Starting Up
So this is the beginning of my online notebook, just as this is an experimental self directed work block I have decided to do something different. Something i have a big interest in and is relevant at this moment in time to the constantly expanding world of new media. The bonuses it brings are almost limitless. It brings in the possibility of directly linking to other appropriate sites for your work and research, inserting clearer pictures and videos, no risk of misplacing or loosing notes, and also as an added plus it gives other people in similar situations the oppertunity to read the processes you are going through, your ideas and how you problem solve. Just an experiment, i'll see how it works out.Head-Wrecker
Its been a frustrating few days for me trying to pin down what im going to do for this project. Im feeling like im stuck in limbo after the exhibition. I just didn't get as much out of the work i produced as i thought i would. On reflection it just didn't feel relevant anymore, i mean i obviously have a big interest in the material and some of the artists that inspired the work such as Michael Warren and David Nash. But the work i was inspired by was being made in the early eighties. Hence my questions about the relevance of my own work. So i don't know where to go from here... possibly video. Me and Ethna still have tocuss what kind of collaboration we are going to do so i think we have good possibilites of a collaborative video piece. Im currently stuck.
Brainstorming
Okay i have a few possible ideas of where im going to direct my work for this project. Me and Ethna have had our first discussion about our collaboration and we have, as anticipated, decided to work with video, but we are doing video like we never have before. Were going to combine our skills of making, sound, humor and whatever else along the way to make an experimental piece about the infamous Daniel Figgis. The basic storyboard so far is our trip down to Whites Hotel Spa. Possibly done through animation or puppets, we have not decided that yet. Also Ethna has decided she wants to work with sound in some way so we will hopefully be producing our own sound for the video. But that is as far as we have got on this specific project so far.
Okay i have a few possible ideas of where im going to direct my work for this project. Me and Ethna have had our first discussion about our collaboration and we have, as anticipated, decided to work with video, but we are doing video like we never have before. Were going to combine our skills of making, sound, humor and whatever else along the way to make an experimental piece about the infamous Daniel Figgis. The basic storyboard so far is our trip down to Whites Hotel Spa. Possibly done through animation or puppets, we have not decided that yet. Also Ethna has decided she wants to work with sound in some way so we will hopefully be producing our own sound for the video. But that is as far as we have got on this specific project so far.
Orla's Collective text and Voiceover class
Today we had a tutorial with Orla Barry on Collective text and voiceover in video. This was a very interesting class for me as far as inspiration for my next piece of work. She shows us how successfull voiceover could be when used the right way such as Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver, Casino and Goodfellas (Martin Scorsese). Or Kevin Spacey in American Beauty. So finally the gears of motion are beginning to turn and my brain is stating to come unstuck. The piece might and might not work but i suppose that's the whole point of experiments.
American Beauty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYrgHju3d-E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYrgHju3d-E
Voice Over
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/staff_top_10/top-ten-uses-of-voice-over-on-film.htm'God help you if you use voice-over in your work, my friends. God help you! That's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character.” So says writing guru Robert McKee (as played by Brian Cox) in Adaptation, and more often than not, he’s probably correct. When executed just right, however, voice-over can work real wonders, not only in the service of advancing a film’s narrative or spelling out a character’s feelings, but also as a means of creating distance to interpret what’s on screen, with the narrator, in a sense, a surrogate audience member. Below are ten such exemplary cases.
10. The Stars Are Beautiful (1974)
Most of Stan Brakhage’s films are silent. This eighteen-a-half-minute effort, included on Criterion’s excellent two-disc “By Brakhage” set, is a rare exception. Brakhage’s oral meanderings may sound a bit curious, to say the least, especially paired with images of children clipping a chicken’s wings. Take a peak at the liner notes, however, where Brakhage expert Fred Camper explains: “…this grew out of a verbal game that Stan and Jane [Brakhage’s first wife] used to play, in which Stan would write down answers to the query, ‘Tell me what is in the sky,’ and they would discuss his answers together.” Interesting stuff, at any rate.
09. Sunset Boulevard (1950)
William Holden’s cynical, beyond-the-grave narration is an essential ingredient in Billy Wilder’s classic, establishing the film’s fatalistic tone from the get-go. In view of structurally similar subsequent endeavors (for example, Kevin Spacey’s cringe-worthy work in American Beauty), Wilder’s film only looks better, for never allowing its narrative conceit to devolve into a heavy-handed gimmick.
