddite and have never taken part of anything like it before, haven’t even really used FaceTime so going into it I was a little apprehensive and concerned as I really had no idea what I was doing. That being said the instructions to take part in it were very easy to understand and execute and once it began I found it very chilled and easy to engage with.

Cat allowed space for us all to discuss issues we may be having with our assignments and delivered a bunch of information in a really relaxing manner and certainly made me feel that this method of study would get us through at this point in time. My concerns arise as to the time in which we could be conducting this format.

Being a practical based studio we certainly can experiment with and conduct our content creation from home, but there really is no substitute for hands on in person tutelage from a person with industry experience and a vast knowledge base, additionally we aren’t currently getting exposed to the equipment and techniques that we require to build our skill set for our success within the industry for the future.

For the first time I experimented with green screen to create a futuristic environment for my assignment. I found the process to be rather interesting. although it wasn’t very difficult to achieve the execution and the final product certainly had room for improvement. the lighting that I had to work with created shadows which required me to do significant adjustments in order to remove the halos left behind after and because of that the final product shows some distortion and noise which I could not remove with my current basis of knowledge.

I am quite happy with the results despite the few issues that I have had and considering it was my first attempt at such a process I am confident that when I next undertake a chroma key process I will be able to build upon the skills I have learned & produce better results.