Design Discourse Essay.

Design Discourse

In the module, design discourse, we have learnt many processes since September, such as animatics, storyboarding, research development etc but with the first project we were very much thrown in at the deep end.  Our first project lasted 6 weeks, it was given the title of ‘Perception’ and we were told to make a film on the subject. It could be animated but if so, must be limited. We were given no more information other than the word ‘perception’. We then were put into our groups. I was with Hannah Loughridge, Megan Houston, Katie Noble and Niamh Cunningham. With what we had learnt on week zero we quickly got to work writing hundreds of words and ideas on post it notes and sticking them to a window. We took photos of this and went home and each did research on what perception is and certain ideas, we came up with many ideas, such as how we perceive the world,  is it correct or construed? And how music and sound plays a part in our emotions and our mental health.

How we view the world could be as simply changed by what we are, an insect will see everything like mountains and skyscrapers, but a bird may see large cities to be nothing but dots beneath them.

We looked at the idea of, when you put your headphones on you are transported to another world, for example, this drawing was inspired by Stairway to Heaven.  

When discussing wether we were going to do live action or animation we looked at the likes of 500 days of summer in the scene when certain things are animated such as the birds. This scene also helped us with perception because in this scene the main character felt like the world was wonderful and nothing could ever be wrong again. 

i had also done a very rough little storyboard telling the story of a teddy bear who wasnt wanted anymore when his eye fell out, he was took to a charity shop where he finally finds a new home. As you can see, this is before i understand storyboard proportions and how to annotate them with action, shot, scene etc.

This was an image that was very quickly edited to show the world in different colours to show that perhaps we are colourblind and the world isn’t as we think it is. 

This quickly turned into some dark and twisted ideas and we came upon the idea of ‘the seven deadly sins’ We originally wanted to make an animation depicting these sins and the punishments for example, gluttony would be punished my being boiled in oil. However, not only was this too dark but it would have been to difficult to visualise 7 sins in a 2 minute film with only 6 weeks to create it.

We quickly realised that if we wanted to create something like this we could only focus on certain sins and it would probably need to be live action. We decided to focus on Vanity, Wrath and Pride. As Niamh is a model outside of the course we decided to create a story around the life of a model where things have gone wrong and she is constantly doubting herself, her image, her life etc all within a voice in her head. We took great inspiration from mental health such as Anorexia, Schizophrenia and self harm. We began working with prosthetic makeup to create wounds. To do this we used liquid latex, red food colouring, face paint, makeup and a lot of time and effort.

As you can see our first attempt at wounds wasn’t that sophisticated, done with tissue paper and paint, the paper dried crackly and made Niamh look like she had very old skin. 

Before we started on Niamh’s face i decided to take one of her modelling images and add in wounds using photoshop to give us an idea what we wanted to create.

We began the process by painting on liquid latex.

We even experimented with the nails, using fake nails, eyelash glue and red food colouring wich was effective but wasn’t as essential to be included in the film. 

This is the finished work, which was very convincing as many people believed it to be real wounds.

As you can see we all worked as a team, here i am working on Niamhs eyes.

And here is Megan and Hannah working with the liquid latex. 

We even added a chin gash.

We worked on finalising the story next and created our storyboard.

Once we were happy with our story we began shooting the film, we shot most of our film in Niamh’s house and some in one of the study rooms in the library. We encountered problems and had to reshoot scenes as it had gotten dark outside and shots were going from broad daylight to night time shots and it looked bizarre and would have messed up our continuity. When we reshot and edited our film complete with sound we showed it to some students for feedback, a few couldn’t understand what was happening and we realised the sound needed to be changed, and thus another evening recording our voices saying awful things (Niamhs thoughts) in the library study room began.  Once we edited this into our film we found that everyone we showed the film too fully understood it.

Within this six week project we encountered many problems and learnt how to work as a team in many ways, Hannah let us use her camera, tripod and computer to shoot and edit, we all chipped in to buy items we needed and we became friends by the end of the project as well.

