Playing with the idea of split screens I wanted to look at other moving image texts that had used this technique to see what I could learn moving forward. I wanted to see how they combined elements and managed to balance them all to tell the narrative or idea. I did some research into these
When sound in the split-screen movie has been discussed, it is usually ascribed a somewhat monotone function and not following the multi strand approach of the visuals as this could be too confusing. For example, Urs Hofer, in a recent PhD on split-screen movies, claims it is a"maxim for many split-screen films is: multiple images – one soundtrack. While the ‘point of view’ is multi-perspectival, the ‘point of hearing’ remains a one-dimensional combination of the different diegetic sound sources, or moves completely to the non-diegetic"
This will not be an issue in my Amen Brother piece as there will only be one audio track so a split screen could work and communicate lots of ideas at once.
I looked at a variety of moving image clips from lots of movies to see what they all had in common.
Pillow Talk, Michael Gordon (1959) above uses a dynamic angles style to divide up the three elements of a shared phone line and love triangle. The shapes are great and the triangle is represented in the centre frame to almost illustrate this and there are 3 main areas of action/narrative happening.
The Thomas Crown Affair, Norman Jewison (1968), has a great variety of shapes and sizes and 6 areas of action and I really liked the layout and I can see something like this possibly working on my Amen piece. The action is like Pillow Talk all happening concurrently and it shines alight on the details of the events happening. Whilst there are 6 elements some are simply repeated though as there are 5 elements of horse-racing and the character watching on so really only 2 main elements represented.
Timecode by Mike Figgis (2000) is a very flat and uninteresting design but does have 4 elements that are all happening concurrently on the screen. However from watching the film I remember that only one or two were at any time active and the others were passive with not much going on. This drew focus to the main action happening and did not divert attention from it by the other 2-3 screens.
Scott Pilgrim, Edgar Wright (2010) does have an interesting design fanning out the 5 shots to create an interesting effect. BUT they are all the same CU and simply reaction shots all of exactly the same thing from the viewpoint of the characters reactions so there is not all that much to take in.
Moving forward this is what I have learnt and these are the points I want to pursue.
Not too many elements 2-3 ideally unless all of a very similar theme.
Design important. I loved the odd split screen of Thomas Crown affair and will develop this.
Sound works best when it is continual and not a mash up of the sound from all elements of the frame combined.
It may also be worth looking at magazine layouts and even graphic novels for ideas and to see if there is inspiration here in laying out lots of elements.
I have been focussing on the Amen Brother piece as my central focus for the unit and this is my primary objective for the mid January deadline and the piece that I will concentrate on.
As far as content, character and narrative for Anonymous goes I have been researching and looking for the right anonymous subject. I have been in touch with a few famed graffiti artist and one of these looks very possible. Also chasing up through a friend at Greenpeace a notorious direct action campaigner. Lastly someone I know who served time as an armed bank robber and is now out and successfully rebuilding his life. I will keep researching this and developing these contacts and see if there is a goer in amongst them.
However in the background I have been developing some stylistic ideas for the Anonymous idea. I have been looking into double exposure photos and live action double exposure also as techniques I could employ in the piece. I have also been researching animation styles and techniques and also playing around with roto-scoping. Currently this is just to increase my skill level but I did want to make sure that when the time came I have an appreciation of how these techniques work creatively so i can explore the possibilities. Alongside this I wanted to have a good degree of understanding of the technicalities of these areas to give me an appreciation of what is possible, best software and techniques. This would mean I entered into using them with a good degree of knowledge to make sure I maximised the potential of them and the processes as well as all important timescales that these will involve.
From investigating ways of interpreting music visually I decided I wanted to try the most obvious first and to visually animate the musical notes on a scale by changing their colour to link them to the drums and cymbals on the drum break. The purpose of this is two fold as mentioned in earlier posts. Firstly to provide some visual clues to what exactly the nature and purpose of the piece is. To put it simply visually show the drum beat (Amen break) happening to help the audience put two and two together and show that the drums in all of the tracks are actually the same. The second is to add some visual interest to the installation.
