Well. To sum up today in a word, I'd probably choose "disaster".
To get my cinematography (shot on first year equipment, the Canon XL1) onto a PC, I needed a DV Deck.
And now we need to rent them out.
Having rented out the XL1 'til Monday and having a Panasonic 151 rented out from this afternoon until Thursday, I was unable to rent one, and ended up piggybacking my friend Scott's DV Deck rental, having it to myself for the last hour.
Cue a massive problem involving dodgy firewires, dodgy university Macs with Final Cut proclaiming that I couldn't use Scratch Disks, not allowing me to change them.... after a lenghtly bout of "Musical Chairs" in the Mac Lab, I had just over half an hour to get my footage onto a USB to bring home before landing Scott a fine.
After sitting through the capture process (finally working), I proceeded to render my 16 seconds of footage. Mac presets slapped it out at a whopping five gig.
So, I changed the converter settings to "MPEG 2" hoping it would provide (like After Effects, which I've been using for a couple of other projects, VMA and VidEd)
I expected at least a semi-decent render to MPEG-2 as a preset.
I was horribly wrong, the 16 seconds I rendered came out to a whopping 120MB, which, for MP2, you'd expect to be a high quality.
Instead, I now have 720x576, 4:3, disgustingly interlaced and horribly, horribly low quality footage.
I now cannot rent out a DV Deck before the hand in to recover the awful quality footage. Granted, the basics are there, but it looks hideous.
Onto the actual project itself, I realise now that without an actual narrative to be filmed, edited, that it's really rather hard to pull off what Alexander Kaidanovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky acheived in their cinematography. Mine appears, instead, to be just a bunch of establishing shots.
A couple, I could argue, resemble the cinematography occassionally employed by Terence Malick, or, to be more accurate, the indie and "amateur" style of cinematography employed by Laszlo Kovacs in Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider, optical flares from the sun, a focus on the natural, the beauty of the outdoors, living off the land, juxtaposed by the ugliness of the industrial, signified by the aging farming equipment I managed to capture.
Unfortunately, due to the freezing conditions and lack of a tripod for shooting, I ended up having to shoot by hand, resulting in a horribly jittery mess that looks more Blair Witch (read, f*cking dreadful) than soviet masterpiece.
So, I guess that through this, I have completely failed myself with a) my choice of shooting later in the year, when Shropshire had snow, and was -6 degrees c in the middle of the day while nursing a cold, my inexperience (coupled with my distaste) of Final Cut Pro, and my rush exporting it. As opposed to working on it as soon as possible, working with the preferred camera and being able to upload DIRECTLY TO MY OWN PC, where I could easily use Avid, as well as the Adobe Creative suite to my full potential.
I've truly shot myself in the foot this time, and regard this as a failed task.
To genuinely improve this task, I could have written a short script. Maybe not even a script, just a miniature narrative, use a couple of friends as actors and shoot that. That way, as with Kaidanovsky, my shots could have had at least a symbolic meaning, whereas my project clearly fails in this regard.
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Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Thursday, November 25, 2010
The Zombie Survival Guide
Finally completed the damn thing. This is my thirty second animation for Visual Media Applications. We had to pick a book to make an animation out of, so naturally, I chose the one with zombies in it.
Cue a Grindhouse-style, semi-"public service information broadcast"-style romp into how to survive a zombie apocalypse (or kill yourself in a very stupid way)
Thanks to Scott, Mike, Alex and Adam for letting me use their faces, voices, etc. And for letting me kill half of them.
Music: Manic Maverick - Field of the Damned (from youtube, "FreeSoundtracks")
Sounds from freesound.org and from the helpful folk at FPSBanana.
ENJOY.
Cue a Grindhouse-style, semi-"public service information broadcast"-style romp into how to survive a zombie apocalypse (or kill yourself in a very stupid way)
Thanks to Scott, Mike, Alex and Adam for letting me use their faces, voices, etc. And for letting me kill half of them.
Music: Manic Maverick - Field of the Damned (from youtube, "FreeSoundtracks")
Sounds from freesound.org and from the helpful folk at FPSBanana.
ENJOY.
The Zombie Survival Guide (VMA Assignment) from Rob Cox on Vimeo.
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Cinematography Blog - Tarkovsky
Having tremendous respect for his films such as Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker, I have chosen to follow the style of cinematography seen in Stalker, one of Tarkovsky's more philosophical films - a film revolving around the most simple of concepts, a journey. And for the most part, that is all it is. For the ill-educated, that is all this film is.
It was at college, while working on my coursework about this film that I heard it referred to as "just a really boring film about a journey". They wanted more "action". They wanted "things to happen."
The true beauty of the film is not the narrative, adapted from the short novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, "Roadside Picnic", but from Alexander Knyazhinsky's elegant cinematography.
Alexander Knyazhinsky's cinematography in this film includes long, slow takes as opposed to the traditional use of a much more rapid montage, in a brown monochrome. The fact most of these wide, desolate shots include the characters' dialogue provides a feel of distance, sadness. Post-apocalyptic imagery that still retains beauty.
