Tuesday 30 November 2010

Experimental Project Production Report


Experimental Project Production Report

For the experimental project this term, myself, Lucy and Corrine teamed up for production. We chose to use the short musical clip ‘Drones and Refrains of Death’ out of the choice of music’s. This clip stood out above the others for the staccato, edgy quality of the music and vocal chants/shouts. We felt we could produce something really unique to coincide with the music.

Our initial idea was to utilise a solid material to create an end result. Our first attempt made use of blue tack sculpted into a figurine model. When this proved slightly more restrictive than we thought, we moved onto use rice on a glass surface to creating shifting shapes and patterns. The rice proved to be a more effective medium to work in, allowing us to produce varied shapes, patterns and other things with relative ease, as well as being easy to work with. The oriental ambience of the sound also went well with the innate association of rice with the orient.

Eventually, however, we decided that rice didn’t quite do justice to the more macabre element of the music. Our decision to move from a solid to a liquid medium was what really made for an effective shift in direction, making use of a not inconsiderable amount of fake theatre blood to create our work surface. Jarring, strange and somewhat morbid images took on a whole new meaning when done in what for all intents and purposes looked like blood on glass.

The equipment used was fairly simple; a camera and a tripod, a glass plate and the materials mentioned above, using stop motion techniques to get the pictures of the various images and their stages. The footage was then edited together and finalised on the computer.
For my part, I helped produce the images in both the rice and blood mediums, along with taking a turn at operating the camera while we cycled roles.

The final result came out very well, in my opinion. Some slightly overt jarring occurred, but through fault of computer and software limitations. The images in fake blood really worked well with the music and its strange rhythm and chants. Images such as the skull and crossbones, bird like creatures and wolves really matched the grim nature of the sound.

No comments:

Post a Comment