I chose to use the scales because they are an instantly recognisable symbol, associated with music and the audience even if they cannot read music are familiar with what they represent. I wanted to exploit these cultural symbols as not only would it help the reading of the piece but give it more credibility and cease it being just a piece of popular music but also elevate it towards art and validity. Also the colours, patterns or symbols would add an extra layer of interpretation to be processed in my opinion at this stage. By animating these notes on the scales and bars the audience would be able to see what is happening irrespective of their ability to read music. Audiences are familiar with the concept of changing colour to follow the music from such pop culture sources as karaoke and bouncing balls on the song lyrics or changes of colour to signify which]lyric is next to stay in time with the music.
Here is the completed animation for the Amen Break score.
The process to create the animation although not really complicated was time consuming as it meant using a couple of pieces of software I am not all that familiar with or comfortable using. Firstly it meant building all of the assets that I would need for the animation. I had researched and tracked down the musical score earlier so had this but needed to build all of the assets that I would need to animate them. I could have done all of this in photoshop but from research decided that Adobe After Effects would be easier and give me more control of the timings and animation. The process is outlined below.
In photoshop import and then cut out all of the different musical notes/symbols assets I would need on a transparent alpha channel. There were about 10-12 of these.
In Adobe Illustrator import in all of these musical notes/symbols assets and convert then into vector graphics rather than raster graphics. This would allow lossless and unpixelated re-scaling if needs be.
Also in Adobe Illustrator I constructed the musical sale lines once again as vector graphics.
Once all of these assets had been constructed they were imported in Adobe After Effects which is a motion graphics package. These were then scaled, copied and pasted and used to construct a replica of the original musical scales BUT every note was a separate layer and asset so that they could be animated.
The music was then imported and viewed as a wave form so timings could be given to animate the musical notes to.
It was then a process of changing the colours
My final thoughts are that it worked pretty well and did give a pretty good visualisation of the Amen break. It was a little flat, un-adveturous and could be more visual though. It is a little perfunctionary and more creativity and imagination may possibly strengthen but it is obvious and to the point and with the music does certainly create a visual interpretation linking to the drumming. Next time I would certainly make sure of the following though.
Bring in a longer stretched version of the music as it is only 6 seconds long. This meant animating to exactly when the drums/cymbals were nit was tricky. By stretching it to 12 seconds it would make the process easier and could then be sped up again afterwards to it's original length.
Some of the musical notes represented double drum hits or even many cymbal hits and my animation was only able to show this as one note and not reflect this. Next time I would break the double hit not into two parts to reflect this.
I looked into Nam June Paik's work earlier on this course for my installation research as he is is widely acknowledged as the father of video art. He was highly influential in smoothing its acceptance into the mainstream art-world and was one of the mainstays of the Fuxus art movement along with founder John Cage, Joseph Beuys and Yoko Ono. It was an interdisciplinary art movement encompassing a multitude of disciplnes and an anything goes DIY philosophy.
Nam June Paik 's work coined the term Video Art which was seen as part of the movement and sharing it's ideologies. Paik and his work was often viewed as an imposter in art galleries in its formative years but due to the often sculptural nature of his early work he helped to path the way by combining a sculptural structure to his work that made it more gallery friendly. He famously said that this newfound medium would “enable us to shape the TV screen canvas as precisely as Leonardo, as freely as Picasso, as colourfully as Renoir.”
Some of his work is exceptionally sculptural and playful and he used TV screens to build, musical instruments, animals and robots from re-appropriated TV sets and screens creating both a message through the sculptures and the screens used to construct them. Whilst I love this type of work it is possibly not a style that I am intending to use on my Amen piece which i see as an installation. However with the drumming theme it may be worth considering if it would be possible to build a drum kit out of TV screens to show the work drawing inspiration form to Cello below.
His work can be multiple screen installations and often uses TV screens to force home the idea of viewing. His huge scale works are really impressive using a great multitude of screens all working to create images independently and as a whole. I really love these large scale works but maybe they may be a little ambitious for my current first installation work but are definitely something I would like to work towards.
His work can be multiple screen installations and often uses TV screens to force home the idea of viewing. His huge scale works are really impressive using a great multitude of screens all working to create images independently and as a whole. I really love these large scale works but maybe they may be a little ambitious for my current first installation work but are definitely something I would like to work towards.
