Part D

For Part D I will be assisting an artist which is Richard Bolam to produce a time lapse film and learn how he does it and help him with setting out the cameras and other creative decisions. I'm also going to choose a piece of music that goes with the final work which I will put together. I chose this project because I'm into music production and film and I’m curious to see how they work together but using loads of photos as a starting point.
So will also be a good opportunity for me to be able to learn more skills and see a background of someone that works in that environment also to understand more about it. I want to be able to achieve a good short time lapse film that works with some background music.

We first went through the different stages on the camera that we would be using and Richard told us a little bit about what he wanted us to do and what we wants from the footage. He also told us about a software that is ‘open source’ which you can download and install into normal cameras like ‘hacking’ the cameras to do things that they weren't built to do. So I’ve learnt that you can hack cameras which I never knew was possible. Even though the weather wasn't great to get a good time lapse film I learn how to pick out small things to make the still compositions more interesting - such as getting shadows in corners or reflections when people, cars or other objects move. When we make the time lapse faster it will create good effects not just a dull boring scene. The main obstacle for me was that it wasn't really a good day for shooting (very dull) and not having the best view without zooming for the cameras.

Richard talked me through some ideas such as mixing parts of the videos together and getting bits and repeating them for example like the bus going round the corner over and over again which makes the video more interesting and he said that it would go with the type of music that I like, like fast tracks and stuff. He also spoke through the frames and made me see how the video would look like in 15 frames per second and 25 frames per second. I learnt TV has 24 frames a second and you can’t see them change!) I decide on more frames per second because it looked better. I was particularly interested to imagine how the grey clouds would move and appear to flow quickly through the air.

While we were putting the videos together, Richard told me about a video by pop music duo, Goodley and Crème, called the mondo video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AkaSfoQ92k ) which is a sequence of them making a track by filming different bits of them making a sounds. I liked their video as they’re really experimental. Richard also told me to watch some on the Chris Cunningham’s pop videos to get a few ideas off his stuff. We ended up watching some as a group and they were well crazy!

I really enjoyed today and learnt a great deal both learning to all the ideas and examples that Richard shared and in making my own decisions about the work we made. I now understand a lot more about image and film such as frames per second, composition, editing, sound tracking and how experiencing with how you bring these elements together can make for really interesting creative work.

NEWSFLASH: Here is our final project!