For the next few weeks of Design Discourse we were taught about the 12 principles of Animation using Adobe Flash.  First we were given a bouncing ball, a bowling ball and a balloon, we had to show how they would fall down stairs taking into account, bounce, momentum, weight and timing. This was a lot of fun but also tricky to perfect, especially if you are new to flash and need to learn about frames, keyframes and tweens.

We then were taught something a little more difficult with a little bunny, his tail, nose, mouth, ears, eyebrows, hair, everything could be moved and animated. We had to make him look alive and with realistic movements, which made timing and thought much more difficult as there was much more to think about, but again it was enjoyable and I feel it helped many of us understand the principles of animation much better.

Another little project we had to help us learn about these animation principles was based on Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day.

We were shown a 40 second clip from this animated film about 2-3 times. Then we were given the sound clip from it and told to draw about 50 drawings in storyboard form showing exactly what happened within those 40 seconds of film, so that if I gave my storyboard to someone else they could clearly understand and go and make the film.

First of all we were given about a half hour to practice drawing Pooh Bear and Piglet and then were set to work, I really enjoyed this project and even did a little extra work discussing the style and colour of Winnie the Pooh.

Here are some of the storyboard drawings and character drawings

Our next project was based on sound. Each group was given a different film clip with the sound removed. My group consisted of me, Tyrone, Hannah, Charlie and Aidhann. We were given a Frank Sinatra film called Suddenly.  We were given a written script to know were we needed to include voices. We then had to go find, download and record sounds that we thought would fit correctly within the film.  The first sounds we searched for were the obvious ones such as gunshots and train sounds. We then realised we needed sounds we wouldn’t even think of, such as the sound of a brick being thrown into a mans back, a gun falling onto a carpet floor etc. Timing sound was the least of our worries, our biggest issue was deciding whether a sound needed to end or it would be continued, for example, we see the train and hear the train but when the film moves to a different shot, should we still hear the train? Etc We also realise we needed many different gun shot sounds as hearing 2-3 repeatedly doesn’t sound very realistic. I found this project difficult but I also feel I have benefited from it.

Because of this project I did a lot of research on sound in my sketchbook and really enjoyed learning about it.

For our next project (which I thoroughly enjoyed) we were all asked to find a sound clip that lasted about 30 seconds and write down all the dialogue and give it to another team. We decided to take a clip quite well known from ‘Hocus Pocus’ and gave it to another team, we were given dialogue from a film which at the time we had no idea what it was from, we now know its from ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’. What we did take from this dialogue was that it was based in New York or another American city in the 1920-30’s. We also guessed it was from a ‘gangster’ style period.

We were then told we had to make a 30 second animatic using this dialogue and so my team of me, Tyrone Owens, Hannah Loughridge, Charlie Maxwell and Aidhann Scott got to work.  We had one week to create this animatic and we were a bit fed up drawing people so we decided to anthropomorphise our characters. Aidhann thought it would be really funny to make the animal characters, farm animals and showed us the film Spotted by Gobelins on Youtube.

It was comical and had great cinematography. We loved the idea of the film being in black and white, I had mentioned Schindlers list and how the only colour in the film was the red of the little girls dress. In this time period the style in New York was glamorous and beautiful and we liked the idea of having the lead character wearing a red dress (highly inspired by Jessica Rabbit from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and then bringing in other hints of red throughout the film, and so we set to work with character development. I began designing a cow character, then a sheep. Tyrone thought It would be nice to have the lead characters as cats, and once we saw his designs, we were sold on the idea.

The story was based on a male and female cat character having a fight, the female leaves the house to go on a night out with her sheep friend, they are both wearing red dresses, the male cat in anger grabs a gun, goes onto the roof of the building and waits for her return to kill her, when they arrive the sheep gets out of the car first, the male cat mistakes her for the female cat and shoots her. The film ends. We spent a few hours working out this story and drew out a rough storyboard on post it notes. Here are some of the rough post it note story board pieces.

