This project was about sound and the various ways it can be used to either contradict or complement visual image. In this post, I will go through the process of thinking about the concept for my final work and also the actual execution.
#1: Ideation
First, I listed 20 places that I have never been to and would like to go to:
At first, I picked the palette idea – I had even planned out all the scenes and sounds that I was going to use, but it just didn’t really feel like something I was very motivated to do or connected with very strongly.
I looked back to my list again and the option of depicting a surreality stood out to me the most amongst all the others. I started to do some research on this topic, and at first I thought I could depict the world within a surrealistic painting. The following paintings are by Salvador Dali, Lubov Zubova and Rene Magritte respectively. What I really liked about Surrealist paintings is that they defy the logic of the real world – clocks that melt, pots that hold oceans and men falling from the sky. I decided that I wanted to focus on this particular effect in my surreal world.
My next source of inspiration came from more recent artists. The first was PES Film, a studio known for their quirky and nonsensical stop-motion animations. One of their short films, KaBoom!, uses classic subversion.
The video shows a fighter plane, but the animator replaces the objects used in warfare with other things that have similar forms. But he plays with the audience by adding in sound effects that we would actually hear in war – explosions and shooting. There is a lot of non-diegetic sound used (e.g. a peanut in real life does not explode when dropped from a height), and it makes the viewer question the realness of the situation portrayed.
The second animation is Fresh Guacamole. For this one, the animator uses a lot of diegetic sound – but it is the visuals that don’t make sense because they don’t align with what we have learnt to be reality or the mechanism of how things work.
I drew inspiration from these two approaches – subversion and the alignment of sound and visual but not reality.
Another huge source of inspiration was Tatsuya Tanaka, a Japanese miniature artist. He plays with scale to create these mini worlds with everyday objects.
After much consideration, I decided to make my video about a surreal vanity, in which all the makeup products don’t align with reality in some way. First I made a mindmap of all the different makeup tools and I singled out the ones I had some ideas for, and did simple sketches.
I picked the ideas that I thought would be most visually interesting, and then I proceeded to draw out my lo-fi storyboard.
With this, I was able to come up with the list of sounds I would hear in my world. I numbered each frame and then wrote down all the sounds in that scene. For consultation, I showed the lo-fi storyboard, along with the soundscape (mostly recorded by me, with a few clips from the Internet).
Feedback received:
- Some sounds were not intense or loud enough
- Certain sounds were not distinctly recognisable as the object portrayed (e.g. the ‘glass’ did not sound shrill enough)
- Soundscape was blocky, which was fine, but there is a need to create bigger and bigger sounds in terms of amplitude to engage the viewer
#2: Refinement
After the consult, I had a clearer idea of how to edit the soundscape. I decided to choose certain scenes to be markers – where the blocks of sound got bigger and bigger.
Mark 1: Glass crunching → Mark 2: Zipper → Mark 3: Trees rustling (mascara) → Mark 4: Matches striking + fire ablaze (lip gloss)
Here is my hi-fi storyboard:
#3: Making the Final Project
I first started by making all the props I needed for the video (a lot of it included brutally destroying old makeup).
For the foundation, I got some sand from Daiso but it was this uniformly white sand. I dyed a bit of it orange and brown and then mixed it in with the original sand to create more of a more “authentic” and dirty sand.
For the contact lens, I printed out tiny lemon slices and then stuck two of them back to back to create a miniature lemon slice.
The Connect-4 eyeshadow palette was made with an actual palette. I removed all the existing eyeshadow, took the tray out and spray painted it blue. Then, I used the empty eyeshadow pan as a cutter to cut out clay discs that would fit in the slots. The discs were painted red and yellow.
The mascara was the actual makeup product as well. I emptied out the container and painted over the packaging to cover all the words on it. Then, I cut off the mascara applicator and replaced it with a trimmed down Christmas branch then I got from Daiso.
I followed a similar process for the lipgloss. First I painted over the packaging, then removed the applicator to replace it with a matchstick. I also painted over the part where the matchstick was glued to the cap to make it look more of a complete piece.
Then, I began to film all the different scenes. I chose a drawer in my parents’ room and hung up a picture of a leaf on the wall to act as decor to make the whole setting more believable. I also covered the pink bedsheet with a monochromatic blanket so as to draw less attention to it.
After filming, I edited all the video clips to make them choppier, emulating actual stop-motion. I thought that the choppiness really complemented the whole idea of a surreality. Actual filmed footage would look very polished and smooth which makes it feel more professional and film-like, but I wanted something more raw. Here is how I achieved the choppy effect:
Importing Video to Frames – selecting the part of the clip I wanted, then letting Photoshop extract the video sequence to frames. I limited it to every 8 frames, i.e. Photoshop picks one frame every eight frames to create the sequence.
Delay – I set a delay for each frame, which is similar to the stop-motion method of piecing each photo together and showing each photo for a very short amount of time.
Then I rendered it in .mp4 format for the final piecing together in Premiere Pro.
Frame-by-frame editing – Some scenes required more post, such as the eyebrows, eyeliner and lipstick. For the eyeliner, I drew on each frame, reducing the opacity of that layer so I could reproduce the stroke from the previous frame and then add on a little bit more.
For the eyebrows and lipstick, it was the same idea – I drew on each frame to create the illusion that the makeup was going on my face.
I also painted over the brushes to show that the “pigment” was getting on.
Colour correction – After placing all the clips together, I did some colour adjustments as I filmed in two locations. My parents’ room was more dim and had an orange light, while the living room where I filmed most of the close-ups was brighter and lit with white light.
For the clips shot in my parents’ room, I increased the brightness and made the shadows darker, to match the other location which was brighter.
For the clips shot in the living room, I lowered the brightness and also increased the temperature to make the clip warmer in colour.
After that, I moved on to recording the sounds for the soundscape. Most of the sounds were recorded by me with the objects I used in the video, with the exception of the following:
Glass crushing sound – The pieces in the video were actually clear plastic instead of glass. I used a hammer to grind on small pieces of glass that I got from smashing a mini glass bottle.
Brush on face – the actual diegetic sound was too soft, so I swiped a pen across the sand to create a more pronounced sound.
Lip gloss ‘pop’ – I had to remove the stopper on the original lip gloss container to empty the remaining product out. As a result, when I opened the container, there was no more ‘pop’ sound. I recorded the pop sound from removing a pen cap to replace it.
Leaves rustling – I found a branch with leaves on it, and I shook it to create the rustling sound for the application of the mascara.
There were a couple of sounds that I did not record myself. They were the sizzling sound when the lemon slice is put into the eye, and the fire being set ablaze at the end. I tried to record the sizzle on my own by using the Vitamin C tablet, but I could not get a short and clean sound because it continued to sizzle for a long time. So I decided to use a sound effect from online instead.
My sound:
Sound found online (link):
Fire ablaze sound (link):
Audio gain – I pieced all the sounds together, and then I made adjustments to the volumes of the sounds to make sure they got progressively louder at each mark. To do this, I adjusted the audio gain of each sound clip.
