October 2016 – K I M .

Hokkaido Cheese Tart: I

What is it about human existence that keeps us going every day? As proposed by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, human motivation can be pared down to 5 categories of human needs: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualisation. But what is unique about each and everyone’s existence and motivation for life can’t really be pigeonholed into basic categories. There is a sparkle that is unique to the way we as individuals chose to carry out our lives.

In my film, I wish to explore the idea of a shared human existence; a common denominator amongst the way we all go through the motions of daily living and the effects of living only through this basic common denominator.

I imagine, life would be very jelat if we did that.

Test shots for cheese tart –

I wanted to use the element of a jelat food as a second running narrative throughout the film to control the pace. In total, the eating of 5 cheese tarts will be narrated, with the first tart being eaten quickly, slopily to show haste, and the last eaten with small bites, left unfinished to evoke the idea of the subject being full – jelat.

screen-shot-2016-10-26-at-3-47-42-pm — It is important that the tart is shot with a clean, white background, in an almost documentative way. As if the cheese tart is being scrutinised in a scientific, clinical manner.

Probably unhygienic to shoot here but the sun was going down and indoors was too dark. Chasing the sunlight before torrential downpour ensued.

Test shots for physiological needs (rest, sustenance) –

Started with a lower camera angel just to see what it would look like

Subtlety of an elbow peaking. I like that

Raised the camera angle a tad bit to show the subject’s face

Shifted the subject’s head closer to the left to fulfill rule of thirds

Revelation – I could have raised the pillow instead. It looks so much better now

Sustenance –

Transparent bowl – says something about the ephemerality of material objects. I love how it distorts the face here

From another angle – giving more breathing space to the bowl

Yet another angle – hair gives a wispy, soft foreground element

Pre-insertion of subject, stuck a chair in front of the camera to introduce a foreground element – fg, mg, bg elements create depth in the shot

Camera set up with chair near the camera to create a foreground element

Test shots for safety needs (shelter, security) –

It might not rain on the actual day that I will be shooting. Gotta think of a more realistic way to simulate rain.

Rough cut for part 1/5 of the test shots:

Mirrors: Silkscreen

Unfortunately, I forgot to take photographs during the silk screening process. But here are some photos of the final product(s)–

Processed with VSCO with m3 preset — Printing on paper before trying it out on the actual tote bag.

The first print on the tote bag didn’t work out because I followed the instructions of putting coins under the silkscreen. It didn’t really work very well for me because my design was very detailed, so having that little gap between the screen and the printing surface causes the ink to pool between that gap and smear when the squeegee pressed upon the surface.

Forrest Gump: Final

In this project, you are tasked to pick four movie quotes either from one movie or various movies that you have watched over the years. Your challenge is to create a visual narrative that expresses each quote using only symbols, pictograms, dingbats (ornaments), icons and engravings as your visual vocabulary.

I was pretty excited to start on this project, mostly because of how organic the brief is and its potential for personal input and interpretation. I started by compiling a list of quotes from movies that I enjoyed that could potentially be used for the project –

Originally, I wanted to have quotes from several genres of movies, but I found that the nature of the quotes would result in vastly different aesthetics across the 4 pieces. Therefore, I restricted myself to movies from the same director – my future husband Christopher Nolan. I am a huge fan of Nolan’s works, especially with how well he manipulates the element of time in each of his movies. And I love that every time the credits start rolling at the end of his films, I am left heart-pounding, skin tingling, wanting more. BUT enough of that. This isn’t a movie review.

We all need mirrors to remind ourselves who we are. – Memento, 2000

In the movie, the protagonist Leonard Shelby suffers from anterograde amnesia, a disorder that prevents him from making new memories from the point that he contracts the disorder. Shelby then depends on written notes, polaroids and sometimes tattoos on his body to help him remember and generate a narrative of his own life, to give himself meaning.

The movie made me think about the idea of self-perception. Oftentimes, the way we think of ourselves may not tally with our actual state of being. Our perception is always distorted, depending on our emotional state at that point in time.

I began with exploring literal ideas of reflection and of course, the image of a person looking into a mirror came to mind.

However, this idea was immediately abandoned because I realized that a literal interpretation might not give the quote the depth that it needed. I then thought about other things with reflective qualities and came to the idea of puddles of water.

Instead of using human beings as the main subject matter of the piece, I wanted to use a rhinoceros and juxtapose it the element of wings. Rhinos are weighty, heavy creatures and one would never imagine them otherwise. Juxtaposing it with dragonfly’s wings and playing with the proportion introduces a new meaning to the rhino – airy fairy, head in the clouds, the rhino thinks dreams of dreams that could never be true. In the puddle, the rhino is reflected but intentionally cropped such that the wings do not appear in the puddle, reminding us that the rhino is, after all, a rhino and nothing more.

I then changed the wings to butterfly’s wings as I felt they were more eye-catching and I wanted to draw more attention to it. I also increased the contrast on the overall image to imitate chiaroscuro in order to bring a more dramatized energy to the overall piece.