As we only had one week at this project we did not have time to create a professional looking storyboard and we quickly decided who was creating each shot of the animatic and got to work. I love the song ‘why don’t you do right’ by Peggy Lee and we thought it could be a nice idea to include this song throughout, by being on the radio, having someone whistle it etc, so that when the sheep is shot we hear the line ‘like some other men do’. And we even decided to name this animatic ‘Like Some Other Men Do’.

However, over the break I decided to re design a more professional storyboard and scribbled in red to show were the red would be in the film.

I am pleased with the animatic considering we only had one week, however there is a lot that could be improved and worked on if we had more time, this project really showed how well we worked as a group, as our tutor was shocked at the amount of work we had created within one week.

However, when trying to upload this film to youtube an error occurred that we cannot seem to figure out. Each time it uploads with uploads with a lot of the sound missing. The link below is the film with full sound being recorded on Hannah’s phone as could not get the actual file to upload correctly, sadly.

Since September until now we have done a lot of work in Design Discourse alone, not to mention Creative Elements, we have heard some presentations on cinematographers, Title Sequence Designers, art directors, and concept artists and we have really learnt how to analyse film. We have looked at Roger Deakins, who’s work in True Grit and Skyfall I found very inspiring, we looked at Kyle Cooper who did the title sequence for Se7en and we also looked at many concept artists for game and film, work from Feng Zhu truly inspired me and when our tutor showed us his youtube tutorials I was so excited.  His tutorials have helped me a lot.

Some of Roger Deakins work below.

Some of Kyle Coppers work Below.

Here is some of Feng Zhu and his students incredible work.

Jeff Kurtti released great books such as the Art of Tangled and the Art of Brave, both i own. They include some amazing work by Glen Keane and Claire Keane.  There is also some beautiful images in these books of work by James Aaron Finch who worked on concept art for the Princess in the Frog. All these art amazes me and always makes me want to do more work and try and improve.

Since September I think it is safe to say I have learnt a lot and have benefited from Design Discourse enormously as my work and thought processes have changed completely when facing a project.  Even  basic knowledge with such things as computer commands has changed. Even though, I primarily work with Sketchbook Pro, my knowledge and understanding of Adobe Photoshop has improved as well.

Reading books has helped me as well. I recently purchased The Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas, this book has helped  me with many things, from understanding basic animation to sound, going from drawings to computers, the ink and paint process, how making 2d animation has changed so much, how computers have changed the animation and film industry and so much more. I also took books from the University Library such as the Animators Survival kit by Richard Williams and from pencil to pixels and The Animators Notebook by Tony White which have all helped me a lot.

Since I have started this course I have become even more determined and excited by animation and have experimented on many little projects on my own, such as animating a ballerina and her walk cycle, and I have also spent some time working with mudbox so that when I begin learning maya I may understand a few basics a little better.

I am thoroughly looking forward to the rest of my time studying animation and am excited by the possibilities and thoughts of were I may one day be with a career in the Animation Industry.

My Animatic Shots

Here are the pieces of our animatic which i worked on.

 

Everyone else in the group has also done plenty of work and it will be shown once i upload the final animatic.

‘Like Some Other Men Do’ Animatic.

For our new project in Design Discourse we were all given the dialogue from a film that lasts 30-40 seconds and told to make a film or animatic using the dialogue, we were told not to find out what film the dialogue was from and so we didn’t, the dialogue is…

What do you think?
 This ought to be the right kind of place
 for a tough guy like you… Garbage cans, rats galore.
 Scram! I said take off! Beat it!
 Let’s go.
 Driver…
 Pull over here.

We were told to make it fun and entertaining, we realised from the dialogue that it sounded very ‘ganster/city/1920/30’s’ era and style. We decided to use animals instead of people. At first we liked the idea of farm animals  such as Cows, pigs and sheep etc. Here are some of our designs.

We then decided to use a cat character and crow for a cab driver, we liked the style and so we rolled with it.

Once we finally decided on the 4 characters of 2 cats, a crow and sheep we began storyboarding. Here is a rough storyboard we made on post it notes.

