Ego In Different Setting – Process 1

I’M BACKKK, after a week full of submissions. I thought that I couldn’t make it through the submission week, but I did! 

Ok, back to my last project in 2D: Ego In Different Setting.

At first when I get the project brief, I was clueless on what I want to do for this project. But the one thing that I wanted was to have my style injected to this project. Like when people see the outcome of this project, they will know that “this is Azizah’s style”. That was one of my objective for this project.

So to start of with this project, I did a mind map based on myself in 3 different types of environment: Around friends, family and being alone. And I realise that I have a lot of roles in my family; middle child, daughter, maid (because I always clean the house) and humpty dumpty (as I’m the clumsy one in the family). So I decided to do on middle child, as I was inspired by my friend’s work about her being a middle child. Below is a gist of her book on middle child.

After reading her book, I had a better understanding about what I wanted to do for this project – Me being a middle child and sisterhood.

 

Mindmap in a family environment + sketches of my equation
Detailed sketches for each frame

Equation 1: Shopaholic me + 2 sisters = They wearing my new clothes

Equation 2: Me blended into the background + Sisters get attention from my parents = Independent and freedom

Equation 3: Hardworking me + Messy room = Me cleaning up after my sisters

Equation 4:  Me + sisters quarrelling = Resolve the conflict

Feedback given: have a constant art direction throughout as some frame has a lot of things going on, and some are just simple and direct.

Hence I did some artist research so that I can visualise how my outcome will roughly look like.

Based on this project called Tanakan for RBK, I like the minimalist, clean and simple where the subject is in the centre (which is similar to my style as I mention in the previous project that I like having my subject in the center). And I also like the use of contrasting colours.

Marly Gallardo is one of my favourite illustrator. Throughout her illustrations, she  uses split complimentary colours, hence most of her works look coherent because of the use of colours. *Me bookmarking this part* Another thing I like about her work is because of the use of PINK. Because for this project I thought of using Pink as the main colour as pink represents me and my sisterhood.

Another artist that I would like to reference is Petra Eriksoon. I like her style of illustration and colour use such as the gestalt on the portrait.

Ok, I think this is sufficient for just one post. The next post will be on my progress and the difficulties I faced while exciting my work. (:

Sequencing Image – Part 2 (References & Draft 2)

References

Here are just what I observe and my interpretations in each movie:

Pan’s Labyrinth

  • It uses different colour scheme to differentiate the scenes
  • Daylight – abit gloomy
  • Why most of the scene are blue? Blue represents cold and isolation
  • Why there is a scene where there is orange? Exotic – where the character its different from human and its in her own world
  • Orange and blue – is it because its contrast with each other? Conflict between the day and night – real life and fantasy

The strangers Part 2: Breathless

  • Does not use the literal sound of the animal.

ET

Movies GIFs - Find & Share on GIPHY

Screenshot of ET trailer
  • use of blue and purple – to represent fantasy
  • orange/yellow – daylight
  • Silhouette – background light & shows the figure

Alice In wonderland – a good example of colour scheme


  • Real world – pastle blue, light colours to show fairytale and green as the contrast colours so that It wont look flat
  • Got into a hole – dark with a shades of orange
  • Sound when the man is walking too – to show his personality/characteristic
  • Red queen – which explains her setting to be mostly red, her soldier are in shades if red too
  • Red vs white
  • Sound effects used – very fantasy

Star Wars: The force awakens

  • A pinch of sound
  • When showing the bad character – the sound becomes lower
  • The background music – fantasy
  • Lighting and the music syncronize each other – Rain with lighting, did not show the  rain sound
  • There is narration on a blank screen

Maleficent  

  • blue/purple effect
  • Light from the back – giving shillotte to the character – introducing the character
  • Light on the character – half side
  • Sound transition from 1 scene to another with the THUM effect
  • Shows the eye – slowing revealing her whole face
  • Thummm then silent, THUMMM louder abit, then THUMMMMMMMMM loudest – same scene different angle
  • Only her narrations with blank image – to emphasis what she is saying
  • Reveling sound effect
  • Sound of the bird
  • Sound effect between the conflict and narration – like it comes down to silent and the narrations speaks

Colours

Filmmaker David Fincher uses color to create emotion.

  • Complimentary colour – Opposite colours represent conflict both inside and out

  • Monochromatic colours – to convey rigid worldview of unbalanced characters. – character are all taking in cafe

  • Discordant colours – draws attention to out-of-place elements to build anticipation

Colors can

  • Elicit psychological reactions with the audience
  • Draw focus to significant details
  • Set the tone of the movie
  • Represent character traits and more
  • Show changes in the story
source: https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/how-to-use-color-in-film-50-examples-of-movie-color-palettes/
Test try of editing the images

Before I start editing the images, I really thought deeply on the colours that I want to insert as I wanted to show the contrast of reality and fantasy. Initially, I wanted to make the daylight more yellowish to show the youth of the girl. However, it looks very vintage and old. Hence I decide to keep the natural light for the daylight.

