I've decided to experiment with some old images that I found on a royalty free website. I've just created some simple photoshop collages. For the composition project I wish to take my own photographs and do my own drawings and paintings and edit them together. I would also eventually like to animate these. I'm presently working on this.

These are only a few simple edits that I have completed, I would like to redo these in more detail and add some subtle animation, much like the cinemagraphs in my previous post.

Here are some example of animation that I would like to achieve:

Psycho Fiddler

I tricked the fiddler into telling her I'll be adding sound over her 'fake performance' thus she played without a care. Little did she know I was to use EVERY note and screech she made with that fiddle for the entirety of the video. I broke it to her in the end and she was ok with the whole thing.

Yay I made my own gif!

Here is just an idea of my take on art performance with the use of video editing. The opening shot is a solo introduction with my guitar on the rooftop accompanied by a ‘made up’ Spanish song’ and another guitar solo to close it off. The visual effects include repetitive scenes of the solos to extend the duration of the notes. Extreme colour- saturation has been applied for the entirety of the ‘Spanish Song’. The audio has not been altered throughout the video except for the repetitive scenes where the solos are re-played over and over again just for the fun of it.

My initial Idea for my video came as an inspiration from a YouTube video titled ‘What Languages Sound Like to Foreigners’ by Smokahontas A.K.A Sara Forsberg. Sara who performs in the video pretends she is speaking in many different languages in their appropriate accents and to the foreign ears they may sound quite genuine. She even speaks in English and American accents but with jumbled up sentences that make no meaning. With my video, I tried to take a step further by incorporating singing but focusing on a single language (Spanish) and including made up subtitles that may give the impression the song is being translated when in reality it is not.

Here are some references and the links to their videos.

·      Sara Forsberg – the voice behind the many fake languages of the real world. 

             https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw

·      Yoko Ono – Made an art performance singing her own version of Katy Perry’s ‘Firework’ at an art exhibition. The whole thing seemed gibberish and a little awkward which is why there is great confidence in what she did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrJz9Dh5MsM

 

·      Tony Melendez – Born without arms but Plays guitar with feet. Melendez thinks out of the box and defies all odds. He was one of the few artists that inspired me for my Project Proposal video and thus my video was sung in ‘made up’ Spanish in dedication.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuIkrsdrJLY

 

The video piece I've been working on is directly related to the work I did in highschool called Lines. It had a big long story behind it about how this person had lost their partner to an overdose. It was about their inner turmoil over the death and how they were living. the individual images for it are below.

The song that this whole piece was inspired from is called Lines. A link to listen to it is here http://tommilsom.bandcamp.com/track/lines

I had always wanted to adapt it somehow into film instead of just still image. And I played around with the idea of it being more like a montage of slow moving shots, that are very static but still show small amounts of life. A big inspiration was the opening scene from Melancholia, directed by Lars Von Trier.

While I didn't end up using the idea of a montage, my use of green/cold lighting was definitely from this. I decided that I wanted this video work to be a new stage of this persons life. I originally wanted her to be painting black lines straight onto a wall with increasing frustration, to then collapse in defeat. It was meant to represent a stage of mourning and depict a coping mechanism she was using. I'm not sure if the emotion comes off so well, my friend (while a very good sport for letting me film and take photo's of her) isn't an actor. Of course finding a wall to destroy was also going to be challenging and instead I settled on sticking up paper, which ended up being incorporated into the video. I filmed in 640x480 even though I have a camera with much higher capability because of the vertical nature of what I'm filming. It seemed strange to have so much space either side of the figure and the top and bottom cut off. 

The link is below to Lines. If you have any comments of suggestions they'd be greatly helpful as I do want to work on it more before it is finalised. 

Cinemagraphs

I came across a particular type of animated GIF called a cinemagraph. Cinemagraphs are described as "still photographs in which a minor and repeated movement occurs. Cinemagraphs, which are usually published in an animated GIF format, can give the illusion that the viewer is watching a video"

Cinemagraphs are created by using both still image and video footage edited together in programs like photoshop.

Here are some examples below:

(from http://www.reddit.com/r/Cinemagraphs)