Dingy city building sets the scene

Man and woman having a fight, we see silhouette through window

Woman says the line ‘garbage,…

‘Rats…

Rats view of the window into apartment. 

‘Scram!’ she yells out the window.

The rats begin to run away.

The woman leaves her flat when she hears the car horn of her lift.

She is all dressed up in a glamorous red dress and gets into the car with her friend the sheep, also in a red dress.

She tells the driver ‘lets go’.  

We see the car drive off.

We see from the male cats view he opens a drawer to reveal a gun. A photo of his wife is on top.

We see his paw lift out a gun. 

We see his feet and tail as he walks up steps that appear to be outside on a building.

Screen goes to black and we see a clock whizzing by showing a few hours have passed.

We see the girls car come back and pull in from a view from the rooftop. We see he has alcohol and his gun. 

We see him sitting alone on the roof humming along to the song ‘why dont you do right’.

The sheep tells the driver to pull over.

She gets out of the cab and her cat friend begins to follow. 

The drunken male cat blurrly see’s the red dress exit the car and he shoots.

We have not decided whether the screen will go to black or whether we will see the dead sheep lying lifeless on the ground.

The End.

We will begin work on this animatic tomorrow morning, the deadline is on Monday and we will need to work well in a group to have it ready on time.

30 Second script

Our new project for Design Discourse is about finding a 30-40 second clip from a film that involves 3 characters, writing out the dialogue and giving it to another group. We will then have a new dialogue and have no idea what it is from, we will then record it and make an animation/live action or animatic using these 30 seconds.

My group decided to use a scene from Hocus Pocus, and here it is.

Character 1- What is this, sisters? Odds Bodkins!

Character 2- Farewell, mortal bus boy.

Character 1- Oh my!

Character 3- What are those? Whats that?

Character 1- Um..

Character 3- What is that?

Character 1- Uh, hobgoblins.

Character 3- Oh.

All 3 characters- Oooh! Oh!

Character 4- Bless you.

Character 1- Enough!

Character 3- Uh sisters, i’m very confused. I…i smell children, but i…i don’t see children. I….I’ve lost my power!

Character 1-  Enough, Enough, Enough!

Character 3- Sorry.

Character 1- We are witches, we are evil.

Character 3– Evil.

Character 1- What would mother say if she could see us like this?

Character 3– Oh

Characters 2&3- Mother!

Character 5- Mwahahaha!

Characters 1,2 &3- Master!

Learning how to Storyboard shots.

After we presented our animatics and storyboards, our tutor wanted us to think more about each important movement in pose to pose actions. We were shown a short clip from the 1977 film ‘The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh’. He showed us a 40 second clip of Piglet getting swooped up by a leaf and being blown away, only to bump into Pooh bear. He let us watch this clip about 4-5 times and then gave us the sound clip from that piece of film. Without being able to see the film any more we had to draw out the storyboard for that piece of film, determining what happens when by the sound clip we were given.  I have to say, i absolutely loved this exercise, it was fun and helpful.

We began by practicing drawing Pooh Bear and Piglet. Here are some quick sketchbook sketches.

 

 

We drew out rectangular boxes in our sketchbooks and began drawing what we could picture in our minds from what we had earlier watched. The clip began with leaves being blown and one large leaf being center screen.

 

We see Piglet sweeping away leaves outside his house when the wind momentarily lifts him from the ground.

 

 

The large leaf lifts piglet and blows him away for quite a while until he finally bumps into Pooh Bear and the leaf blows away.

 

 

Piglet continues to get blown away by the wind and Pooh slowly follows whilst watching.

 

 

Piglet gets lifted higher into the sky by the wind and Pooh sleepily continues to watch.

 

 

 

 

Pooh jumps up at the last minute and grabs piglets scarf, it begins to unravel and Piglet continues to be blown in the sky, getting higher and higher.

 

 

The scarf unravels until Piglet is holding onto the last piece of the unraveled thread. We see a final shot looking down at Pooh to explain how high up Piglet is.

 

 

 

This story happens for about 40 seconds of film and it took me about 45 story board drawings to depict. As you can see here i have only shown a few.