08. The Piano (1993)
We only hear Holly Hunter’s affected Scottish accent twice during the course of Jane Campion’s film—at the beginning and at the end, both times as voice-over. Her character, Ada, is mute, as she explains in the opening segment: “The voice you hear is not my speaking voice—but my mind's voice.” The epilogue is down-right haunting, concluding with a recitation from 19th century British poet Thomas Hood’s “Silence” over a shot of Ada’s beloved titular instrument, sunk to the bottom of the sea.
07. Fallen Angels (1995)
Wong Kar-wai is current cinema’s equivalent to baseball’s “five-tool” player. He composes exquisite shots; masterfully directs actors; possesses an uncanny knack for narrative rhythm; knows exactly how (and when) to use music to compliment (and comment on) his images; and employs voice-over more effectively than just about any of his contemporaries. This masterpiece features perhaps Wong’s finest work to date in the latter area. Its final scene is particularly golden, with Michele Reis hitching a ride on the back of her beau’s bike as she confesses: “…the road home isn’t very long, but at this moment, I’m feeling such lovely warmth.” Self-admittedly ephemeral--and swoon-inducingly romantic.
06. The Magnificent Ambersons (1942)
In contrast with his flashy star turn in his Greatest-Movie-Ever-Made(-It’s-Official!) directorial debut, Orson Welles never appears on screen in his second feature, though his tremendous presence can be discerned in every frame. This is partly because his adaptation of Booth Tarkington’s novel about a wealthy Midwestern family’s (and, implicitly, America’s) fall from grace is the most personal statement Welles ever put to celluloid, and partly due to his warm, witty baritone gracing the soundtrack as our humble narrator.
05. Diary of a Country Priest (1951)
As with nearly every aspect of his aesthetic, Robert Bresson’s use of voice-over stands decidedly apart from the rest of the pack, despite leagues of art-house imitators copping his style. Susan Sontag dubbed Bresson’s method “doubling,” in that bits of narration seem to simply mimic what’s occurring onscreen. In Bresson’s version of Georges Bernanos’s novel, Claude Laydu’s priest reads passages from his journal that seem to match his on-screen actions, a technique which may well appear odd or even superfluous to the uninitiated viewer. It’s through such quotidian repetition, however, that we progressively come to recognize the priest’s spiritual distress.
04. Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988-98)
For Godard-haters, this eight-part, four-and-a-half-hour video work would undoubtedly prove nothing short of unendurable, but for admirers, it’s the crowning achievement of his underappreciated late period, if not of his entire, turbulent career. Over film clips and archival footage, Godard ruminates on the symbiotic, often problematic relationship between cinema and 20th Century history. (A note of honorable mention here goes to Martin Scorsese’s My Voyage to Italy. Taxi Driver and GoodFellas both contain far more famous examples of voice-over, but, for my money, I’ll take Scorsese’s poignant reflections on Italian cinema over either.)
03. Badlands (1973)
In Terrence Malick’s first feature, Sissy Spacek is cast as the Caril Fugate to Martin Sheen’s Charles Starkweather, but Natural Born Killers this most certainly is not. One major element that separates this from virtually every other on-the-lam flick is Spacek’s narration, by turns, precocious and eerily dispassionate.
02. The Thin Red Line (1998)
As a die-hard Joyce fan, I typically shudder when people casually describe things as “Joycean,” but I’ll make a glad exception for Malick’s ethereal adaptation of James Jones’s not-very-Joyce-like-at-all World War II novel. To complain that it’s bad poetry is like quibbling over the grammar in the Penelope monologue.
01. Days of Heaven (1978)
No one does voice-over better than Malick. I guess you could argue that anointing his only three features (his fourth, The New World, is finally due out later this year) atop this list is some form of overkill, but I’d instead call it justice served. His second movie gets the edge, in my book, with child-actor Linda Manz’s observations of life on a turn-of-the-century Texas farm layered over Ennio Morricone’s lush musical theme and some of the most breathtakingly beautiful images ever captured on film. If Malick’s depiction of the story’s love-triangle doesn’t seem to work quite the way it should, it’s because we’re watching it play out through Manz’s character’s young, only passively interested eyes. She’s more fascinated by bugs and mud and the way the wind blows through the wheat fields than by the actions of the adults around her. Thanks to Malick’s singularly masterful approach, we are, too.
