Summary of Semester 1

So it is hand ins tomorrow and there is nothing more that can be done. So Im just going to post a summary of things I have done, what I have learned and what I am looking to do in next semester.

So I started off this year with an idea of expanding my previous 3rd year project of visualizing sound. Through the research process I have learned so much about visualizing music as well as improving my filming, editing, directing and producing skills.

In week 8 in my crit presentation I said by the end of the semester I wanted to create three main types of videos (as well as a lot of smaller media tests to further develop my ideas). Those three videos have been completed: The music video (daniel and lewis), a visual cue/ textural video (my video with the 1st year soundtrack) and a transitional video (the Gaelic video). Each video has taught me different things.

I would also like to point out that since releasing the music video "im done" on youtube, it has had 5000 views in a week and we have had a massive positive response. A company even wrote an article/review about it 2 hours after it was uploaded. (see here :http://www.ljrandco.co.uk/daniel-muir-dee-new-and-oh-so-talented/).

My editing skills are unrecognisable, at the begining of the semester I was googling "how to cut a clip in premiere pro"... yes.. it was that bad. Now I am a lot more time effective and dont struggle to find simple tools.

In terms of my project's development. I have now explored extensively the areas that I intended to explore and I am ready to take semester two on. I still dont EXACTLY know what my final project outcome will be but I will defiantly use the key points that I have established in my research proposal: Colour and note association, musical and visual characteristics, and creating a greater aesthetic for the eye and ear.

Essay Grade!

I am SO happy, I got my essay grade back on Thursday and guess what!! I got a A-, 18/20. That's pretty darn good, I am over the moon as I have never managed to achieve an A in my essays, so to get one in 4th year, I picked a very good year to get an A in my essay. To be fair though, I did work really really hard on that essay and obviously it has paid off. Gives me great hope for my dissertation as has motivated me even more!

What have I learned from this music video.

Green screening

-The subject must be better lit, taking out every shadow
-I wont be getting the subject to wear white, that was a big problem for reflections
-Box out an area for the subject to move so that they don't go in front of the over head lights and change the lighting on their face

Outside shooting

- Invest in portable lighting equipment
- If the lighting is back, probably shouldn't shoot there
- Have back up locations


Over all

-Film more, even thought I had almost 40 minutes of footage for a 3 minute film, I still struggled to find really good stuff to use.
-Making sure the shots are perfect before moving on to the next


Good things

-I have gained experience working with clients, taking into consideration of their style, genre of music and target market.
- I have developed knowledge in cinematography and composition when filming
- It has significantly improved my editing skills
- I have learned how to polish and make a video look more professional.
- I have learned the basic green screen and editing process

Tomorrow is the big day!

Well, tomorrow is the big day..shooting Daniel and Lewis music video. My brain is going mental with so much things to organize so I thought I would right a blog post A. to clear my mind and B. so you lovely people can see what I'm doing! OK

First of all tomorrow could go really well or well, bad. Because we couldn't find a suitable day before the Christmas break, I didn't know if we were going to get the video completed before hand in. But we managed to get a date for tomorrow but by that point uni had closed for Christmas, and the lecturers aren't back until the 7th.. tomorrow so I couldn't email them and expect a reply. BUT Robin emailed me back saying that although he wouldn't have time to properly timetable me a slot, he may be able to get me the room informally. So we still have a good chance of getting the room. Which is why I will be at uni at 9 on the dot to try and find Robin or another lecturer. FINGERS CROSSED.

List for Daniel and Lewis:

3x sets of clothes- No green
Any jewelry they need/want
Portable speakers
Copy of the final edited song
Props, eg Microphone, headphones- if they want
Umbrella
Waterproof jacket

List for myself:

Camcorder- Fully charged
Camcorder charger (for green screen shooting)
Camera- to take behind the scenes pictures
Tripod
Umbrella
Waterproof jacket
Storyboards for reference
SD card
Extra SD card
Black bags (to sit on if shoot location is wet)
Paper
Pen
Route map to get to location
Bus times for the 22


Order for the day:

7:00- Amy Get up and get ready for day
9:00- Amy go into uni and find lecturers for green screen
11:00- Pick up Lewis and Daniel from the train station
Depending on the rain situation, if it is dry when they arrive at 11, then we will go straight to the shoot location, but if it is raining we will go shoot the green screen scenes and hope the rain will stop.
6:00- 7 shoot night time footage


Link to weather for Dundee on Monday the 7th : http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2650752



Potential problems for tomorrow:

1. We cant get the green screen room ( option 2, go buy a very big bit of green material)
2. We cant get into the location (Resort to back up locations)
3. It rains all day- which may cause bad lighting for the camera (result of shooting in Scotland)
4. Boys miss their train-haha!