Sound

Sound artist reference – Ben Burtt

I was amazed by how he used the traditional method to create sound. Even a bear sound can be used for a character’s voice. He also used human sound to create character voice by mixing the humans voices (I think this was use in Starwars). A lady with  a low voice as ET voice. He explore sounds anywhere he can find which inspires me to go out and listen to the sound around me

In Wall-e, it require a whole new world of original sound such as the background, ambience, robot sound, space. There is no dialog, so it emphasis on the little details like the squek sound. Each sound created by Ben Burtt shows the personality of the character. (Note: Control the sound, loudness and hierarchy of the sound and use sound at the right choice, right moment).

He was inspired from history of sound like Disney, musical sound by using props that they have. Previously, sound were made in studio and it has to match with the scene as there were no technology. Wind sound were made by using wind machine. Thunder sheet metal is used to create thunder sound with echo in it. The even combine sound from different items to create a new sound.

Experimentation

So I went and recorded a few sound. However, I recorded it using my phone and I could not find a way to upload the sounds. ):

Screenshot of the sounds I recorded
The snack I ate while recording the sound of eating
I stood by the side of the road to record the traffic

Based on this video, here are by observations & interpretations:

  • Focus more on the sound of the small details on the moving image
  • Able hear the table – fork and spoon – dining ambiance with the glass and stainless steel
  • Magic sound effect
  • Vibration phone
  • jingles – elephant wearing the gold crown
  • background music
  • taking pictures, beep phone
  • Silent – to show that everyone is quite surprise, spoon & fork down, stop eating to hear what she is saying

After researching about the colours and sounds, I input whatever I have observed into my video.

The blue and purple colour to represent fantasy and mystery type of setting. Some images are in natural lighting to show that its is reality. This is to differentiate fantasy & reality. I added a few glitch images and texts to show what was the main character is thinking, like her state of mind was not stable at that time.  I tried to keep the sound minimalism and play around with the breathing space to create tension. I tend to focus on the little details such as breathing, walking, opening the door and etc.

Sequencing Image – Part 1

Hello! So my group consist of Alina, Ying Hui, Syadza & me.

So how we start of was each of us came up with a story and we tried to mix it and match each other story. So as a start, we discussed individual story on WhatsApp.


Draft idea for storyline

So my idea (top most whastsapp chat) was about my childhood friend that I have not connected since we left primary school. Whatever she is doing now is a mystery to me and sometimes I wonder what she’s currently doing.

Then Ying Hui’s idea was about her long lost friend, where Ying Hui thought she would not turn out that way. But they both are still contacting with each other on social media.

Then Alina suggested to do like a fantasy story, which I though was a good idea. Because if this was an individual project, definitely I would not be able to create a fantasy story, so why not do it as a group then.

Syadza’s idea was about a girl who had a traumatic kidnapping accident, which plays around with the girl’s mental state.

So to conclude our idea, we mix our idea by having a girl, not in a stable mental condition, being transferred to another school which has fantasy in it.

Storyboard

After the discussion on Whatsapp, we met up to discuss in more detailed about our story. So our story is about a girl being transferred to a new school. In the new school, there wasn’t any humans in it.  Everyone is in an animal face. During lunch, she thought that everyone will have a normal meal like rice or bread, but it turned out to be the opposite. Some were having meats, carrot, rats, lizards etc. Then the animal beside her offered her a piece of meat, she accept it and ate it. Soon after, some of her body changes and she became one of the animal in school.

We wanted more scene as we felt that the ending was quite abrupt, and we had to fit it in 20 frames.

After confirming our storyboard, we went out to find props for our shot. The most important thing was to find animal mask as it is our concept in the storyboard. So I went to Daiso, and Ying Hui went to a shop in Bugis where they sell animal mask.

Searching of props

Image reference

Before we shot our images, Alina sent those images as our reference. The setting of the image should be dark, with a bit of lighting on the subject.

During the shot, we had 2 camera: Alina’s camera & Syadza’s camera. In Alina’s camera, she changed the setting of her camera so that the image will look dark when it is take. And in Syadza’s camera, we took it in normally lighting.

Alina’s camera
Syadza’s camera

The difficult part was editing the images, as some images are darker (in Alina’s camera) and some are lighter (in Syadza’s camera).

After we got our images taken, we realise that it does not have to be 20 images. So we went to shot for more images as we realise that the previous images might be too short to create a sequencing image.

Ying Hui’s drew the storyboard and she was just lazy to redraw the last few scenes.

