Chronicle (2012)

Three high school students find a stone buried in a cave which activates a telekinesis power inside them. They explore an experiment with this power to become stronger. However Fatal decisions and events start to occur and they have to fight the dark possibilities of their power.

This image shows what they were able to accomplish when they first gained their power. They threw baseballs at each other and then they would stop it in mid air. The nosebleed from the character on the left is because he is trying to use his power too much for what he can possibly use. The trio came up with the idea that their power is cased by a muscle and when a muscle is used too much it bleeds. All the focus in the image is pointed towards the ball because both characters are looking at it and one is also pointing directly at it.

 This individual character has become very strong. He was showing off to his friends and was trying to play a prank on the actual owner of the car. When she got back she was very confused and suspected them of taking part in moving her car. Ater doing this his nose also bled.

Here they have used their powers to lift themselves into the sky and started playing American football. Using their power on the ball they can also throw really well even with the restriction of the clothes. Both characters are clearly in view and colours have been considered to make the main characters stand out against the background.

Zoetropes

William Horner is the original inventor of the zoetrope in 1834 however he called it a daedalum. This was then forgotten about for over 30 years until it was patented by M. Bradley in England and William Lincoln in America. It was Lincoln who renamed it to zoetrope.

Zoetropes are optical toys that use persistance of vision to create the illusion of motion from a set of still images. It consists of an open topped drum and was supported on a central axis. Slots of equal distances and size would be in the upper side of the drum. A sequence of images that progressed slowly would then be placed on the lower inside of the drum; underneath the slots. The drum is then spun and the illusion will appear through the slots. The faster the drum is spun the smoother the motion will be and the viewers can look into the drum from any position.

The most famous case of a Zoetrope was from Eadweard Muybridge. In 1878 Leland Stanford gave Muybridge the challenge of proving that a horse will have all four of its hooves off the ground at one point of it's running motion. They set up a whitewash shed with 12 bulky camera lenses pointing out of the side. A white backdrop was placed infront of the cameras in order to increase the contrast of the horse. A Prize horse was then sent down the track with a two wheeled carriage. When the horse came to the cameras; the carriages metal wheels completed an electrical circuit with the 12 wires that were placed across the track and triggered the shutter to each camera. At the time each camera was state of the art and created all 12 images in half a second. It took him 20 minutes to develop the pictures and then he displayed them for all the viewers at the event to see the results. This proved Stanford was right and it started the worlds investigation into how animals actually moved which showed posture errors in sculptures and paintings of the art world.

The images that he created could be placed in a Zoetrope and give the illusion of a running horse.

Star Wars and the Force

Star Wars is a movie franchise about a world far away where there is a constant battle between good and evil. The audience follows a particular family of the name Skywalker. There are physical and emotional battles within the main characters which causes them to make crucial decisions that decide there own fate and the peoples around them. This family are linked to both the light side and the dark side of the force otherwise known as the Jedi and the Sith. Both of these organisations use the force in different ways. The force is the energy field created by all living things and binds the whole universe together. The basic force is like telekinesis where you can move things around with your mind and access others minds and thoughts.

Here a Sith lord is using the force to choke and lift the hero. This is like moving objects with their minds. Looking at this frame I can see a line around the hero and a change in the quality. This shows that the hero has been cut from a separate clip and pasted onto this one.

The two heroes are using their force on themselves to help them when they jumped across  to the other platform. Without this help they never would have made it across. Looking at the image closer I can see that the two heroes have a very harsh edge as they start to jump and as they are flying through the air the edge of their bodies is extremely soft and show a lot of movement however the lightsabers are very solid and have a similar density to what they usually do. This shows how the characters have been placed on the image and the lightsabers have been reconstructed afterwards.

This is the animation  of Yoda that was made and used in Star Wars I, II, III. This image shows the body positioning of someone who uses the force in great extent at a very powerful level. It shows concentration and a strong posture of the body. These are certain characteristics that we could use in our stop motion film.

Stop Motion Animation

This is a cinematic process used to make static objects look as if they are moving. It is most commonly used in claymation like Wallace and Gromit. Lots of images are all taken after slight movement is made within the frame of the image and then placed on a time line with a specified duration of frames in a second. If this is used effectively it can make the impossible happen within the video.

However this can be very time consuming. For example the first Wallace and Gromit short film A Grand Day Out took 6 years to fully make.