His themes and techniques are many and varied and often appropriates distorted mass media, including newsreel, concert footage, and commercials. Nam June Paik is happy to borrow and appropriate from mainstream culture as well as high art and his work never lacks impact, power or a sense of humour. All of these are attributes I would like to pursue in my own pieces be they the Amen one or Anonymous.
Whilst the above all contain areas I can borrow from the main area of his work that interested me on my Amen Break piece is his audio works drawing heavily on appropriated and manipulated video imagery. Below in Videofilm Concert (1965) he creates a commentary mixing a huge variety of clips exploring of the interfacing of film and video. They are marked by a playful, irreverent sense of improvisation and experimentation and are a direct media intervention. Paik appropriates, distorts, manipulates and juxtaposes footage from a multitude of TV and video sources from TV adverts to someone practicing Yoga to TV adverts to comment on popular culture. Use of appropriated and re-contextualised distorted voice overs complete the effect.
To quote from Electrical Arts Intermix website the work is "richly inventive and ironic, these experiments form a link between Paik's performance and sculptural works of the 1950s and early 1960s and the celebrated video works and installations of later years".
In the clip from Global Groove (1973) below Paik is creatign a forerunner to the nasty music videos that started to crop up in the late 70s early 80's. Distorted imagery of dancers seems very passe now but were pioneering for the time a bit like us watching The Matrix bullet time for the first time. The distortion often subtle, strobing of the footage and the techniques used really creating something that is very visually interesting even if it is lo-tech by our standards. The bleeding of colours almost to an electronic watercolour look but then pulled sharply back into grainy video I especially loved.
I have been inspired by a lot of Paik's work and aim to take forward and play with some of the ideas gleaned from both his AV collages and structural works into my own pieces. Below are thew key points for consideration.
Sculptural construction of drum kit (like cello) to show the clips of the artists. screens being bass, tom, toms, side drum, cymbals and high-hat?
Appropriation as Paik did this to great effect and this spurs me on with my appropriation considerations.
Use of colour and especially saturated TV colour to make images jump out of the screen at audiences.
Bizarre appropriated VO. can this be applied to my own work or even use a VO?
Abstract images created by effects alongside more identifiable images. Give a real texture and strong sense of visual style that I must consider.
Len Lye (1901–1980) created some work I was really inspired by and is a natural bedfellow with the works of Oskar Fischingher and John Whitney that I have previously mentioned. He did extensive work and pieces into movement, colour and the interplay of this with music which I found really inspiring and opened up the possibilities of different techniques with my Amen Brother piece. Below are some details of him followed by a couple of examples of his work and my thoughts and how they influenced me.
He "is arguably one of the twentieth century’s most original artists; a one-man art movement spanning several countries and multiple media over a lifetime and beyond. As a New Zealander practising in London during the pre-war years, and then a key figure in the post-war New York avant-garde art scene, Lye mapped a unique course through Modernism.
Lye spent his career pursuing an ‘art of movement’, a theory he initiated before he left Aotearoa New Zealand in 1924. He wanted to affect people physically and emotionally, so that art became a full body experience. Whether this was with flashing, dancing cinematography, or thunderous, oscillating metallic sculptures, his work stimulated the senses and was unforgettable.
He was a pioneer of experimental film and kinetic sculpture, and his practice included painting and poetry, among numerous other media. The intensity, energy and excitement of his work were matched by a gregarious and restless personality; British poet Alistair Reid once described him as ‘the least boring person who ever existed’."
Kaleidoscope (1935) above is a riot of colour, line, shape, movement and occasionally text. The pace and variety are really interesting especially the way the lines and shapes keep in time with the tempo of the sound but also the editing of this to changes in it to collide one style with something quite different to create visual phrases to match the aural and musical phrasing of the piece.
Colour Box (1935) which follows it is of a similar vein still relying on line but this time also working with objects such as abstract cut out fish shapes, human figures and sail boats as well as sea waves breaking film footage greatly coloured in the background. This mis-match of style creates the same sort of effect but also creates a theme and a greater sense of story and narrative rather than just the abstract lines and shapes.