After i did this i decided that i had enjoyed it so much that i would extend on practicing the characters.  I wanted to show in my sketchbook the films style and use of colour, here is a little water colour painting i did of Piglet outside his home in the big oak tree.

 

 

I did these little drawings of Pooh bear in different poses using copic markers.

I really enjoyed drawing Piglet, probably as i got to draw him so much throughout so decided to do many different piglet poses and then added colour using Copic Markers.

 

I really enjoyed this project and would like to do something like this again in the future.

Perception Evaluation

Time for a brief evaluation on the past 6 weeks. The past 6 weeks have been alot of hard work, but they have mainly been alot of fun. Not only have we created a sketchbook, a blog, a film and an animatic, but we have made friends, good friends, and for me being an awkward, small, knitting, comic reading, tea drinking 21 year old disney fanatic is a bit of an accomplishment in itself.

Week One.

In week one it was really a week of bouncing off wacky ideas and post it noting them onto the window. We realised pretty quickly that the theme of perception was leading us down some pretty twisted, creepy ideas based around mental health. We quickly liked the idea of basing it around schizophrenia and the seven deadly sins. I also did sketchbook work and research on what exactly perception is and did a quick story board for an idea that never lead anywhere.

Week Two.

In week two we began developing ideas based on the seven deadly sins. We had come up with an idea of having a character or characters be each sin and give them torturous punishments for these sins, for example the glutton would be deep fried in oil. We realised that this would be impossible to accomplish unless it was animated and as Conann pointed out, we would drown in a 2 minute animation needing made in 6 weeks unless it was limited animation and we realised that wouldn’t be very effected for the ideas and imagery we wished to create.

Week 3. 

In week two we needed to get our heads down and get a solid idea down and get to work with it. We liked the idea of judgement and how it affects people mentally and physically which is were schizophrenia came back into the picture. As Niamh from our team is a model we decided to focus on the life of a model. Megan came up with the idea of Niamh having a doppelgänger. We started sketching out rough storyboard ideas and specific shots we envisioned.

Week 4. 

Monday of week 4 something great happened. Megan came in with an animatic created of how she envisioned the story, we fell in love and tweaked and worked it from there. We created the story of a young model who gets a letter in the post informing her she got a fantastic modelling job. She goes to the job feeling ecstatic and begins posing, the interviewer says she’s not good enough for it anymore. When Niamh turns around her face is awfully disfigured and wounded, to a horrifying extent. In the film we will begin to hear voices and thoughts running through her head from her doppelgänger ‘your a disgrace’ ‘did you eat today? i hope you didn’t’ ‘they aren’t laughing with you, they’re laughing at you.’ etc. The character turns to alcohol and in a moving scene draws pre surgery lines on her face describing the major alterations she feels she needs to make. She passes out drunk on her bed and when she rolls over to face the camera in her sleep we will see her face cut up and wounded once more. This sort of thing will continue in the film and the haunting voices in her head will get worse and worse until she cant take it anymore, grabs a scalpel and rips apart her face, she will scream more as the voices get louder and more over bearing and the film will end.

We began shooting by the end of this week.

Week 5

Week 5 we spent a lot of time filming and began basic editing and searching for the correct sounds needed for the film.

Week 6

The end is near! We worked our butts off this week editing and reshooting very early in the week with shots that hadn’t looked right when we saw them edited together. Early today we had what we thought a good finished film, but i feel we had gotten to engulfed in the work load that we couldn’t judge the film anymore like someone who had never seen it before and couldn’t understand what was easy to read and what was confusing. We got some outsiders perspective from Andrew of second year and Mike, one of our tutors.  Andrew was honest as we had asked him to be and explained that he didn’t really understand Megan’s part in the film as the stalker/ghost/doppelganger. We quickly edited her scenes to make Megan appear ghost like and it worked very successfully.