In my group we discussed possible themes that we could explore. Since as I had already done some initial ideas I suggested linking it to Star Wars and use the 'force' to move things around in the frame. I think this would look very strange yet mystifying because the stop motion will make it look a little juddery yet its something that would never have been seen before by some people which makes it quite special. I think that this idea might be quite hard to produce because there will be flying and moving objects that will need to be controlled during the photo shoot. If there are flying object in the final video then we may have to throw things into the air and time the shutter perfectly multiple times to make it look smooth in the movie.

We then took out some equipment to try out some simple and basic techniques.

This blue section is where I was lifting my hand to signal the movement of the mug.














This purple area shows the mug moving across the frame into the palm of my hand.






















The green area is where where I lifted the mug up to my mouth to have a drink and put it back down on the table again.

















The rest of the images are where we tried to make my college lanyard move across the table and float up and over my head. However there is a couple of mistakes during this part.




This black area shows where we dropped the lanyard with the intention to reverse the order so that it looked like it was floating. However we forgot about this and made the initial movie without Changing the order it.


This red area is where the sun had gone behind a cloud and the camera wasn't ready to compensate for the change in lighting which has majorly effected the look of the movie.

The cloud had moved for the last three frames in the movie so there is a major change in exposure which makes it even worse.

The first 8 seconds of this movie look very effective because it is very smooth and flows well. However as soon as the frames where we dropped the lanyard came up it all went wrong. All the images in this movie lasted for 2 frames of the the 25f/s. We obviously took enough images for the first part however no where near enough for the lanyard section of the movie. This shows that in this part of the movie the images need to last for more frames and I need to consider the positioning of the frames. This will make the movie a lot smoother because each frame will flow onto the next and they wont judder around the screen into a blur.

I am going to edit all of the images in the red section and remake the movie with all the frames considered for the order in which I place them on the time line.

Remake

 I started off by uploading the frames I needed at the time in order to not get confused by which frames were where in the movie. By changing the duration of each frame before you put them on the time line means that you won't have to deal with moving them across when gaps are made. The frames dont move when the duration is changed on the time line so they leave gaps inbetween them.

 This screen shot shows how I have nested the movie into specific sections of movement. This keeps it easy to keep track of each section and allows me to move sections around easily if I need to.

 Over the time line there is a line thats half green and half red. The red shows that Premier Pro may struggle to play all the frames seemlessly however sometime this will not effect it's playback quality. It is only a precaution.

I have switched over to Photoshop so that I could edit the dark images so that it replicates the exposure of the originals.

Here I have finished the frames and nested all the sections.

I have added the audio and I am cutting it down to fit the length of the film.

When exporting the video you need to change the format to H.264 and then the preset to YouTube HD 1080p 25. This is what a lot of computer systems run at with videos.

Click on sequence 01 and you can change the name of the file.

It will then give you the expected completion time and save it to the selected destination.

This is a lot smoother and I have changed the duration of individual frames to give different effects. For example lifting my hand in the first second was at 2 frames and then the cup moving started at 5 frames and increased to 2 frames after going through 4 and 3 frames. this made it seem like the model was struggling at first and quickly gained his strength.

Rhett & Link

Rhett & Link class themselves as internetainers. They plan and produce short funny videos like music videos, sketches, vlogs and local commercials for YouTube. They have gained nearly 2 million subscribers and have posted 315 videos on their main channel as of 11th May 2014.

To make this video over 200 shirts were designed and printed and both characters had to change shirts over 100 times each. The video ran at 30fps and each image ran for 6 frames on average, at some parts it did run faster for the effect. It was directed and edited by Joe Penna and the animation and sound was by Billy Reid who also produced a behind the scenes video on his channel. Reid explained that as Penna was taking photos on the DSLR he was also taking images on his Mac which showed the duo where they were standing and their facial expressions in the previous frame. A live stream was overlaid on top of the previous image taken which made it easier to make smooth. This video is very effective because of the smoothness of the movements and imagination used to annoy each other with different antics. I think that the variating colours and individual designs on the shirts also keeps the audience very  focused because it is always changing with the different subjects on the shirts. The lighting is always consistant because it was shot indoors with artificial lighting.

I really like this piece of work because I have never seen anything like this. they have made it funny and worked with lots of different angle and ideas. They have used optical illusions which made using props easier and look like they were using and throwing them. It took them two days to produce and most of one was where Rhett used the fire extinguisher on Link; there was a lot of smoke and dust they had to clean up.