For my Cinematography project, I intend to try and replicate the feeling of danger, of fear and respect for the environments shot in, as seen in Stalker.
For roughly the first half of the film, the urban environment that the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) lives in with his wife and disabled child is darkly lit, wet, drab - run down and decrepit. This whole section of the film is accompanied by a brown monochrome or sepia toning, indicative of the poverty, the lifestyle and political climate associated with the area surrounding the zone - miltaristic oppression, restricted travel (after all, it's an area of massive scientific/military interest, as well as being dangerous) and the Stalker makes a living off travelling (with those who have the money) to the centre of this zone.
After attracting military attention, barely escaping (a few minutes of fairly tense action, despite taking place over very few shots) the three men make their way into the zone by railroad, over a fantastic three minute scene, a journey shot unlike anything you'll see in cinema today, a slow, sombre transition from a to b as the camera follows their passage from urban, destroyed setting to the empty, alien rural zone, and from the darkness required for their infiltration, to light.
As soon as they've entered the zone, the visuals jump from monochromatic/sepia to full blown colour.
Granted, from the perspective of a film viewer in 2010, we've pretty much "seen everything" and a technique like this can seem "cheap" to some people, however, if you'd seen this type of filmmaking in the 1970's, it would definitely have been a treat.
Rather than there being any kind of visual threat on screen there is a lot of danger on a near psychological level the danger created through suspense, acting and cinematography - no visible dangers, just an air of unease, of fear. There are no visible dangers in the zone, hence how dangerous it is, you step foot in the wrong spot, and you fall victim to hideous gravitational anomalies. Yet, we're never really told this.
It's all achieved through fantastic cinematography, direction. The extreme lack of exposition leads to ambiguity as to the nature of The Zone.
The locations used within the film are beautiful, affecting the story brilliantly. Without these locations, the film would have been nowhere near as meaningful, as thought provoking as the film truly is. The fantastic location scouting did come at a cost, however, as the vicinity to a chemical plant is believed to have led to the director and some cast/crew's deaths in later years.
As a film that only includes 142 shots in just over 163 minutes (by comparison, the shower scene from Psycho is 3 minutes long and includes 50 cuts) the cinematography tells a lot more about the story than much of the dialogue, and a lot more is revealed through expressive acting, through cinematography, than it is through exposition. A perfect example of the film's visual storytelling is from the dream sequence, which, in one shot, pretty much sums up the past of the zone.
For my Cinematography project, I am aiming to try and recreate the visual style of Stalker over several shots, trying the slower style, and trying to create a short clip (roughly 2-5 minutes) that could possibly show a narrative, as Stalker does. This will mean I'll only be using around five shots, as the average shot within the film is one minute, the longest being four minutes as a continuous shot.
Updates to come.
It was at college, while working on my coursework about this film that I heard it referred to as "just a really boring film about a journey". They wanted more "action". They wanted "things to happen."
The true beauty of the film is not the narrative, adapted from the short novel by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, "Roadside Picnic", but from Alexander Knyazhinsky's elegant cinematography.
Alexander Knyazhinsky's cinematography in this film includes long, slow takes as opposed to the traditional use of a much more rapid montage, in a brown monochrome. The fact most of these wide, desolate shots include the characters' dialogue provides a feel of distance, sadness. Post-apocalyptic imagery that still retains beauty.
For my Cinematography project, I intend to try and replicate the feeling of danger, of fear and respect for the environments shot in, as seen in Stalker.
For roughly the first half of the film, the urban environment that the Stalker (Alexander Kaidanovsky) lives in with his wife and disabled child is darkly lit, wet, drab - run down and decrepit. This whole section of the film is accompanied by a brown monochrome or sepia toning, indicative of the poverty, the lifestyle and political climate associated with the area surrounding the zone - miltaristic oppression, restricted travel (after all, it's an area of massive scientific/military interest, as well as being dangerous) and the Stalker makes a living off travelling (with those who have the money) to the centre of this zone.
After attracting military attention, barely escaping (a few minutes of fairly tense action, despite taking place over very few shots) the three men make their way into the zone by railroad, over a fantastic three minute scene, a journey shot unlike anything you'll see in cinema today, a slow, sombre transition from a to b as the camera follows their passage from urban, destroyed setting to the empty, alien rural zone, and from the darkness required for their infiltration, to light.
As soon as they've entered the zone, the visuals jump from monochromatic/sepia to full blown colour.
Granted, from the perspective of a film viewer in 2010, we've pretty much "seen everything" and a technique like this can seem "cheap" to some people, however, if you'd seen this type of filmmaking in the 1970's, it would definitely have been a treat.
Rather than there being any kind of visual threat on screen there is a lot of danger on a near psychological level the danger created through suspense, acting and cinematography - no visible dangers, just an air of unease, of fear. There are no visible dangers in the zone, hence how dangerous it is, you step foot in the wrong spot, and you fall victim to hideous gravitational anomalies. Yet, we're never really told this.
