Assignment
Project 3
Exquisite Dreaming:
(Multiple Points of View/Perspectives):
expanded the collaboration from 2 students to 3 or 4 for a collage video dream––a non-narrative experience.
Process, goal, content and style were determined by each group.
Multiple perspectives from literal camera angles, stylistic approaches and film theory were required. Investigating, reporting, simulating and empathizing generated sequences, transitions, scripts and imagery. Revisions and refinements included storyboards and transcriptions.
Final Dream Project
Process:
Some aesthetic inspiration I found this week:
Paprika (2006)
Alice in Wonderland (1951)
Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Travis Scott
A$AP Rocky
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We plan on all shooting material, contributing to the storyboard, and acting. However, Elias will be our default and head videographer. Mario and Suzanne will be the actors, and I will be responsible for finalizing the video editing. If there are costumes and makeup needed, again, we will all contribute, but Mario will oversee these areas.
Our review is from 1:30 to 2:30. We are planning to watch the assigned film history videos together after the book presentations. Then we will go together to the equipment center and rent cameras, and perhaps other filming equipment. From there, we will go outside and begin orienting ourselves to and experimenting with the equipment (playing with perspective, testing what lighting conditions work well on these cameras, testing the sound quality of both ambient and directed audio, etc). If the film history videos take 30 minutes to watch together (we will take the tests outside of class so that we have more time together for the film), then at 11 we will head down to the equipment center. By 11:30, we will have taken our equipment to a nice location outside. This gives us a full 2 hours to familiarize ourselves and get some early shots in before our review at 1:30.
Our video concept is very simple right now, but the idea I think will be very effective if we do it well. Because each of us have such varied dreams, and even each person’s dreams are so varied, incoherent, nonlinear, obscure, we do not plan to create a video based on chronology or naturalistic sequence. Instead, we plan to compile fragments of each of our dreams into one video. The sequence of these clips is something that will be chosen based on fluidity and transitions that can be made between clips. So, each of us will have simple story ideas for many of our dreams and then we will shoot them and compile them. We are keeping dream journals for this purpose. Editing will be a very important step in our video.
We want our video to be “trippy,” for lack of a better term. Some of our inspirations are Alice in Wonderland (both the 1951 and 2010 films), a anime film about dreams called Paprika, and music videos such as Travis Scott’s and A$AP Rocky’s, as they play with interesting visuals.
As the deadline for the dream videos is approaching, we are finalizing our work. For our group, this means tweaking and fine-tuning the editing. Last week we all got in front of and behind the camera. Elias mostly directed the shots, but all of us contributed to the ideas for each shot and took some footage ourselves as well. Editing is a bit more difficult for us. This is because the nature of our project places an emphasis on the editing and compositing of our piece. However, editing can only be done by one person at a time, as video file sharing is such a process. The way we approached this issue was to all meet up and work on our own edits side by side. Each of us used very different techniques and after a little while we stopped and watched each other’s videos. From there, we discussed what we liked and did not like about each, and what we wanted to use for our final video. Elias’ edit was mos aligned with our collective vision for the project, and he was also the furthest along (so most adept at the process), so we decided that he would be doing the editing while we continue to send him ideas and resources. For the text, we had the idea of using different languages. This stemmed from a conversation we were having, in which Elias and Mario both mentioned dreaming in other languages. Though this seems obvious, it was difficult to think about for me and Suzanne, who only speak and think in English. Mari, then, is recorded a short writing on dreams in Spanish, and Elias read the same writing in German. Here is a link to the video as it stands currently: Dream Video. Our plans for class time are to continue to edit and tweak the video, especially in regards to pacing, color, and text. We also look forward to using the advice from the informal critique to further enhance our video.
At this stage, our video is just getting final tweaks and finishing touches, such as adding the title and credits. Over the course of the week, our video has changed dramatically, largely due to two main choices. First, after hearing Anney’s advice for our video, we experimented with the overlayed hallway. We did want to have this sort of frustrated emotional response evoked by the viewer, similar to the sort of feeling when you want to run or scream in a video but you cannot. We decided, through experimenting with layers and mirroring, that the hallways could recede into the sides and background of the composition rather than obstructing the view of the portrait shots. In order to reintroduce the stuck feeling though, we slowed down the pacing a bit. This way, the viewer can fully appreciate all of the shots without obstruction and it also allows more time to appreciate each shot, but the pacing is just slow enough to create a more dreamlike pace. This major change led to another: we decided to move away from the music soundtrack and focus on a more quiet, careful soundscape. We all felt as though this would allow the video to be much more hypnotic, trance-like, and dreamlike, as we generally do not dream with music anyway. I think that our video is a lot more successful now than it was last week, as it looks more professional and accomplishes our aspirations in a different way, but one that is ultimately more effective.