At this point in time, I was rather stuck on what I should do with the background. I didn’t want it to be too attention-grabbing such that it would take away from the focus of the composition. I began to think about the original idea of using mirrors instead, and thought of how the mirrored rooms in circuses could also carry the same concept.

This is the final composition. Keeping the concept the same, the image of the rhino is reflected in the mirrors, but now it is more apparent that the butterfly wings have been left out intentionally, to evoke a surrealistic quality to the work.

Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space – Interstellar, 2014

From the get-go, I knew I wanted to show a contrast between the element of ‘love’ and the element of ‘time and space’. Visually, love was simple enough to portray – an image of a heart does the trick. However, to portray the idea of time and space on a still 2-dimensional image was a little more difficult. I went to look at how certain scenes in the movie sought to portray it and came across this:

In this scene where Cooper attempts and interdimensional handshake, the image is distorted to a high degree. In many films that depict time travel, the same imagery is also used. As such, I also wanted to attempt a level of distortion in my composition to bring out that idea.

To portray the idea of love, I firstly used the sparrow as the main subject matter. Unlike most animals, sparrows are monogamous and remain with their partners throughout their lives. I then distorted the image such that there would be 2 heads occupying the same body, signifying harmony and unity of two creatures. Lastly, the imagery of a heart is used to depict literal love, and this is made to stand out from the background with a negative space of a triangle, which is a shape that portrays stability.

To portray the idea of time and space, and our ‘not being able to perceive the dimensions of time and space’, I decided to distort the overall image of the birds and the clouds. I decided to use a more geometric kind of distortion (as opposed to the organic, fluid one used in the movie) because I wanted it to be as jarring as possible.

Somewhere in there I also inverted the tones on the clouds to add a more surrealistic feel to the composition.

After consultation with Shirley, she advised me to tone down the background because it was competing visually with the main subject matter and so I made it less dark.

Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange. – Inception, 2010

The main focus of this piece is subtle surrealistic elements, to portray the whole idea of ‘not realizing that something was actually strange’. After playing with animals in my previous compositions, I wanted to bring in people as the subject matter.

I first came up with this, introducing subtle strange elements like the repetition of the eyes, arms and legs. And also layering – notice how the woman is standing in front of the man, but also behind him (skirt, arms). I then wanted to incorporate the dream element, and so included the large eye in the sky. The eye and the barren landscape indicate a sense of being awake in an environment that we are not usually awake in – a dreamlike world.

However, I found that my composition was too static due to everything being centrally aligned. So I sought to make it more asymmetrical:

I tried this at first but this just made the eye look like it’s winking.

I then thought about adding another strange element to off-centre the composition. I chose the elephant because it is an animal that we associate with largeness, and instead made it to be smaller than the height of the man’s knee. Playing with proportions here add to the surrealistic element as well.

An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. – Inception, 2010

Two quotes from Inception, but that’s okay because it is an amazing movie.

I really love this quote because it speaks volumes about the way we as humans interpret information and the nature of which we receive information about the world around us. Oftentimes, we get ideas about things, but one must realize that our ideas are not always original. In the movie, ideas are artifically implanted into the minds of people via experts. In the real world, we subconsciously implant ideas into our own minds via what we see in our every day life. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we are always receiving information through out interactions with the world, and we are always subconsciously influenced by these ideas, whether we like to or not.

Instinctively, I went for the imagery of a chimpanzee because they are human-like, intelligent animals. But after playing with the composition for a while it didn’t really make sense to use a chimpanzee. Scrap that.

I then went literal with my interpretation (HIV virus texture) to see what I could get out of it, but that didn’t make sense either. Scrap that too.

Then I thought it all out properly and went back to my own interpretation of the quote – the idea of implanting ideas and memories into a person and came up with this:By the use of repetition, the group of men all have the same thought/idea (represented by a rubik’s cube) implanted into their minds. The large hand is made to be ambiguous. The identity of the hand is left unknown – could it be the hand of God? Could it be the hand of one of the men in the image? Either way, due to the intervention of this hand, all the men are thinking the same thing, a highly contagious idea.

Again, I found my old habits coming to play and my composition was too centrally composed. I consciously tried to break out of that by adjusting my elements:

In the end, I used the HIV virus texture as a background to give everything a little more context. And the hand has now moved to the edge of the composition to create asymmetry.

Overall, it was really fun interpreting the quotes into a visual composition, and I got to explore a different kind of aesthetic than I was used to. It was a little scary leaving aesthetic elements up to a google search, but the world wide web is such a big place that you can almost always get the picture you need.

For future generations that have to go through this project too, there is an open source photoshop action that turns your images into an ‘engraved’ image. Looks like this:

Available here

You’re welcome.

Change my mind_Just In Case

I decided to change my topic after the previous thing.

It was a beautiful thing but I felt that it could not sustain itself – you can only exploit sorrow so much before it gets jelat and stops carrying the depth you want it to carry.