I think that is it from now but I will probably be on here in a mad panic about something else for tomorrow!

How to make my videos look more professional

Seeing as I am doing the music video for Daniel and Lewis, I want to make sure it looks as professional and as polished as possible so here is a great tutorial that shows how simple adjustments can improve the look of your footage.

Train Footage

I was on the train the other day and thought it would be a good idea to take some moving footage of the landscape  I think it will work really well with the Rhythm of the Gaelic Song. Here the videos I took. Hopefully they will edit in nicely to the video to symbolize traveling to visit her family.

They have a nice soft feeling of time passing by, with calm colour tones.

Let there be light

These are some concept film take in a drawing class. I really love the blurred candle, I was blowing at it but not too much to blow it out and it created a lovely effect.

Gaelic Music Video

Ok So I'm going to start on the Gaelic Music Video Competition. Firstly, here is a link to the song to listen to. Its down at the bottom and entitled " Clann a’ Ghreusaiche". The whole song is in Gaelic but non-Gaelic speakers can enter too. I have a copy of the words in English and its about the island that she loves, Raasay and her family even though they are far away.

Here are the lyrics:


1. Take my greeting over the Sound
Over to the green island that I love

Near the misty mountainous island (Skye)
Dun Caan is under the clouds

2. The little island is so famous
Raasay is my love

Clachan, Oscaig, Manitoba
Fladda, Torran, up to Rona

3. Clan MacLeod will be there forever
The Shoemaker’s clan are my family

After the war you took the land
There was no one in the area left wanting

4. Sorley, spread you poetry
The Cullins and Hallaig

Calum, come up the road
From the castle up to Arnish

5. A big family, of high standing and renown
Three sisters, six brothers

We are spread throughout the country
But our blessings and our greetings go to the island

Its a beautiful, soft song with a sweet melody and silky voices. I want to have a similar effect in the video. For this video I plan to focus on Timing, Rhythm, Harmony that has been applied in constructing the song and apply these characteristics to my video.



Link to song: http://www.feisean.org/en/projects/project.php?ID=11

Mindmap!

This is a mind map that I created for jotting my ideas for the Gaelic Music video.

Storyboard for installation idea

Here is a storyboard to describe my installation idea better.

Music for visual cue/textured video

Here is the music that I will be using for my video, I have uploaded it just onto youtube so you can listen to it directly on the blog and dont have to go onto another page

Idea for textured/visual cue video

OK! So I have talked before about wanting to make a visual cue/ textured video taking inspiration from beardymans "monkey jazz" video. I was struggling to find a song and I was lying in bed last night and I was scanning my mind for possible music tracks that would be interesting to use for this media test. Then it popped into my mind. In first year we did an audio module and one of the tasks was to make a ringtone for yourself that best describes you. So for that task I decided to make a ringtone out of the objects I had one my desk. They were things that I used everyday and pretty much summed up my life so I thought it would be an interesting idea. So I did it, it worked out really well and got a B+ for it.

Now, when I remembered about it last night I thought, why not use this as the music for the media test. It describes you and it currently has no visual representation for it. So that's what I am going to do!

Love and left- an interesting transitional video

I've known about this video for a quite a while but I forgot A. about the video B. that it relates to my project and c. when I remembered about it to blog about it earlier. But anyway. Love and theft is an amazing video, that you have to spend 6:50 out of your life to watch. The way in which the visuals and music work so well together is great. The video visualize the mood and feel of the music at the time, some times its ditsy and sweet and goes into full aggression and through the use of colour, style, timing and content the visuals follow along this roller coaster of a song.

I think it would be really interesting to try a transitional video to follow along with a diverse musical composition and to try and reflect the mood and feeling through visual means.

Possible locations

I took a walk tonight for some possible night shoot places.

essay writing time!

Well this is the time that I have to put down my camera and pick up lots and lots of books. I've actually been really good this year, I've been taking books out every since first week of classes so I'm feeling quite prepared. I have been mostly concentrating on the literature review and I have decided to split it into 3 sections that I feel are the most important factors in creating my final outcome.