Stop motion group project proposal

For this part of the project I will create a stop motion film with two other students. We have discussed the theme; and agreed on fantasy. Primarily Star Wars and the force which is used in the movies. We will have to create a 15 second or longer stop motion film. 180 images will give us a safe amount of images to use in total for a 15 second film because a 24 frame per second film will have 360 stills. This means that on average each still will last 2 frames of the 24f/s. This could be very effective because it could make the film very smooth in the movement from one frame to the next. We will be using fast shutter speeds to stop any movement. This could be very problematic if we are working outside with variating light and will be difficult indoors because of the power of man made light. Fast continuous shutter may also be used to capture props falling; this would be used to make something float. I will be using my Nikon D610 camera and we will have to use a tripod so that the edges of the frame can be controlled and the characters within the film won't jumping around the frame uncontrollably. The whole film will be shot in colour and I am going to do some research into whether my camera can shoot at a 16:9 frame ratio. This will stop the black lines from appearing at the side of the movie and make them appear at the top and bottom instead.

The images we will take will be portraiture and still life. We will be using each other as the models. This will keep our ideas confined to us and be easier to produce the right images because we all understand what we want to achieve. The locations we use will be around our college however with all of our skills, knowledge and connections I think that we may able to go a little further than just around college. To complete these movies I will have to learn how to use Adobe Premier Pro better because I have only used it a small amount previously and not very well. Tutorials on how to use this software will be given by one of our technicians at our college and if I do need more information then I can also search YouTube for tutorials. I will also use the computers to document what I am doing by using screen shots.

Initial Ideas

I have decided that I am going to use the word heroes as my focus for this project. This means that I can link both factual and fictional stories. I can also explore real life stories and create the real life heroes into super humans. I feel that this is a very broad subject and will allow me to experiment with lots of physical and digital manipulation techniques.

Design Development cycle

The design development cycle is the method of developing a piece of work. First it starts with the idea, this could be based on a need or a want. Then you research others who have done similar things, this will develop your own ideas and influence you. You then start to take images. These images then need to be evaluated and if they aren't good enough then you need to reshoot these images or maybe go at it from a different angle in order to get it right. Evaluate them again and if they still aren't good enough then again reshoot but if they are correct then publish them online or display them.

Thaumatropes

One of the earliest and most popular is on of a bird on one side and an empty cage on the other. When spun it looks like the bird is in the cage. The GIF below is from the film Oz the Great and Powerful.

When creating my own I wanted to make it quite individual. I started searching keywords like 'amazing' and 'impressive' with thaumatropes and found this:

The artist who created this is called David 'Meggs' Hooke. His style is very graffiti based and a lot of his subjects are based on pop culture and fantasy creatures. For this piece he painted half of the skull on one side and the other half on the other. When the disk is spun it creates a whole one.

This really inspires me because I feel that I could use a skull with an image of a model so that when it is spun they would fuse into one and look similar to that of the front cover of the Final Destination DVD cases.















I first took an image of my friend and I found an image online of a skull by 'yungtyrant' on Wikia.

 To prepare the portrait I circle cropped the image.

 And deleted the unnecessary parts.

I then used a cooling filter to make the background whiter and equalize the colour tones on the models face.

I placed both the images on a word document and made sure that the eyes nose and mouth lined up.

After printing and cutting the portrait out I realised I had to line the skull in the same position that the face is. so I put the face behind the skull and placed them on a window so I could see through. I marked around the skull where the edge of the circle was and cut that out.

One of the images has to be upside down to the other so that that when it is spun horizontally they are the same way up. I finished by hole punching the pictures and a piece of card in the middle and tied on some string.

I feel that this works quite well, the skull is off by about 2mm but I dont think that this is very noticeable. I enjoyed making it and I found it quite easy. However I feel that it would work a lot better if the portrait was black and white and had a filter attached to make it look similar to the skull. This might make them blend together easier as it is spun.

Introduction

For this assignment I will study narration through images that could tell a story or document an event. To show time passing I could use multiple images, multiple exposures or even long exposures. Some of these are good for fraction of a second sequences and some are suited for images that are taken over days or even weeks. The story being told through the images can be fact or fiction and the set could be staged or actual documentation of the image subject.

First I will have to describe  and explain the design development cycle so that I can use it to improve my own work. Individually; I will have to produce a final image consisting of a minimum of 3 images that reflect a story through its sequence. Finally as part of a group I will create a stop motion film.