This is where it ends.

In This is where it ends., Nguyen explores the theme of loneliness through the visual and sonic portrayal of different mind states one might be unfortunate enough to encounter while experiencing bouts of the aforementioned emotion. Perception is played with through the portrayal of an objective physical world versus an emotionally laden subjective world.


Chronological commentary/thought process (if anyone is interested):

As I was shooting I was playing some music in the background and I thought, “Hey maybe I could cut the shots to dis chill beatz.” So I tried that out. But this segment is supposed to suggest time passing slowly and to introduce the idea of being alone/loneliness experienced by objective observation, so the chill beatz didn’t work very well to keep things minimal. But here it is any way for the luls –

The pretentious typewriter is there because I wanted to be able to capture the character in the act of self-medicating and self-prescribing illegitimate drugs to cope with the crippling loneliness. I was not sure what to name the drugs so a quick google search for “common antidepressants” gave me a few options:

Prozac, Selfemra (fluoxetine)
Paxil, Pexeva (paroxetine)
Zoloft (sertraline)
Celexa (citalopram)
Lexapro (escitalopram)

It is so interesting that there are different types. These ones I found are the sedating types – meant to be taken in the evening to induce sleep. Perfect.

They were meant to imitate prescribed medicine labels but the pill bottles I got were too small for that, so I could only fit a few essential lines in.

“Let her sleep, for when she wakes, she will move mountains.” JK. She wakes up feeling like shit and ends up taking dubious drugs due to her inability to deal with the feeling of being alone.

This part is raw footage from the phone, so the blue was altered in the physical environment with blue cellophane taped over the ceiling light. There are a few reasons.

  1. Changing the colour of the environment is good for suggesting a transition into another space. In this case, there are two aspects of space that has been altered:
  2. One: time. There is a corner in one of the shots in this sequence that shows a peak of the window, indicating that it is dark outside. The blue here emphasises the time of night.
  3. Two: altering the mind state. In her waking, the environment has been transformed from the objective physical world (white, natural lighting), to this subjective mental state world (artificial, altered lighting).

This is also where it transitions from a 3rd person perspective to a 1st person perspective to further emphasize the idea of objectivity and subjectivity. In the 1st person perspective, we see the world through the subjective eyes of the character (quite literally).

Our eyes also see differently from the camera. To play on this, I wanted to use a wide angle lens on the phone to visually portray our wide peripheral vision. I was supposed to bring home the proper clip-on lens and all but I forgot so I bought this dollar jelly lens which is quite sucky but does the trick and also makes blurry vignette edges which is good for emphasizing a dreamlike state.

This is also the part where jtan304’s soundscape is used.

Lastly, there is a final transition into the hallucinatory drug stage where the character experiences visions/memories induced by the drug taking. The spasmodic bursts of images of physical intimacy with another person are where the viewer finally comes to the conclusion what the character’s distressful state of mind might be attributed to. There are many ways to cope with loneliness (many things one might do to distract oneself from loneliness), but this is perhaps the easiest way to do it without taking too much time/explaining too much.

Even Olivia Laing mentions it briefly, where she questions –

How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being?… Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty?

In editing this part I also played with colour, bathing the non-flashing memories with blue to create a spark contrast between the physically experienced world versus the imagined hallucinations. However, I didn’t quite like it in the end, and much preferred the original where the two narratives were in the same colour, suggesting a dissolution of the barrier between the imagined and the objective – the character is confused as to what is real and what is not.

Here is the alternative footage that I tried out –

I didn’t know what to call the film initially. But in my editing, I realized there were many cadences in the piece that seemed to suggest that the film has reached a conclusion, but always seemed to be followed by another sequence of images. And even then, for myself, in the experiences that brought about and inspired the making of this film, I was asking, fearful – when is it going to end?

This is where it ends.

Exhibition Review: How Loneliness Goes

How Loneliness Goes is a book about those of us who abide in the city.

My wish is for this book to wander in my stead, exist as a testament to existence, and credibly proffer the possibility of beauty as a balm for everyday sorrow.

— Nguan

 



It is with a slight upward curve of the lip to have to review this exhibition by Nguan. I started following his work when rrhzhao introduced him last semester during one of his classes.

It seems so immediately instinctive to be drawn to Nguan’s images. Something about the colour. Something about the light. Something about the people and the architecture. Even after looking at his photographs on different occasions, I still feel like I can’t grasp fully what it is that the photographs have that so penetrates the soft inner core of this young adult.

This show at FOST features a selection of Nguan’s photographs from the “Singapore” series, and as suggested by the exhibition title, the photographs deal with the idea of loneliness. Specifically, loneliness in the urban context. It is interesting to have to approach this in the state of mind that I am currently in, dealing with loneliness of another kind. I will first try to dissect the images objectively through their formal elements.