Section one
I think I am going to start off with the theory of the association between a note to a specific colour.
Starting from the very beginning, I have been reading a lot about Pythagoras and Aristotle who "speculated that there must be a correlation between the musical scale and the rainbow spectrum of hues" (http://www.awn.com/mag/issue2.1/articles/moritz2.1.html). Also when I was reading Goethe's "theory of colours" book, I read in the notes that Aristotle also said that "it is possible that colours may stand in relation to each other in the same manner as concords in music, for the colours which are (to each other) in proportions corresponding with the musical concords, are those which appear to be the most agreeable" (page 418)
I have also been reading a lot about Sir Isaac Newton and his theories of the association between a musical note and colour. Newton was "the first to observe a correspondence between the proportionate width of the seven prismatic rays and the string lenghts required to produce the msucial scale D,E,F,G,A,B,C."(http://rhythmiclight.com/articles/InstrumentsToPerformColor.pdf)

I will probably take about goethe's theories and then lead on to Louis Bertrand Castel.

Castel in 1730 created an Ocular Harpsichord which was founded on the Newtonian Doctrine. The colour organ was wired up to 60 different coloured panes of glass that corresponded to a individual note. When the sound was played, a curtain would lift the pane of glass and reveal the colour to match the sound.

Before Castel built the colour organ he posed the question " Can anyone imagine anything in the arts that would surpass the visable rendering of sound, which would enable the eyes to partake of all the pleasures which music gives to the ears?" (D.Conrad, 1999. the Dichromaccord: Reinventing the Elusive Color Organ.)

Section two

In the next section, I want to focus on the similarities in characteristics of music and visuals. 

I will probably start off with a quote from William Moritz that I have previously mentioned. 

"Just as many different techniques create moving images, so do many different instruments create musical sounds. Images (ie colors, form, materials, juxtapositions and contrasts etc.) and sounds (ie. tones, melodies, rhythms, orchestral colors, harmonies and counterpoints) function the same in different media"

Then I will talk about Leopold Survage as I feel his "Colored Rhythm" is appropiate to this section. As a painter, he had a problem with space so he wanted to create an animation so that it was as free and fluid as music. So he took a characteristic from music and applied it to visuals

Then I will carry on to Wassily Kandinsky. Why he is in this section it that he had an interesting relationship between Arnold Schoenberg. They were both similar in the way that Kandinsky wanted to create new abstract art and schoenberg wanted to create a new harmony in music. Schoenberg's work "seemed without rules, random, based on "aimless wanderings"". The way Schoenberg composed his music helped Kandinsky convey his ideas on compositional structure for abstract painting.

Section Three

In the final section I plan to talk about how you create an aesthetic for both the eye and the ear. In this section I will talk about the study I found in that the conductor found that:

“Although information from the world enters our heads via different sensory organs – the eyes and ears in this instance – once they are in the brain they are intimately connected with each other. Impressively, they are connected in non-random ways, so hat some combinations of sound and vision go together better than others.”

then I will most likely talk about a modern visual music artsit, I am currently torn between Netia Jones and Maura Macdonnell. 

Music video workshop day in Glasgow!

I'm just back from a rather strange workshop, strange not as in it was boring but I was basically the only person that turned up so I had an entire day of skilled people talking to me!!

First of all the day started with a history lesson on music videos. The funny thing is that for my module last year 'digital media project' I chose the music video industry as my chosen area to talk about. So I had already did an extensive research into the history but it was good anyway to go over it and I found a few videos that I had missed it so it was still worth listening and taking notes. The talk was taken by Blair Young who has a music video/ promo company in Glasgow so it was really interesting hearing how he started out to where he is now. After the talk I asked him about graduated programs and talked to him about my fourth year project ( I gave him a link to my blog), unfortuantly due to the small size of the company they do not have a graduate program but he said if I wanted to come for some work experience I should get in contact with him... CONNECTIONS!

Then we closed for lunch and the second half of the day was held by Film G representatives (who organized the day). They have a competition on currently for passionate film makers and one of the section is a music video. Even though the songs are in Gaelic, that doesn't mean that I cant enter. I listened to a few of the songs and met a few of the songwriters who talked about their inspiration for their songs. It was really interesting having that one to one talk with the people who I could potentially be creating a visual representation for their music.

I would really like to enter as I think it would tie nicely into my project as well as a chance of winning £500 AND a day on a set of a music video, which lets be honest for a student is INVALUABLE! I'm not going to say I am defiantly going to do it because as I progress I might get some really good ideas that would be better to develop further, but I'm hopeful I have time for both!

