4D – Assignment 3 Video

Beneath

Day by day, people think it is alright to say something hurtful and expect the victim to take those words with a pinch of salt. However, every single word you say will leave a heavy impact on the person and no matter how much you regret saying it, the scar will remain there permanently which is portrayed using hammer and nails.

Original Idea

Initially, I just thought of working with plain text on a plain background without any visuals. The text would endlessly be going from left to right, up and down, diagonally, etc. However, visuals are compulsory for this assignment hence I needed to think about another idea.

Inspiration

My classmate, Zoe, told me about a story where her teacher made her class write down thoughts they feel about themselves, and afterwards they would crush the paper. This made me remember about the story of a boy and a father where the kid was instructed to hammer a nail onto the fence each time he made a mistake. After the boy realised his mistakes, the father made him pull out each nail hammered. However, the holes on the fence remains there forever, like a scar. Which gives a very good visual as to how words can wound people’s hearts.

Development

Before starting to film, I planned out the shots using a story board and tried to imagine what kind of sounds I would hear from filming and how I can work them together with text.

As you can see most shots that I planned out were closeups with varied angles.

I did not follow everything that I originally planned out as I realised some scenes did not really work out well.

Originally I planned to film at home, but the lighting was really dim which led me to filmed in the 4D studio instead where the lights were pretty bright. However, I still had to film it with ISO 800 and above with the lowest aperture.

I used by own hands as the person hammering the nails, while the camera was rolling on a tripod. I tried to film as many angles as I could so that I did not need to re-film anything. I tried panning the camera, having still-shots and so on.

Post Editing

Process of adjusting the brightness and contrast as well as the colour balance. I made the colour scheme more dark blueish because it creates a more damp and sad mood.

More colour correction examples.

Text

After editing the effects I went on to search on the internet what kind of words/ sentences people say and I’ve founds tons of it. There were also lots of cyber-bullying cases which eventually led on to the victims committing suicide.

I’ve copied some of the comments from here and added them to the video and tried to play around with the layout.

The layout that works well the most was the last one which was like a subtitle.

After creating all the text files, I arranged them in a way that it lines up with the loud hammering sound. The text appears and disappear quickly as it is not meant to be read. It is to show that these kind of comments are quick to be said/ appear.

From this project, I learnt the importance of planing and lighting throughout the whole filming process. Without planing, I might have missed out on some shots which will be very time consuming. It was also my first time filming a video alone and using Adobe Premier Pro.

Although I met up with some difficulties with editing the videos using the software, I have to thank my friends for giving me advice as to how to edit them 😀 I really appreciated their helpfulness 😀

October 19, 2016

4D – Amar Kanwar: The Sovereign Forest – CCA Exhibition Review

On the 29th of September, G2 had a trip to Amar Kanwar’s exhibition at Gillman Barracks which was really an eye opener to me.

Amar Kanwar’s exhibition was based on the difficulties the people experienced in Odisha, which is located in east India. The residents there had to shift multiple times, because of land developments instructed by companies or the government. As quoted from the exhibition guide, “The Sovereign Forest attest how one is never able to fully comprehend the gravity of a crime; through such an open-ended process, constantly adopting shifting perspectives, one can hope to come closer to a truth.”

Firstly we were greeted with a 40 min long video showing the calm and beautiful landscapes/ close ups of Odisha, with very small and minimal text that describes the story. Followed by the evidence and stories which were in the subsequent rooms beside it.

The artwork that I really liked the most was “Selections from the Evidence Archive” (2012-2015). This artwork consist of 251 digital prints which were either contributed by other people or found by the artist himself.

I really liked how detailed the documents were and how they were neatly arranged at the eye level and in chronological order. The evidence was interactive as the audience was able to touch and flip through everything, which I found interesting. Through the well organised display, it tells the narrative as well as the emotions of the people very clearly.

Through this exhibition, I was amazed by the materials and methods the artist used in contemporary art, as I was usually more exposed to the modern and traditional types of art. The entire setting of the exhibition was really dark and gloomy which sets the seriousness of what the artist wants to convey about the politics in Odisha. His selection of materials matches his theme as well, such as the book about “The Counting Sisters and Other Stories”, where the pages were made with handmade banana fibre paper which gave a very rough and naturalistic texture to the paper.

Amar Kanwar’s exhibition gave me inspiration as to how I can make use of found documents and infuse the sound and video footage together for future assignments. However, I do not think that I will be using those inspirations for assignment 3 as the theme that I wish to experiment on has a huge chunk of mean comments. Hence, I doubt I am able to make use of minimal text from his film. I would most likely apply what I learnt from Kanwar’s exhibition in future projects.

October 13, 2016October 17, 2016

4D – Assignment 2

Amongst the Crowd

In our current generation, smartphones have dominated the whole world, causing people to helplessly become dependent on it. The impact has become so great that even in newspapers, it is inevitable that some pictures have a particular person or a group of people using a phone. Therefore, I cut out images from newspapers that shows someone using a phone in the background or when he or she is not the main subject in order to express people’s obsession with smartphones.

Planning

I wanted to do on a topic that is somewhat related to my first subject which was on mean comments. Since mean comments are related to social media, and technology, I have decided to do on a topic about people’s obsession with phones.