Something about the colour.
Pastel hues are more characteristically recognisable in Nguan’s photographs. It is not a desaturation of colour, not really. Robert says Nguan does not edit his photographs and that the colour is achieved completely through the analogue film that he uses. I am not inclined to believe him a hundred percent. But then again they are friends. I will settle for the in between and conclude that Nguan obviously uses voodoo magic to achieve such colours. On a more serious note, something about the pastel hues, to me, evokes a sense of other-worldliness. A dreamlike state that is separates his photograph from objective perception by the viewer. This is perhaps a more Nguanced (nuanced) and lighthearted approach to loneliness, in great contrast to how I have chosen to portray the more crippling kind of loneliness in my own film.

Something about the light.
What immediately follows the observation of colour is the light in the photographs. There are no absolute blacks or white, just a sort of ambivalent low contrast grey area in-between. This further serves to propel the viewer into this dreamlike world that Nguan creates in his photographs, serving as an almost mist-like, fog-like veil shrouding the subject matter in the photograph.

Something about the people.
With the rare exception, the people in the photographs are mostly not looking directly at the camera. They almost always are caught in the act of simply being, simply existing as they are, simply living; as humans do. And in the act of simply existing, Nguan has, through his voodoo camera magic, captured a sense of ‘nothingness’, of unguided ponderous thought, and most importantly, a kind of vulnerability of having been caught in this moment of ‘nothingness’. Perhaps there is a universal alignment in understanding these candid, vulnerable moments that allows us (me) to feel what the photographer intents me to feel through his photographs – a sense of emptiness.

Something about the architecture.
When there are no people, there is space uninhabited. In the “Singapore” series, the language of space is depicted through Singapore’s communal living spaces – our HDB flats. One would think that being alone would mean being in private spaces inaccessible to those other than ourselves, therefore Nguan’s transformation of public spaces into lonely spaces is beautiful to note. Of course, the trope of lonely = empty space is used formulaically. But of course, it works formulaically as well. Also, there is sky. There is almost always sky. I am not sure what this means for Nguan. But for myself, the presence of negative space – of sky – has always had an effect in influencing my state of mind. Be it day sky or night sky, this vast beyond calls for trepidation and fear and yearning all at once. Most of all, it leaves me feeling small, vulnerable, alone. There is so much sky.

Business idea: Nguan should collaborate with VSCO and make a filter. It will be the first filter that I spend my money on.

Starting with pre-production

For the first time in months, I left Pulau NTU for home. It was a difficult journey. It was long. It was arduous. But I was home. And I got to work setting up the room for shooting.

Decluttering.

I had stuck cellophane to the ceiling light so that it would bathe everything in blue. Because blue is the warmest colour. What? No. Blue is cold and blue is sad and blue is lonely.

Also I think that I used blue because in the Ganzfeld Experiment colour is used to alter mindstates so I blue here is meant to suggest and induction of loneliness in the character.


The original shots were a little bit low, so I tried playing with a higher angle of the camera for this master shot.

Checking for headspace – this might be a too tight.

Another angle to alleviate headspace problem? I decided against this because of a few reasons.

  1. The changes in movement of the character causes variation in size which could indicate hierarchy, which is not ideal
  2. The frontal master shot before was much better in portraying the idea of an objective physical space due to it’s straight on, ‘scientific’ observation.

In the end, I went back to the frontal master shot with a slightly lower angle. Headspace works well.

Starting with sound

In the Ganzfeld Experiment film (previous post), I also observed the sounds that were used to complement the images. What I noticed was repeated through the piece was a sort of low-frequency buzzing/whirring/pulsation in various forms being used intermittently throughout the dreamlike hallucination bits. At this point in time I am not too sure how to go about achieving this exactly, but as a first step I went about recording what sounds I could in the spaces around me to see if I could imitate the sounds I heard. Here are a couple from the collection –

In the end, I couldn’t really get a sound that felt correct to me. I eventually turned to freesound.org which I found was a great resource for, well, free sounds. A quick search of ‘alien’ sounds gave me quite a big variety of the ‘low-frequency buzzing/whirring/pulsation’ I was looking for. I was particularly fond of these two:

https://www.freesound.org/people/ERH/sounds/70960/

https://www.freesound.org/people/Connum/sounds/11705/


Somewhere along the way an ADM student made some sounds –

made this soundscape for his 4D submission –

Original OSS post [here].

The original intent was to portray an idea of omnipresence – of being everywhere/in several places at once, but along the way –

…I listened to it again and it dawned on me that it sounded like someone attempting to perceive something unperceivable.