Ideas for my solo video piece
I have started getting some ideas down on my next piece of video, i drew a rough storyboard of how i wanted to encorporate voice over to video. So first of all i want to experiment with how i actually film the footage, i want to use new experimental shots that i havn't used before, i know the mojority of the shots probably won't work but im going to try them regardless.
So to try and connect with my graffiti again my idea for the storyboard so far is to create a comedic narritive of a typical day in the life of a graffiti artist with a little twist at the end. So at the beginning of the film i want to open with a shot of the characters feet coming in from above the camera, so it will probably be left on the ground, then have the character walk slowly out of shot, then i want to film a shot from behind the character with just the back and the back of the head in shot as the person is walking, i think i want a hoodie to be worn and pulled up to conceal their identity to a certain extent. Possibly another shot of the hand close up either just fidgeting or clenching a fist. Then a shot from the front on a tripod of the character walking towards the camera with their head down until they walk off shot.
Then i want the character to come to a wall, down a lane and begin to spray (i will seek permission from the council). Then hopefully with the help of some accomadating gardai i want a chase to occur, with a few close ups of the character and freeze frames as a voice continues to speak, still don't know what text to use.
Finally i want the character to arrive home after running for a durational period, another experiment how to film a running sequence successfully, then hopping in the shower getting changed and ready for work, and the final shot of the main character arriving at work, which is the garda station.
Possible name: 'The Insider'
List of shots: Ground on foot shot
Walking back to head shot
Fist clenching shot
Front shot-walking off screen
Chase/Running sequence
Progress on the Collaboration
Ive started on the design of the puppets (so we decided on puppets), going to make them punch and judy style, With a moveable mouth for Figgis. Ethna is beginning to draw the backrounds for the trip to Whites, and playing with some sound.
I have started getting some ideas down on my next piece of video, i drew a rough storyboard of how i wanted to encorporate voice over to video. So first of all i want to experiment with how i actually film the footage, i want to use new experimental shots that i havn't used before, i know the mojority of the shots probably won't work but im going to try them regardless.
So to try and connect with my graffiti again my idea for the storyboard so far is to create a comedic narritive of a typical day in the life of a graffiti artist with a little twist at the end. So at the beginning of the film i want to open with a shot of the characters feet coming in from above the camera, so it will probably be left on the ground, then have the character walk slowly out of shot, then i want to film a shot from behind the character with just the back and the back of the head in shot as the person is walking, i think i want a hoodie to be worn and pulled up to conceal their identity to a certain extent. Possibly another shot of the hand close up either just fidgeting or clenching a fist. Then a shot from the front on a tripod of the character walking towards the camera with their head down until they walk off shot.
Then i want the character to come to a wall, down a lane and begin to spray (i will seek permission from the council). Then hopefully with the help of some accomadating gardai i want a chase to occur, with a few close ups of the character and freeze frames as a voice continues to speak, still don't know what text to use.
Finally i want the character to arrive home after running for a durational period, another experiment how to film a running sequence successfully, then hopping in the shower getting changed and ready for work, and the final shot of the main character arriving at work, which is the garda station.
Possible name: 'The Insider'
List of shots: Ground on foot shot
Walking back to head shot
Fist clenching shot
Front shot-walking off screen
Chase/Running sequence
Progress on the Collaboration
Ive started on the design of the puppets (so we decided on puppets), going to make them punch and judy style, With a moveable mouth for Figgis. Ethna is beginning to draw the backrounds for the trip to Whites, and playing with some sound.
Trip to Dublin
This week we went to Dublin to see a few exhibitions, it had been a while since i had been to Dublin to see an exhibition so i was not expecting to see anything that could potentially influence my future work, but thankfully i did.
Well firstly we started at the Hugh Lane gallery for the expanded exhibition on the life and work of Francis Bacon. It featured the usual Francis Bacon section and some very interesting pieces i had never seen before. Such as the photography of Reece Mews and Eadweard Muybridge and John Deakin as well as some of Bacon's slashed canvases and finished pieces. A good collection of work for the observer.