-scene-

What is the value of the photograph when the trigger happy individual can –
compose (carelessly);
snap (carelessly)
to satisfy an insecurity borne of the nature of mechanical reproduction?

I dug up my old archive of photos (the one that was collecting dust in that one folder in the hard drive that never gets touched after it’s been dumped there) and looked through them. I was really drawn to a particular set of photos that I took a few years ago when I was in a particular place. (I wish I still into photography now like I was back then).

The photos were nice. They were very pretty. And I’ve got to hand it to younger Kim for the good colour correction (really, it was more like batch automating the same photoshop action on all of the photos).

Then I looked at the photos – really looked at the photos. And I realised that I had an unnecessary number of them. Almost all came in pairs, and some were repeated 3, 5, 10 times. It was cute to see my thought process back then – just take more than 1, just in case one turns out bad then I can just filter them out later. Then I realized that I still do the same thing today, but to an even greater degree. It’s so easy to take photos, and so easy to throw them away. It didn’t use to be like that with analogue film. Hah. I say that as if I lived in that generation. But yes, film is precious. Each shot counts, so you actually take the time to compose and use the correct settings before actually pressing the shutter. With the digital camera, none of that matters anymore.

4d-assignment-2-final6 — Including more than just pairs to vary the pace of reading, also to imply quantity (more is better when it comes to this)

4d-assignment-2-final8 — 4 trains of thought – 4 camera settings

4d-assignment-2-final9 — 4 trains of thought – 4 camera settings

4d-assignment-2-final13 — The last spread reveals the location.

Processed with VSCO with hb1 preset — The cover.

Other things I wanted to say –

As much as possible, I didn’t want the images to have people in them (collectively, living things). Because people move and people change in their state of being – it makes sense to take multiple photos of a living object because it is different at every slice of time. With still objects like buildings, however, it makes no sense whatsoever to waste frames on the same thing over and over again because the way it is one second ago will be the same way it will be one second later. The only thing a second photo will satisfy is your insecurity of not having taken a good photo.

picmonkey-collage — People change in every slice of time.

2.What is it about another country that makes it so much more beautiful than your home country? Does an American find America as beautiful as outsiders do? Do foreigners find Singapore beautiful? I have tried to answer this question for myself and have found that (personally), anywhere with a good amount of sky is beautiful. There is not enough negative space in Singapore.

The Scene of the Crime – A meditation

The Scene of Crime is a complex, poetic documentation of the disappearing landscape of Odisha. Kanwar’s film vividly humanises an issue that is so often perceived to be a statistic; mere ink on paper.

Through purposeful cropping, Kanwar brings the viewer into intimate scenes of the landscape. The abundance of close-up shots offers a new perspective of seeing – forcing one to look, truly look and scrutinise what is referred to as the ‘evidence’ of the crime, rather than glossing over it in a wider shot.

The camera is almost always stationary. What is captured are subtle movements of the landscape – blades of grass trembling in the wind, the vibrations of a branch as a butterfly departs from it – nature subject to nature. These subtle movements are furthermore enhanced by the stillness of the landscape. In each shot, there is always a stationary element that contrasts the aforementioned subtle movements. For instance, the trembling of grass blades against the stillness of the ground, or the shivering of leaves against a strong, sturdy branch. The stationary does not take away from the movement, but in fact, enhances it.

Another well-executed aspect of the film is its pacing, which is closely tied to the sounds included in the piece. From Map 1-5, there is a clear build up of intensity. Kanwar makes use of natural sounds like omnipresent wind, violent rustling of leaves and distant thunder to complement the visuals, adding multi-sensorial layers to the already immersive piece. Furthermore, it appears that the audio has a symbolic presence. The sounds of nature accompanying each shot are almost like cries of anguish as if nature itself was calling out in pain as it struggles against its imminent extinction. This is made more poignant by the stark diminuendo following Map 5, where the sounds noticeably dim from the piece, evoking an eerie defeat, an almost certain ‘death’ of the forest.

Beyond mere visual-auditory stimuli, Kanwar engages the audience intellectually through thought-provoking captions.

“She searches for him, sometimes amongst the dead, sometimes amongst the living.”

The use of he/she personification elements invites the viewer to ponder about the identities referred to in the caption – after all, there is no distinct human-to-human dialogue or narrative in this film. One then considers the involvement of third party stakeholders. Who are the ‘bad guys’ that are destroying the landscape? Who are affected by these changes? Is there anyone doing anything about it all? The incongruency of the relationship between each text and its accompanying visual allows the viewer to work things out for himself, rather than have the story be told to him directly.

Going back to an earlier point, what really stood out to me in the whole piece was Kanwar’s effective use of a contrasting element to bring out and enhance another element that is its polar – using stillness to bring about movement. This purposeful juxtaposition is not only symbolically significant, it is also quite visually stunning. It is on this note that I wish to explore similar visual themes in my third assignment. Perhaps I will stretch the concept of visual juxtaposition into other realms – darkness & light, fast & slow etc.