Here is the link to Film G to find more:

http://www.filmg.co.uk/en/competition

Neon- Closing party

Well! what a week! been to a ton of NEON things and I'm up early for a music video workshop tomorrow! A very productive week. Tonight was pretty amazing, it was the final night for neon which has been hosting a whole variety of digital art this week and the finale was not a let down. But it was the final performance that caught my eye tonight. It was a strange looking photo booth in the corner. I got talking to the creator behind the installation and wow it was so cool. Basically Steve is a student at perth college study music (I cant fully remember the course he is on) and this was a project that he had done for college. So how did it work? Well you entered the photo booth and had your picture taken, then he translated the information into sound and then from sound to an image again! So essentially visualizing music! Here is my photo:

Pretty cool huh?

But back to the main attraction. Well creative would be an understatement. Two guys playing music and singing in a transparent prism that had visuals projected onto? Yes that is exactly what it was. An audio visual feast! Throw in some neon lights for music stands and wow, what an ending to a wonderful festival. I took some footage of the show that I will upload later for everyone to feast there eyes on, but I don't really know what else to say about it? I was a wonderful blend of audio/visual stimulation. 

Here's a short video that I took of the night

NEON- Heartbeater

Just back from another amazing neon spectacular! First of all I would like to thank Nilupul for such a warm and lovely evening. It was cozy and intimate with only a small amount of people who were all so kind and friendly. Firstly to describe this installation art, basically you are connected by your hands and feet and your movement controls and interacts with the audio/visuals. The piece is inspired by water, tranquility and peace giving off quite a meditative feel.Designed by composer Mattew Collings and artist Erik Parr, this installation is a sensation for the eye and ear. But what I espeically loved about this piece of art is that its not just used for neon, but Nilupul (where it was showcased) will be keeping "heartbeater" and using it classes and meditation purposes which I think is just so fantastic that a quite abstract piece is used in a really great way and not just for one week purposes.

At the beginning of the night, we were shown a short video of how the public interacted with "heatbeater". It was great seeing all the school children bouncing up and down and having such fun and interaction with quite an abstract piece. There were professionals for the evening that I was at and even though I do not want to doubt or offend their abilities but I much preferred the children and general public playing with it. Watching them, you could see the exploration in their minds and the adventure that they were on as it may seem just like fun to them, it was also expanding their minds to more than just maths and english. 

What I would have probably preferred with this installation would be if it was in a small encasing and you were on your own so it would become fully submersive to the user. Other than that it was a great night and I fully enjoyed the ways in which "heartbeater" connects with people on a different level to match their needs for it.

Here is an article that Nilupul posted on their facebook page :

http://www.facebook.com/nilupulfoundation

NEON- 100,000 Lux

WOW! Tonight was amazing! I am so glad Lynn mentioned this to me, it was great! Ok, so what was is it? Well it was a wacky combination of science, visual art, and sound design! Sound cool? They used the side of Abertay University which has a light system already built in to the exterior. The audio was in control of the visuals generating a colourful, bright and an equally engaging piece for the eye and the ear. What is really interesting is that this artwork was created by data collection from the solar dynamics observatory which programmers erin michno and ian reynolds used to create the spectacular visuals. Also involved was lecturers David Mactaggart and Antonia Wilmot-smith (Dundee University). The audio was created by Raz Ullah who is currently at Abertay studying his masters in sound design. The audio is very unique to say the least, I hope not to offend when I say that it reminded me of the old dial up tone you used to get when connecting to the internet. But as a whole it was very engaging for the eye and ear; the visuals where interesting and in sync with the audio. It had a very alien/spacey vibe to it which is what I really like about it as its inspirations/data technically originates from space so I think its quite cool that it gave off that effect. Over all I thought it was a brilliant exhibit of people from lots of different fields working together and taking something mathematical and numerical into something very beautiful

Here is a picture from Neons facebook page of the event ( I took videos and will upload them later)

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.517611701584027.121679.250366684975198&type=3&l=7e4b453583

Here is the video that I took (time lapse)

The leaves at night...media tests

So after going out a week or so ago, I noticed when walking home one day the the street light where actually inside the trees that I was filming and the effect that it gave off was beautiful. A dark blue sky, dark yellow leaves and a ray of light beaming onto the immediate leaves giving such a high contrast to the other leaves.

I really loved the contrast and in the second picture the kind of sun like glow even though it was dark, it just shows how lighting can really change how you see things.