Next we visited Jaki Irvine's 'City of Women' in the LAB and 'A Harlot's Progress' a series of prints by William Hogarth 1732 on the First floor Galleries, the pieces were connected as Jaki Irvine had been invited by the LAB to make a piece inspired by the prints and that is how 'City of Women' came about. I have to be brutally honest and say that the video piece didn't particularly effect me as much as it was supposed to. I dont know if it was the way it was filmed or the fact that Irvine was working with a community of people that were not used to doing this kind of thing and obviously so. After i was told that they piece was about prostitutes and how Foley St. used to be their stomping grounds, and this was the artist's response to the harlot's progress, i understood the piece. But i would prefer if the video piece was strong enough to stand alone because initially i though it was about a group of gay women coming together.
Our next stop was an exhibition at the Project Arts Centre, under the name of 'Aion Experiments'. This was a very interesting exhibition, it was something i had never seen before. The pieces on show were as follows:
A sculpture piece by Ciaran Walsh, it was a tall piece, scientific looking so i couldn't fully evaluate the piece as i have the feeling that it was supposed to do something as was Ulf Rullof's 'Stretchers' a sculpture and light piece, but unfortunatly we didn't get to see the light cycle. There was a fantastic Ethna-esque video piece by artist Takeshi Murata, very Beatles/70's ish. Then there was my favorite piece in the show a sculpture piece titled 'Sacrilegus Totem' by Sam Keogh. The piece itself was very crystal like, like a piece of cryptonite you would see in Superman or something, but this is what made the piece so strong is that is physically looks nothing like the materials from which it was made which included Acrylic Medium, bambo, card, Earth, glitter, oil, paraffin wax, polystyrene, polythene, perspex, tape, tinfoil, cardboard, wax, papier-mache, MDF, tinfoil and soil. A really interesting piece.
Our final stop and most benifitial for me was at the RHA where i was introduced to the work of Nevan LeHart. An absolutely fantastic installation of a variety of pieces. Including a cardboard and found objects hearse, a cardboard horse, possible hit by the hearse and some obviously critical cracks at the church.
My reason for liking his work so much is that they explore different aspects of humour from light hearted to some obviously dark humour. I love the way his installations can give some much possibilities of interaction a reaction in the viewer, something i will definatly explore in the near future.
Taken from the Irish Times-Written by Aiden Dunne
''They’ve also included documentation of some of the games or practical jokes once typical of Irish wakes, from the National Folklore Collection, and examples of the Skellig Lists, published sheets of scandalous rhymes about the antics of young people of marriageable age. The result is a hybrid exhibition, often didactic in tone and not, despite the subject matter, a barrel of laughs.
That’s not because, as countless academic conferences have demonstrated over the years, there’s nothing funny about humour out of context. It’s more to do with the show’s focus on the inherent cruelty of humour. Freud set the tone when he linked jokes to unconscious agendas, arguing that they mask various kinds of aggression and hostility, and often don’t much bother with the mask.
Hence the wake games, presumably facilitated by copious amounts of alcohol, which fostered group identity and cohesion by the time-honoured method of picking on a chosen victim – although the victim could be capable of turning the tables, as one example in the show suggests.
One of the first pieces you encounter in the gallery is Nevan Lahart’s ramshackle hearse, a hearse that looks as if its been involved in a Hollywood-style car chase entailing multiple collisions.
The gallows humour involved in the jarring disparity between funereal solemnity and knockabout farce is characteristic of a whole subsection of the exhibition. Death and humour go hand in hand. Take the dying words attributed to the actor Sir Donald Wolfit (among others). When asked by a concerned relative if it was hard to die, he replied: “Dying is easy, comedy is hard.”
Overall a very benifitial trip.
Getting back to Work
The last few days ive been really trying to pin down what type of text to use for my voiceover. I want to use something that will stir the viewer, be unrelated at far as narration goes, but some time in the text i want it to become relevant. Still in limbo but i had a good talk with Orla about the piece when we were in Dublin, she suggested staying away from being too literal, and also i have made a few decisions myself as far as the actual content of the video, ive decided not to approach it from a comical side. Because i feel that by doing this i will subconciously create some kind of narrative and do totally the opposite of what i intend which is experiment with new shots and try and use voiceover. Im going to have to make a decision soon because time is really running out now.
Also good progress with the collaborative piece with Ethna, Puppets alsmost finished and we basically have our storyboard down.