So went to reshot a few more times and I realise that we had too many images. There were a lot of images that we took as each of us has our own storyline that we want to portray. And each of us also has different ending that we want to show. Hence, it was the only way to help each other to shot more images as teamwork makes the dream work.

Artist References

For humour references, I will always look for Adam Ellis‘ comic strips. His works are injected with humour that are we can relate to. Some of his works are:

When I was searching for references for wood engraving, I found an artist named Andrew Davidson. He does different the of techniques such as wood engraving, painting, illustrations. What I admire about him is his strong sense of design by solving design problems and conceptualised.

Since one of this project visual vocabulary, here are some wood engravings done by Andre Davidson.

More of his work can be found here: http://www.theartworksinc.com/portfolio/andrew-davidson/

After my classmate presented about Abnormal art, I was inspired by it and i thought of putting it in this project. So I research about abnormal art, and found an artist, Eugenia Loli. What I like about her artwork is she uses collage to create abnormal art and some of her artworks have interesting composition.

Bipolar
Rocket Man
Upper Class Dealer

My last artist reference is Lynd Ward. He is an artist and storyteller, he used wood engraving to create visual storytelling. For this project, we are required to express our quotes through visual narrative and it has to be black and white. I uses his work as an example as his artwork matches the project brief closely and his artwork can be referenced.

Task 2: References

Artist Reference

Photographer – Danny Santos

Link: http://dannyst.format.com/street-scenes#22

Under his series called Street Scenes. Some of his pictures are taken with less light, which i entended to do for task 2. When the sun is about the go down, the photographer uses the sunlight to create depth of the humans. The light also gives a direction to the focal point.

Image Reference

I like how the composition of this picture is taken. The picture is taken in a way that I can see the overall bedroom and also the opening of the door. By having a hint of the door, it gives me an idea of peeping into the room.

By taking a part of the room, it can already give me some hints about the person characteristic. From this picture about, it gives me a hint that the owner is and artist as there are many painting displayed on the walls. The owner likes bright, vivid and neons colours as most of the paling has those colours. Most likely the owner is a female as there are many female portraits. The owner might be a nature type of person as there are plants by the window.

Task 1: Image Reference

I know my level of expertise in taking an image: average and below. Hence, before I start taking pictures, I will do some research and image references to understand how a good picture should look like. With the image references, I can also adopt the style of it.

When I thought of taking picture with my book, the few places that I thought of was library, my bedroom and when I am travelling. Hence, I went on to research on the types of photograph that can be taken at those places.

Library

In this image, it shows a mid shot of the lady find books in the library. Her expression shows that she is focus on finding the books that she wants. There’s a depth in the image to focus on the lady and the foreground of the bookshelf. The colour and tonal are dull, brownish with less lighting to show that the library is old and vintage.

This image dipects a wonderland of books. The colourful cover books contrasting with each other and pages makes it look like its flipping by the wind. Another thing that gives the feeling of a wonderland is the hard cover books. Normally the hard cover books are used in movie like Harry Potter. The way the character is placed in the middle of the image looks like she is being absorbed in the world of books.

In this image, the photographer uses rule of third and place the subject on it. The light rays coming in from the window, give a direction to focus on the subject.

 

 

 

 

Library

In this image, it shows the mood of the setting – comfortable and relaxing. The way the lady position herself on the bed will reading, shows that she is into reading and is conformable in her position. There is depth in this image, as the background is dark and blurry which allow the foreground and the subject to be the focal point.

 

 

What I like about this image is how the lighting is used to focus on the object, which the the girl and her book.

 

 

 

Travelling

I like the compositing of this image, and how the lighting shines of the person reading. However, I feel like it is lacking of feeling, as the person face is off the image from. It would be better if the image were to have her face to show how she feels while reading or how she interact with the book.

This image uses rule of third to place the subject with is the person. With the use light coming from the window, it shows a silhouette of a lady reading. Just with a small gesture of her fingers, I am able to guess that she is engross in reading the book.

 

 

In conclusion, I would like my image to be taking in the library. As I want my image to look calm, peaceful and relaxing. And the way I should interact with the book is that I am engross and focus in reading the book.

Task 1: Artist Reference

Photographer – Nguan

Link: http://nguan.tv/singapore.htm

Series: Singapore

This images are taking under his series named “Singapore”. In this series, he uses cool colours to depict Singapore. As a singaporean, I find it astonishing that he did not capture the busy and hectic lifestyle in Singapore. Instead he chose to capture Singapore in a different view, which focuses on the subject that tells the story with the help of the emotions and background.

The cool colours, in his images, make it not striking to my eyes. I feel relax and calm when I look at those images. The images also allows me to think about the story that the photographer is trying to convey.

In conclusion, I would like image to look calm, peaceful and relaxing. And the way I should interact with the book is that I am engross and focus in reading it. The outcome of the image should be in cool colours, not contrasting to the audience’s eyes.