The piece begins and is sustained by a low whirring that exists in the background. It then is foreground by a selection of piano strokes which does well to imbue an uncomfortable-ness in the piece. It then moves into higher-frequency distorted sounds. Towards the end, there is a crescendo that seems climbs to a high frequency, that seems to suggest a breakthrough into sorry I am probably butchering this but another dimension/state of mind of sorts. Then the whirring. That escalates and builds. Then. End.

TLDR; it spoke to me and with permission, I will be using it.


As I had decided to use jtan304’s soundscape in certain parts of my filmic piece, I now need to find accompanying sounds that could complement existing part of the soundscape in order to maintain coherence throughout the film. What stood out to me in the soundscape were the intermittent piano strokes used throughout the piece.

I then thought of using piano melodies to sustain coherence for the rest of the film.

At this point in time I have somewhat decided on the shots I’d like to sequence, and I know that I require something that could suggest a dream-like presence or state of mind from a first person perspective. So after many years, I touched the keys again –

I played with a few chord sequences and eventually came up with these that I felt were right(ish) –

Chord sequence from Jhene Aiko’s Eternal Sunshine

Chord sequence from Eery’s Her.

V hapz 2 play muzak agn.

Starting with visual representation

There was a film I watched that was quite lovely.

It deals with an interpretation of the Ganzfeld experiment which is used as a measure of detecting ESP (Extrasensory Perception).

Extrasensory perception, ESP or Esper, also called sixth sense, includes reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses but sensed with the mind.

The contents of the film are not so important as the way the visual aspects of this “extrasensory state” are dealt with.

In the extrasensory state, the character dreams/remembers/sees what seems to be memories in surreal and dreamlike sequences. What is interesting (to me) about these sequences are the colour and image distortions used to alter the images (aka glitch effects). In contrast with unaltered footage, it very effectively suggests a kind of alternative mindstate

In contrast with unaltered footage, it very effectively suggests a kind of alternative mindstate – one that is beyond objective perception in the real world. I am quite keen on exploring a similar style of image alteration in my film as well, to portray the perceived contrast between the objective physical world and the subjective lonely state of mind.


I downloaded some glitch apps on the phone to see what kind of visual language was accessible to me in image alteration. There were some really good ones like (Glitché) but that wasn’t free (on top of paying for the app itself, you have to play like $5 more to access most of the functions) so forget that. #brokeandhungryandsleepdeprived.

I ended up really liking (Bent) for its many suitable filters and functions. But one downside to the app was that I couldn’t import existing videos into the app for it to alter the image. Meaning if I went with this I will have to shoot on my phone straight from the app as opposed to using a proper camera.

Life is for dangerous living.

I went with it anyway.

Here is some footage I got to see what the app could do –

4D: This is where it starts.

I wanted to make a film about loneliness based on the story I wrote for Narratives class. It was about loneliness – how a girl hallucinates her body parts as being separate entities from herself, sentient beings that speak to her and talk to her. She thinks her body parts are her friends, a sort of twisted kind of imaginary friend.

The thing is – no one else sees these body parts as sentient beings. And so it is significant to consider that loneliness is a state of mind accessible to only the individual experiencing said loneliness. And said loneliness is experienced through a lens that distorts the objective physical world through emotions and skewed perceptions.

I also realized that what I did for Assignment 1 also aligns with this idea somewhat – on the idea of perception.

So, this film will continue on the theme of perception – subjective versus objective perception of spaces. Specifically, alterations caused by loneliness.


There is a book I want to read.

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

But I predict I will not have the time to read it + think about it + evaluate my thoughts + come up with a concrete conclusion about the book that would inform my thought process for the film in time for submission.

But I did read a Brain Pickings article [here] that talks about the book and about how Laing describes her loneliness.

It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.

Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair.

Beautifully poignant. But also, I think these did not do much to inform my thought process about the work, more so, it has cushioned my own feelings of loneliness.

Some say that one does not know loneliness until he/she has felt completely and utterly alone whilst in the company of others. Then perhaps Laing has alleviated some part of this lonely 20 year old girl by speaking words she herself is too crippled to form.


In response to reading about other people’s Lonely, I thought more about my own Lonely. Here are some raw thoughts from the stream of consciousness (if you are interested):

Idea of loss
Emotions associated with losing somethings that was once there
Losing objects/people/things in general
Missing the lost object

Why keep objects?
For their sentimental significance
Sometimes this gets a little manic and illogical – the kinds of items we keep
There is no objective reason to keep these items but
We keep them to justify/ the last thread to the thing that is lost
Objects of permanence vs memories/feelings of impermanence

How does a lonely person live life?
Either succumbing to the loneliness
And therefore crippling themselves, not doing anything for long periods of time
OR by distracting themselves with things to do, people to see


At the end of it all, here is my conclusion:

The film is (will be) a representation of the objective world and the lonely state of mind of the artist.