Rainbow Dance (1936) moves the techniques above further on. He has action happening on different planes and also more human figures, moving, playing and even some that are filled in with colour and shape a little like the double exposure work I have been looking into. These move and dance on the screen often duplicated to almost create strobe like movement.There is mise-en-scene in the form of backgrounds such as stylised streets, mountains. There is a weird illogical narrative embedded characters rain, clouds, person with umbrella then consumed by lines and then recreated playing a guitar! A balletic tennis player and lots of balls flying around the screen. He also even re-uses some footage from Colour Box.
The ideas I will take most from his work are the use of colour, shape and line and the cutting to the music to make the visuals and the audio link and be intrinsic to each other. I also loved the idea of the basic double exposure type work where the inside silhouettes of the human figures were replaced by colour and shape and feel this could work well with my Amen Brother piece. Possibly the album covers or music videos of the bands who have used the drum sample within a silhouette of the drummer.
The "Big Crit" with my fellow students provided much for for thought. One of the areas that really came up was creating a more obvious and creative visual interpretation of the Amen Drum Break for the audience. This was to help the audience realise that the drum break on all of the music played was actually the same just appropriated and re-interpreted and contextualised. Secondary to this was to create a more visual aesthetic for the audience.
From my earlier research into the work of Oskar Fischinger other names cropped up also doing interesting things with creating visuals to represent music. The aim again is to create a contextual background to deepen my knowledge of practitioners, styles ands techniques. The aim is that I may be able to use directly or as draw upon as inspiration or the catalyst for my own visual interpretations of music for my Amen Brother piece.
John Whitney (1917–1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. His early works often in tandem with his brother John created their remarkable series of Film Exercises between 1943 and 1944. These films are visually based on modernist composition theory, the carefully varied permutations of form are manipulated with cut-out masks so that the image photographed is pure direct light shaped, rather than the light reflected from drawings as in traditional animation. the brothers wanted to move away from the symphonic music of Oskar Fischinger which they felt was somewhat old fashioned. Therefore the eerie, sensuous neon glow of these forms is paralleled by pioneer electronic music sound scores composed by the brothers using a pendulum device to write sounds directly on the film's soundtrack area, with precisely controlled calibrations. At that time, before the perfection of recording tape, these sounds - with exotic "pure" tone qualities, mathematically even chromatic glissandos and reverberating pulsations - were truly revolutionary and shocking. The brothers won a Grand Prize at the 1949 Brussels Experimental Film Competition for the Film Exercises.
The simplistic nature of the Five Film Exercises I like but the thing I have taken most from the piece is the use of colour. I researched and looked into colour psychology on my professional Practice module for the course and it may be worth revisiting this. also in a throwback to my research into the colour and shapes of Oskar Fischingers work it may be worth investigating the theory and psychology of shapes.
Below is John Whitney's demo reel of work created with his analog computer/film camera magic machine he built from a WWII anti-aircraft gun sight. Also Whitney and the techniques he developed with this machine were what inspired Douglas Trumbull (special fx wizard) to use the slit scan technique on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Yantra above by James Whitney (1957) is bizarre, abstract, yet beguiling and the link between the music and the visual interpretation of it works well. A commentator on Youtube sums it up well "This is the in-between area, where thoughts are not fully formed, yet are beginning, shapes are not fully developed, yet are growing, and life is not fully developed, yet is gestating....this is that visual "twilight zone" between being and becoming." I feel that this style may be a little too abstract for my own Amen Break piece but are certainly great brain food.The particle type nature I like but feel it may be not clear enough for my piece and the solid drum hits I need to reflect but it is worth investigating further.
During the 1950s Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 film Vertigo, which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass.
In 1960, he founded Motion Graphics Incorporated, which used a mechanical analogue computer of his own invention to create motion picture and television title sequences and commercials. The following year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his device, titled simply Catalog represented below. In 1966, IBM awarded John Whitney, Sr. its first artist-in-residence position. themes.