It's all achieved through fantastic cinematography, direction. The extreme lack of exposition leads to ambiguity as to the nature of The Zone.
The locations used within the film are beautiful, affecting the story brilliantly. Without these locations, the film would have been nowhere near as meaningful, as thought provoking as the film truly is. The fantastic location scouting did come at a cost, however, as the vicinity to a chemical plant is believed to have led to the director and some cast/crew's deaths in later years.
As a film that only includes 142 shots in just over 163 minutes (by comparison, the shower scene from Psycho is 3 minutes long and includes 50 cuts) the cinematography tells a lot more about the story than much of the dialogue, and a lot more is revealed through expressive acting, through cinematography, than it is through exposition. A perfect example of the film's visual storytelling is from the dream sequence, which, in one shot, pretty much sums up the past of the zone.
For my Cinematography project, I am aiming to try and recreate the visual style of Stalker over several shots, trying the slower style, and trying to create a short clip (roughly 2-5 minutes) that could possibly show a narrative, as Stalker does. This will mean I'll only be using around five shots, as the average shot within the film is one minute, the longest being four minutes as a continuous shot.
Updates to come.
Filmy Ramblings
The views expressed in the Free Cinema manifesto (Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson) contained the ideas I most believe in, in approach to film making. We looked at this manifesto within a Film Tech tutorial; it states:
No film can be too personal
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant, perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style, a style means an attitude.
I agreed with this completely. Possibly spurred by my respect for Lindsay Anderson (if.... being one of favourite films of all time) but more to the point that it was, nay, is relevant. There were other manifestos by auteur's such as Werner Herzog, but I believed that the free cinema manifesto applied to the world of film making today more than ever before. The original article written in the mid-50s as cinema began to take on a change of it's own, many 60's films (like independent cinema today) focusing on creativity, youth, challenging the establishment & discrimination, be social class, race or sexuality, personal freedom...
Today anyone can pick up a camera and technically, anyone could make an independent, if not artistic film. As a film student, I lean more towards "Free Cinema", anyway. Most films created by the students here also tend to be of a "free" nature, 'free' in the sense that they are made outside the confines of the film industry and are not set by the traditional confines of professional/mainstream filmmaking. The same way we make films here, is the same way that Anderson, Mazzetti, Richardson and Reisz made their "Sequence" films.
Their films were made for no more than a few hundred pounds, mostly with grants from the British Film Institute's experimental film fund. Our films, mirroring this somewhat, are made for sweet bugger all on grants from the Student Loan Company, often produced in limited, small time frames. The only problem stopping our work being a perfect example of Free Cinema being deadlines, which oppose the core principles of Free Cinema, however me whining about the education system is far from likely to win me any marks... but I digress.
Anderson et al's films were all typically shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, hand-held cameras, usually with a non-synchronised soundtrack added separately. Again, many parallels to the way we film students have been working at university and in some cases, college beforehand. Having gone through Film Studies at Sixth Form, I had emerged respecting independent cinema. The artistic. The freelance. Mostly a love of British Cinema from the 1960s onwards.
No film can be too personal
The image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size is irrelevant, perfection is not an aim.
An attitude means a style, a style means an attitude.
I agreed with this completely. Possibly spurred by my respect for Lindsay Anderson (if.... being one of favourite films of all time) but more to the point that it was, nay, is relevant. There were other manifestos by auteur's such as Werner Herzog, but I believed that the free cinema manifesto applied to the world of film making today more than ever before. The original article written in the mid-50s as cinema began to take on a change of it's own, many 60's films (like independent cinema today) focusing on creativity, youth, challenging the establishment & discrimination, be social class, race or sexuality, personal freedom...
Today anyone can pick up a camera and technically, anyone could make an independent, if not artistic film. As a film student, I lean more towards "Free Cinema", anyway. Most films created by the students here also tend to be of a "free" nature, 'free' in the sense that they are made outside the confines of the film industry and are not set by the traditional confines of professional/mainstream filmmaking. The same way we make films here, is the same way that Anderson, Mazzetti, Richardson and Reisz made their "Sequence" films.
Their films were made for no more than a few hundred pounds, mostly with grants from the British Film Institute's experimental film fund. Our films, mirroring this somewhat, are made for sweet bugger all on grants from the Student Loan Company, often produced in limited, small time frames. The only problem stopping our work being a perfect example of Free Cinema being deadlines, which oppose the core principles of Free Cinema, however me whining about the education system is far from likely to win me any marks... but I digress.
Anderson et al's films were all typically shot in black and white on 16mm film, using lightweight, hand-held cameras, usually with a non-synchronised soundtrack added separately. Again, many parallels to the way we film students have been working at university and in some cases, college beforehand. Having gone through Film Studies at Sixth Form, I had emerged respecting independent cinema. The artistic. The freelance. Mostly a love of British Cinema from the 1960s onwards.
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