Class Assignment – Transformation

The assignment asked us to express a kind of transformation in the medium of film. My group (Josiah, Vanessa and I) decided to try to do a transformation from Light to Dark, as well as Concrete to Abstract.

For Light to Dark, our inspiration comes from a scene early in Scott Pilgrim vs The World, when the titular character Scott is asking party goers about a girl, Ramona Flowers. One of the party goers (his sister) warns him against chasing her and as she does so, the entire scene becomes darker except for a key light on the sister, serving to make the scene more comedic. It can be seen from 2:40 to 2:50 from the video link below.

Using that concept, we took a more serious approach and used one light to control the background, two lights on the actor and the smaller light on the actor’s shoulders. Our finished video is below.

Our 2nd video was inspired by a video that used the slit scan effect to the extreme. Set in Japan, the people melt away into blurs due to the effect. Giving the concrete to abstract effect.

We tried to replicate it with mixed results. The effect is not as smooth as the vimeo one but we still got the effect we wanted, so it was a success. The video was taken in various parts of NTU and the effect was added later.

Why did I chose film as my specialisation?

I always wanted to be a author. Write a famous book and live off the royalties. But I didn’t feel like I could do it for the rest of my life.

Then I went to poly and got introduced to filmmaking and I became very interested in not just the story in the film, but all aspects of it like the cinematography, post production and art direction. I really enjoyed how so many different parts came together to tell one story for everyone to enjoy.

My personal or societal perspective on film making?

Film is that is a medium everyone can enjoy. You might not understand the language of th actor but something about the framing, directing or color will tell you what is happening in the story. Therefore my personal perspective on filmmaking is that we’re learning a universal language to tell stories and share it with others.