By the 1970s, Whitney had abandoned his analogue computer in favour of faster, digital processes. He taught the first computer graphics class at UCLA in 1972. The pinnacle of his digital films is his 1975 work Arabesque, characterized by psychedelic, blooming colour-forms. In 1969-70 he experimented with motion graphics computer programming at California Institute of Technology. His work during the 1980s and 1990s, benefited from faster computers and his invention of an audio-visual composition program called the Whitney-Reed RDTD (Radius-Differential Theta Differential). Works from this period such as Moondrum (1989–1995) used self-composed music and often explored mystical or Native-American
Both of the works above Catalog (1961) and Matrix III (1972) also give me plenty of inspiration moving forward. I reiterate again how the use of colour and shape are really exciting and the psychology behind these is certainly worth investigating. I also like the naiveness of the images and their simplicity and clarity. Obviously this is due to the technology available to Whitney at the time but it serves his subjects well and feel it would do the same in my work and overcomplicating the visuals is not needed here also. The use of technology I am also a little wary of as the sound of drums is perhaps the most primal of all musical sounds and using a very tech heavy visual production I am not too sure will sit all that well with the piece. However as I am writing this some of the music I will be using is of a more technological nature sampling, electronica, drum and bass etc so perhaps it could be one of a variety of visual representations and not just one. These would need to all have a similar form so as to do the job of visually interpreting the music to the audience continually though so be similar. However through clever use of colour, size and shape the old genre adage of "repetition but difference" may be applicable here.
Experimenting with appropriation I was interested to see that a Gee Vaucher introspective was opening at First Site in Colchester so went along to look at her work some of which used this. I first became aware of her work through it being used for album cover artwork for Tackhead's (1990) album "Friendly as a hand grenade". The image is a good representation of the political nature of a lot of her work which she used to communicate her own ideologies both locally and also on global issues. Unlike a lot of her work though it does not contain the familiar collage style.
Vaucher's work covered a multitude of disciplines but the areas that most interested me was her use of appropriation to communicate her ideals, philosophies and political agenda. She started work in fanzines with a satirical look at the issues that she saw around her in everyday life and these themes stayed with her throughout her career. These ranged from sexual politics to globalization and the environment to political hypocrisy. She started out as an illustrator and cartoonist but when she found this process too time consuming moved towards a more montage approach using images alongside her own illustrations to make her work and her point.
Whilst I found the majority of the exhibition really exciting and interesting these were the works I found most useful to help me better explore the notion of appropriation. Also to look for inspiration, ideas and styles that I may be able to incorporate into my own work.
A lot of the work that most interested me was her visual work with CRASS the punk band. With a strong political agenda and anti right wing politics it combines her intricate hand drawn work with and appropriated imagery. It also has a playful sense of fun unless you were on the wrong end of her work that is and Maggie thatcher was a popular target. Her work follows in the vein Peter Blake and his people collages and Jamie Reid and his punk aesthetic by quite often being an amalgamation of the two.
Whilst stylistically her work is not of a huge amount of use to me, some of her more graphical album artwork is certainly interesting and food for thought. Her use of multiple image images re-purposed (or appropriated) to communicate a message certainly is. Looking to the future and documentary work her work does set itself up well to be turned into Terry Gilliam cut out animations as some of it is practically freeze frame versions of this.
Also I was interested to discover that she did a lot of work with Crass on their music videos and on stage visuals that followed in a similar thread to her artwork. Often filmed directly from the TV the juxtapositions of images once again create a strong message of consumerism, dictatorship and right wing politics and war.
Below is the catalogue notes on the exhibition.
Introspective is Gee Vaucher’s first major institutional show in the UK, and spans the artist’s career of more than forty years. It charts Vaucher’s journey from local activity to international ambition, from domestic concerns to world politics, and from healing the planet to healing the mind. Including collage, photography, photomontage, painting, sculpture, film, performance, typography, sound and installation, the imagery she creates ranges from the absurd and often comical to the harrowing. Her message spans the political and the personal, the environmental and the humanitarian.
Originating from the counterculture of the 1960s’, the importance of Vaucher’s work within the historical context of collage and photomontage practices as critique of the status quo is undeniable. However it is yet to be fully recognised by the mainstream. This exhibition redresses this imbalance, and where better than in Essex where Vaucher has spent most of her life.