Mike was even more critical and explained that he couldn’t understand or read a lot of it and that the sound we had worked on wasn’t working well. Since we were focusing on schizophrenia we decided to bring in even more voices representing the thoughts in Niamhs head.  We spent all evening in uni fixing these problems, we didnt leave until after 8pm but i feel we have majorly fixed our problem. With our deadline in the morning, im glad we got the positive criticism today and got things sorted out.

I thoroughly enjoyed this project although it did have some exhaustingly long days especially when shooting. I wont lie, i’m glad its all over, but i did enjoy the project. If we were to do it again i would have asked for the criticism we got much earlier in the project and more often as it really pushed our film in the best direction possible.

 

Perception. The film.

The end has finally arrived and we finished our film today for the deadline tomorrow morning. It has had a lot of issues and major changes along the way, especially today right at the end. It came to our attention that the film wasn’t reading well enough and so we changed some shots and changed the sound dramatically leading us to stay in uni until 8pm. I hope it reads in the way it was intended and expresses anger, pride, vanity and mental illness such as schizophrenia. I hope it is moving and frightening and most of all i hope you enjoy it. It was a lot of fun to make, but i am incredibly glad its all over.

 

Film Shots

We have dramatically changed the film since these were shot and basically edited but it gives you an idea of the story and position in which the story reads.

Since then we have fully edited, added it many transitions and filters and we have worked hard on voice recordings of and given it a real schizophrenic approach.

Film opens in black when a letter comes through the door and fills the shot with light.

When the see lead character opening and reading letter.

We see a close up shot of the letter which informs us she has been selected to model for model Belfast.

We then see the lead character happily walk out the door.

She happily looks up at the sky and takes a deep breath of fresh air.

This shot then transitions into a new scene of her doing the same pose whilst modelling at her shoot.

We then see her continue to strike a few poses.

She oozes confidence.

We then see a camera flash

We then see the mouth of what we can assume is the interviewer saying ‘youre not good enough for this anymore’.

We go back to another shot of the lead character posing in a full body shot.

We see another camera flash

The screen remains white from the camera flash

We then see a side view of the interviewer snidely saying ‘i’m sorry’

The lead character swivels around in her chair to face the camera. We see her face become wounded and horrifying.

The character gets up and walks towards the camera.

Screen fades to black

Shot fades into shaky shots of alcohol

The hand held shaking expresses that the lead character is drunk

The drunken character judges her appearance to point were she begins to draw on pre surgery lines as if to alter her image drastically.

We then change to a shot of the character drunkenly stumbling to her bed.

She flops onto her bed.

Her back to the camera.

In her drunken slumber she rolls over to reveal her face, horribly changed, with deep wounds.

The camera fades to black

Camera blurs into the next morning

We see the character putting on her jacket to leave the house, her face perfectly fine again.

As she walks out the camera transitions and we see her walking out of the house with her face looking horrible again.

We see her walk out the door.

We then see a shot of her as a normal person having a normal fun time socializing. We begin to see a character

We see the lead character doing work whilst this stalker ghost stares in the unfocused background

We see a shot of the lead character walking home, the stalker/ghost soon follows looking hauntingly pale.

Once the lead character walks into her home we see a foot wedge open the door, no doubt its the stalker.

The camera pans upwards and we see a hand holding the scalpel 

We then see the lead character using the scalpel to cut into the pre-surgery lines.

The shot changes to layers of film of her cutting herself, we see blood pouring down her face.

We her pain and blood

Enough is enough and she screams

The screen fades to black.

The end.

Cinematography

Yesterday Conann was discussing Cinematography and showing us some beautiful examples of good cinematography for us to carry through into our paintings in our ‘New World’ projects for Creative Elements. One particular cinematographer who i thought was great was Roger Deakins. He did the cinemaotgraphy for The Secret Garden, The Shawshank Redemption, Wall-e, How to Train Your Dragon, Skyfall and many more amazing films. However, Conann showed us some of his work from True Grit (2010),  and i was amazed, the shots he captured were beyond beautiful. 

The light beaming through these windows in the dusty room is just beautiful.  Capturing the golden, warm colours really sets the mood. 