Possible Names: An evening with the Fig
Shut the Fig Up
Fig Roll/Fig Rolled
Shot list: Walking to Whites
Close up of 'Daniel' yapping
Whites hotel shots super imposed beneth the puppets
My shirt being ripped off
Us leaving as we are asked to have drinks
Some Inspiration for my video
Julien Donkey-Boy is an avant-garde 1999 independent American drama film directed by Harmony Korine. The screenplay concentrates on the schizophrenic Julien, played by Scottish actor Ewen Bremner, and his dysfunctional family. The film also stars Chloë Sevigny as Julien's sister, Pearl, and Werner Herzog as his father. Julien Donkey-Boy is the sixth film to be made under the self-imposed rules of the "Dogme 95" manifesto, and the first non-European film to be made under the Dogme 95 "vow of chastity".
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999, and received a limited release in Los Angeles at a single cinema on October 15, 1999; the film showed for a month's time at the Los Angeles theater, and grossed a total of $80,226 by that November. It was, however, given a wide theatrical release in European countries the following year, particularly in France and the Netherlands.
After Orla suggested that i watch this film i was inspired by how some of the scenes were shot such as the free hand shot focusing on Juliens chin as he walks. It just gave me a starting point on how i could possibly film some of my work.
Some work by Tatzu Nishi http://www.tatzunishi.net/
Panic and Decision making
This week has been both really stressfull and really benifitial. I think that when someone is truly under pressure they are forced to make executive decisions, no more waffling around or feeling sorry for yourself, you just have to get down to it and finish or start at the case may be, the work you need.
I have finally chosen a piece of text which i think is strong enough to be used in the piece, its an abstract and an obviously dark way of portraying self expression. It is a piece of text taken from 'Banksys wall and Piece' which is an extract from the Journal of Lt. Col. Mervin Willett Gonin.
An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. Source: Imperial War museum. Cited at Banksy.
I have asked Ethna to be the voice over and she has agreed. I was in a split mind weather or not to use a womens voice as the extract is taken from a man's diary. But after my tutorial with Orla she reassured me that it did not make a difference weather it was a man or a woman, just that the way the text was spoken, slow, fast, calm or panic stricken, so i have asked Ethna to try a few different ways and then i would have the choice between them depending on how the shots are going to be put together.I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
Me and Ethna have decided to film our collaborative piece in the next day or so. Ethna has to do a few finishing touchs on her backround and im in the process of making new puppets which should be finished tomorrow, as by dad threw out the unfinished puppets i had left in the shed during the big clean up. So itys gone from punch and judy to sock puppets, yet another adaption. Im making Daniel with a moving mouth piece, me with a removable top, ilva with a bandana and colette with head of curls. We also have some sound to finish. I have asked Gareth to be in my own video with the voiceover and we have agreed to do it next wednesday.
Fig Roll
Finished the collaborative piece with Ethna and it has turned into a completly different project than we had intended. We filmed our storyboard a few days ago. And in the process of editing we decided that the process and outtakes were much more interesting than trying to force a narritive that wasn't particularly interesting to begin with. So we obviously still edited out thein appropriate pieces and constructed a 10 minute diary of our work, hilarious and far more interesting. You can hear the discussion that me and Ethna are having for the duration of the film, the interaction between us as she directs me where to place the puppets and when. You can see the mistakes we made and how we fixed them, and in general how we worked well together to promblem solve. Somthing which i had anticipated to be far easier to film had great potential to be the most stressful part of this project block.
But without any hesitation i would definatly do it all again, and definatly with Ethna, A great addition to any collaborative team.
Filming With Gareth
Today was a frustrating one for me, the first time ever that i wished i could be two people, the director and the actor. We met in college around half two and had a brief discussion about what type of shots we needed to get while we were out. We needed a lot of in and out shots where Gareth would run in and out of frame, walk in and out of frame, walk from above the camera, fidget wuth his hands. walk in front of the camera, Hide and squat, A really good set of ideas... none of which turned out to be useable. I appreciated all of the help which Gareth gave me and the time he gave but when i finally got back to the college to edit i realised that he kept looking at the camera, he wasn't running fast enough or something else that just didn't work. So on that frustrating note i have to go out and film again tomorrow with myself as the character, so i need someone to film me, i now realise why people hire actors, you can be as strict as you like to get the shots you want with out worrying if you have offened anyone.