Original Idea

Initially, I wanted to use an idea where I manipulate objects onto people’s faces. Each picture will have a different object chosen, and it would also symbolise something different. Here are the images that I had originally picked:

Most of the images had people looking down on their phones which shows their dependence to their phone.

Ragged clothings are usually worn by poor people, and in a worst situation, by slaves. Hence, I wanted to used a ragged shoe to symbolise their enslavement to the phone.

However, Robert said that it would be more interesting if I took my own pictures instead of taking images online, but I felt that I would not have enough time to complete it in a week.

Another suggestion he gave was to take images from newspapers instead. Which leads me to my finalised idea.

Final Idea

While I still have the aim of trying to show people’s obsession with smart phones, the newspaper gave me an idea of finding images where there are “accidental” shots of people using their phones in the background. The purpose of newspapers is to provide daily information about the world, which is very formal and serious. However, it is unavoidable that there are some shots that has people in the background using their phone. Thus, I decided to cut them out those images.

Testing some layouts:

September 20, 2016

4D Assignment 1 development + Final

Presentation #1

Personally I like to do on topics that has been frustrating me. Hence when the assignment was just given out, I was bothered by all the negativity on social media, especially during the Rio 2016 Olympics.

Of course there were kindhearted people that gave positive and encouraging comments, but the rest were really heartless and insensitive.

Here are some screenshots I took from the Facebook comment section regarding Singapore’s Table Tennis women’s Team lost to Japan.

After the first presentation about this, I was told to work with text, and incorporate images together.

Presentation#2

For the preparation of the next presentation, I went on to find more hurtful comments on social media, hence touching on the topic of religion, foreigners, art etc.

Table Tennis Players

Editing process

Foreign workers

Mean tweets regarding foreign workers

Step by step editing

Muslims

Anti-Muslim people on twitter

Manually added tears in the top right photo

Art

I don’t understand why people have to be so pessimistic especially towards artworks that replicates from photographs, which was why I chose Chuck Close in the image. If they want to critic at least give both the good and bad.

Alex Tan

This guy is the editor of States Times Review, a very well-known website for anti-government articles that may/ may not be true. His kind of comments spreads negativity, which was why I chose his face. One of the comment about blocking people on a particular post was rather ironic…

After the presentation, Mr Robert said that the images looks like posters instead because of the words. In addition, the main subject matter wasn’t very clear because of the colour figure and words. I was also advised to choose consistent images and not to make it too dramatic with crying people.

Presentation #3 (Final)

Improvements from presentation #2

Table Tennis

Playing with different layouts

I changed the image as in this one, Tian Wei looks disappointed and discouraged. Chose this text layout because the clean edges at the corners works better with the image.

Foreign Workers

Draft

Made the image more contrasting as compared to before with more blacks.

Muslims

Art

Draft

Alex Tan

Draft

New topics

African Americans

Up till now the African Americans are still discriminated and are treated differently.

Asians

On the internet, people will start stereotyping and keep saying the same few racist jokes such that it irritates and annoys me very badly. For example, Asians eating dogs/ cats which is not applicable to all Asians…

Donald Trump

This guy has been spreading hate all over his twitter/ rallies, etc with insensitive tweets.

Experimenting with layouts and justifications.

Seamless Words

Everyday and every minute, there are countless of nasty comments in social media platforms. Hence, I have copied those comments and placed them together in a paragraph to show what kind of hate is given to a particular group of people or said by an individual.

After the final presentation, my classmate, Kim, suggested that the pages looks like a book and if so, the content inside it will be unexpected.

In a normal published book, the words will usually be something professional and have been edited many times. However, for this, the words are just plain nonsense, which makes the concept more interesting.

September 19, 2016September 19, 2016

Image and Meaning Photo Hunt :>

Most of the images are pretty straightforward

1) Something that is not “ntu” at all

This photograph is my favourite as it is somewhat like a deception to the eye. This photo was taken at North Spine, near Mac Donalds but instead, it looks like an underwater shot. The blue windows attracted me to explore this area and I’m very satisfied with what I found.

2) Somebody not studying in ntu

They were so nice to let me take a photo of them.

3) Somebody studying in ntu

-nil-

4) Useless image you see

I don’t usually pay attention to this kind of advertising because they look like scrap paper.

5) Useful image you see

The exit sign is pretty helpful to me to find the way out as I get lost easily and have poor sense of direction.

6) Nature

I like fluffy looking trees, which makes me feel more relaxed and calm.

7) Urban nature

Nature invading man-made structures through a hairline crack.

8) Urban

The blue windows gave a interesting colour to the whole composition

9) Singapore

This is a great symbol/ representation of Singapore as she is well known for its Clean and Green environment. In addition, the round green dustbins are very common here, and quite iconic as I have only seen such dustbin in Singapore.

10) A place where Art is shown

The televisions at ADM lobby. Films, variety shows, can also be considered as Art. Someone in class also jokingly said that the trash can is where art is shown ??

11) A place where art is made

Architecture is a form of art, as well as for landscapes. Therefore, construction sites are places where all these were built/ made at.

12) A photograph with a faculty

In my opinion, a faculty is a school, thus I took this photo of MAE, which was the nearest to ADM.

13) A photograph that shows what the Earth Observatory of Singapore may be about.

Extremely literal information of what they research on.