When seeing a landscape image like this, i truly understand the need for widescreen film. 

Another film by him i adore is Skyfall. I remember watching it in the cinema and just thinking, wow, this is incredible. 

the opening credits were entertaining, beautiful and had me glued to the screen.

Again Deakins uses strong light beaming through windows to create a strong silhouetted figure.

Only someone with great talent can strategically create an image in darkness and highlight in such a skillful way. It truly is inspiring. 

After becoming so inspired i decided to go to the library and took out the book ‘Cinematography Theory and Practice, Image Making for Cinematographers and Directors’ by Blain Brown. 

Already from only reading the first few pages, its a great help and opening my mind to new possibilities. It is making me think of the image im creating completely differently. When i make my film/painting etc i need to take into account…

• The Frame
• Light and Colour
• The Lens
• Movement
• Texture
• Establishing
• POV

Splitting things into the rule of thirds helps me visualize what i’m trying to create much better. Something people seem to overlook is in thinking that this is only important in photography, or only important in live action, as you can see here, it is always important. 

 

The main thing i feel i need to focus on is light and colour, what makes an image go pop? What leads you into the image? IS there only one basic colour from dark to light? Is it an array of colour? Where is the light coming from? and why?

This is something i feel i personally need to research to become better at not just film making but painting and photography. 

Something i hadnt even picked up on until a few years ago was filters in film, or one colour scheme throughout, i find it it be beautiful and is something i want to focus on now, take Pans Labyrinth for example, the entire film has a cold blue/grey or golden filter.

And take Honeydripper for example, it takes its name literally bringing warm honey shades into the film throughout. 

Other films focus only on one colour for a specific effect, a very basic idea of this comes to mind from Schindlers List. This film is done fully in black and white until we see a lone child in a scene of war disaster, this childs coats red colour is kept fully saturated in the film. It represents so much more than just highlighted an innocent child, the red represents the fear, anger, blood, love and loss of war. 

We later see a body in a red coat along with the other dead bodies in a cart being took to the incinerator, the first time i saw this film i cried my eyes out when i realized this revelation. This really does show how use of colour can be used for more than just an aesthetically pleasing image. 

I am looking forward to reading the rest of my book and hope to learn and work well from what i am learning.

 

 

 

 

Prosthetic Makeup in Film Making.

Yesterday, we began shooting our film which meant spending quite a substantial amount of time preparing to shoot due to needing Niamh to look beaten and cut up. We decided to ditch the tissue paper and PVA glue and we purchased liquid latex which worked much better!

We began by painting on the liquid latex using a paint brush, it was put on white but dried clear. We applied this to Niamhs nose and chin.

 

Once dry, we very carefully pulled and cut the latex away from Niamhs skin to make it look like skin cut open and ripped apart. As you can see from this photo, its very stretchy and effective. 

We painted in the wounds using face paint, lipstick and red food dye. The food dye was deep, thick and gunky and portrayed the idea of blood fantastically. Once it had dried a bit we put white face paint down the centre to look like bone peering through the wound. Once this was done we watered down mascara and painted and sponged it down Niamh’s face to give the idea of her having been crying.

As you can see in this shot, we feel this looks very effective. I am very pleased with the outcome.

 

As you can see below we all worked well and efficiently in a team to create this.

As effective as this was, we felt we couldn’t have Niamh in a film with just a beaten up face, there would need to be something more, we decided a beated, ripped about finger nail would have just enough ‘gross’ factor and effectiveness without over doing it.

We bought fake nails, eyelash glue and tissue paper to create this effect. We began by cutting up a fake nail and filing it to look beaten and battered. We stuck half on teh nail on using the glue, then glued on a very thin layer of tissue paper onto her actual nail and poured red food dye onto it, we then stuck the other half of the fake nail so it would like like it was hanging off her finger. We used eyelash glue instead of nail glue as we wanted it to look like it was barely still attached to her finger, this worked very well.

After doing all this we began shooting our film and luckily got it almost all shot, we will begin editing next week and capture the final shots in good time.