Known primarily for her work with anarcho-pacifist punk band Crass (1977-1984), Vaucher is a cult figure who commands a great deal of respect for her political activism, alternative way of life, and skill as an artist. Introspective presents never-before seen footage of early 1960s’ performances in Colchester with avant-garde group EXIT, which would go on to form Crass. As well as brand new photographic and sound pieces that reflect on the changing city-scape of New York, where she spent formative years in the late 1970’s working as a political illustrator for publications like The New York Times and New York Magazine.
The exhibition reveals original material that would become the iconic record covers of the 1980’s, and political posters which have influenced countless activist artists. From the political assault on the masses to the psychological assault on the individual, recent paintings and drawings emulate the dismembering and disfiguring technique of collage resulting in grotesque bodies and faceless individuals. Part-dog, part-baby sculptures laugh back at us in-amongst other works dedicated to animal rights.
Throughout her career, the book and its rudimentary template, the ‘zine’, have been defining formats for the outcomes of Vaucher’s various projects, providing her with the autonomy and control to produce and disseminate work through her own channels and on her own terms. From the DIY circulation of ‘International Anthem’ (1977 – 1983) to the most recent ‘A Week of Knots’ (2013 –) published through Vaucher’s own Exitstencil Press.
Following on from my "Big Crit" feedback and working on three screens I decided to look into the possibility of considering VR as a means of dissemination. This would make the experience very intimate and personal to the audience member and hugely different to my initial 3 screen idea but it is an idea I have been wanting to experiment with.
One usage of this technique was the VR experience that accompanied the excellent film "Notes on Blindness" 2016 by Peter Middleton and James Spinney . The film is based on academic John Hull’s diary about learning to accept blindness during the early 1980s, Notes on Blindness uses original audio recordings to attempt to visualise the sensation of losing sight. Hull, who kept a log of his emotional journey as his sight failed, eventually accepted his condition, describing himself as a “whole-body seer”. The film won at Sheffield Docfest in 1996.
The film is uses amazingly visuals and has incredible sound design to try and communicate Hull's amazing verbalizations of going blind. Actors play out scenes lip-synching to his words be they thoughtful descriptions of his failing eye-sight. Also audioscapes of when he used to leave microphones and tape recorders around his house in different rooms and environments as he tried to make sense of his impending sightless world aurally. The film actually comes with different soundtracks for the sighted and also the blind through different audio description options too.
To accompany the screening the directors also created a VR experience "Notes on Blindness: Into darkness" that you could use to try and get an impression of John Hull's re-interpretation of a world without sight. I experienced this as part of the Cambridge Film Festival where after the screening you could don a headset and headphones and get a feeling of John Hulls world. the experience as an audience was bewildering as you were in a very isolated experience and shut off from the outside world a very different environment from the busy cinema auditorium I had just emerged from. It helped in this sense to appreciate the isolation of an unfamiliar world. The experience then used Johns own audio as he tried to explain how he made sense of the world and the ever changing environments using just the audioscapes around him. Visually it built up almost echo sounder, audio inspired 3D fragments of light and shapes to create objects as the sound from them would have brought Johns senses to life to create his environment. The experience was pretty interactive and as the audience you followed the sound coming from all around to track down and also make sense of the environment you were in just as john would have done. Sound came from all around, the foreground, middle and background and sometimes moving between all three as it became yours and Johns focus.
Taking this idea forward into my own work I loved the idea of being immersed by sound and the sound design coming from all directions and alerting you to visuals and interest within the experience. The visuals represented in the experience would obviously not work for my Amen piece but the idea of background, middle-ground and fore-ground elements of visual and sound really fascinates me. also the VR ability to get the audience responding to the environment to build their own narrative. The notion of headphones and experiencing the piece as an individual and the way that a lot of music is consumed today through headphones greatly interested me. I need to look into the technology more and explore the potential and appropriateness for my work but feel it is an interesting avenue to pursue.
As I have mentioned earlier in the blog as part of the idea for anonymous piece working in reverse and creating work style first and then finding subjects to use with it I wanted to investigate ways of making them anonymous. The idea being that the subject is never actually revealed but their character, narrative and story is still able to. I thought the double exposure technique I had seen used in photographs was a really interesting one and wanted to explore this further as I felt stylistically, visually and conceptually it fitted with the mood tone and ideology I was wanting to communicate.
To this end after research and consideration I wanted to do a very basic test to check I could make the technique work and to progress my skills in After Effects. I found the excellent tutorial below and worked my way through it. the process that I followed is all in here so I will not bore you with it here.
Before I started work on the test I shot a few basic pieces of footage against the green screen at the college I work at. I have used green screen before so this was not an issue and as long as the green is well lit and the subject casts no shadows on to the background it is fairly easy. I filmed a few turning heads in a few different shot sizes. The finished experiment/test is below.
The process is a little complicated and involves a few processes in After Effects and as a test I feel it works. As well as the turning head I shot against the green screen I found some interesting paint in water footage online to use as the basic double exposure. I could have used anything but I felt that I wanted to try something that was a shot of colour and had an interesting texture and movement. I did not take the test as far as it could go and overlay the image of the face back over the top again at the end as I felt I had achieved my objective and had spent far too much time on it anyway but this would not have been too tricky to do. If I use the techniques then I will certainly do this stage though. I did toy with using a mid shot or medium long shot of the character for a while but felt that the technique works best over big expanses and went for the medium close up in the end. This is something to remember for when I really use the technique though. Also it was good to see it worked in real time as well as slow-mo in the True Detective title sequence. Overall pretty pleased and given the time a great technique to use.
I loved the idea of using the double exposure technique and as I mentioned earlier felt it would work well with the Anonymous documentary idea I was working on. It allowed faces to be obscured but in a really interesting and visual way and I felt sure that the technique could be applied to moving images as well as static photographic ones.
So after looking online and talking to some friends and colleagues a few pointed me towards the opening titles sequence of the US detective TV series True Detective. It followed that opening sequences with their often multi layers and filters may have used it so not being familiar with the series (I had it as an unopened box set at home) I sought it out.
The effect looked even better in my opinion in motion rather than the double exposure photographs. The title sequence added mystery, gravitas and movement and created a form of internal editing. The Soviet film-maker Sergei Eisenstein said of his theory of intellectual montage editing is "“an idea that derives from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another”. The interesting thing about the double exposure technique used above is that it is not creating this as Eisenstein intended by shots following one another BUT at the same time. This creates the same effect but the collision of images runs concurrently rather than consecutively.
Aesthetically the affect is really interesting too irregular shapes and compositions filled with intriguing textures and tones and these melting into one another. Also the mix of this with other images, shots of colour, layers moving through layers and fascinating abstract imagery created by the mix of the two. Images are double exposed over faces and people a lot but also inanimate objects, telephones, water towers Naked flesh is mixed with natural images of landscapes, trees and fire and sparks add a shot of red the colour of passion and danger.
The effect in the titles creates a slow-motion dreamlike quality the music images and mise-en-scene of the images used creating a dreamlike pace, but due to the images and their connotations a nightmarish sub-text as all of these together create meaning. An underbelly of society of crime, sex, exploitation, danger and death inhabited by hardboiled cops and a criminal element. The use of industrial buildings demonstrates elements of money and big business and religious imagery of crosses and churches and worship suggests corruption of power and religion. Due to the tone of the titles and indeed the excellent music by T Bone Burnett the whole overall effect is of a noir cop thriller which from research and asking around is the theme of the series.
As far as using this on my own work there is certainly huge potential and I can see it being a way to go. What will need testing is how well it works with realtime images as well as slow motion. The slow motion obviously works well but it does give it that dreamlike quality where I want possibly a more realistic as well as edgy quality to my anonymous pieces. It is very clear that simple bold images work best and animated stills can also work well. Tonally the look used in True Detective is muted and all similar with the odd shot of colour but it will be good to see if brighter images and more use of colour could work too.
Looking into how the technique is created I researched around as well as asking out in-college After Effects wizard Dean Lockwood where I work. As with most things these days there are some excellent tutorials for guidance when creating the look that I have looked over and it all seems very doable. It will require some green screen work and possibly any interviews I want to do being stages in a green screen. This is a technique I have used before and am happy using. It is then just a composition job in After Effects bolting everything together. I am not as confident in After Effects as in other packages but it is something I need to learn and this seems a good place to start. The tutorial for how to create the effect I have included below.
