When your filming…

I am going to describe some instances where certain ‘rules’ or practices are usually good to use. As a new filmmaker it is useful to follow such things but by all means nothing should be done a specific way and your style should not be constricted by such things, and after all this whole process is about finding your own style. You should think about these things when filming but they are for the benefit of the editing and a lot of them will make editing easier.

First I want to talk about the cutaway shot.

A cutaway is a cut from the main ‘action’ to something else, for example: there is a man walking through a door and towards the camera until close. Between him entering and reaching the camera there is a cut to a woman watching him, that is the cut away.

Cutaways are a very useful thing to generate when you are shooting as it gives you narrative drive but also allows you to move away from footage that is not so good or to cut together the best bits of many takes. If you have a scene where there  are a few people talking and the main shot is on one actor you can use cutaways to the other people as a way to join the first bit of one take to the last bit of a different take of the same scene (maybe the last bit of the first take wasn’t as good). This gives you the freedom to edit together the best material you have. You could also cut to a detail contained in the main shot which is then called an ‘insert’.

NOTE : An cutaway is better when it is animated. Instead of cutting to a person listening, have them say something.

Even better is when the cutaway reveals story or character and so does not just keep the film moving but adds depth. When the cutaways seem just important as the main shots this is called a parallel edit.

Now for a few useful tips I was given, again not necessarily the right thing for your film but as general rules pretty good.

• Set the frame first. Unlike video where you would keep the action in the frame, the lion, the kid playing soccer etc, you should let things move through your frame. If a man is walking let him enter and exit the frame. If there is movement it is not a bad idea to have the camera stationary.
• Keep the camera position relative to the action. If a car is moving from left to right do not shoot it from the opposite side as the direction change is confusing. Use the 180 line rule.
• If there is no motion in the action move the camera. If two people are in shot having a conversation and both are standing still, track across them or move in closer. Animate still shots.
• Always have a variation of your shot. It is good to get a different angle or a tighter shot of your scene so you can use it to cut to when editing. If your camera is at the same angle but a different distance from the action it is called an ‘on axis’ cut. Any change in angle should be at least 30 degrees, otherwise the difference is not enough and it will look strange.
• Think of the end of your shot before you start. If you are panning in a circular motion start in the awkward position so you end up in a natural stance at the end. If you can shoot thing that go together, do. eg man walks down one road and up another to a house, you film him walk towards the camera and then pan with him as he walks towards the house.
• Action cuts. If you are shooting cutaways always have the action enter and exit the frame. Do not start with the subject in the frame as it may not cut. If you can never have your characters already in shot, have them enter. With closeups have the character step into shot, the motion is good for editing.

Haiku

As a way of getting into the feel for telling stories through editing we have been given the task of filming and editing a short piece based upon a haiku. A haiku is a japanese poem that follows a specific structure. This good explanation below is from www.creative-writing-now.com:

What is haiku?

Haiku is a Japanese poetry form. The best haiku uses just a few words to capture a moment and create a picture in the reader’s mind. It is like a tiny window into a scene much larger than itself.

In English, haiku is normally written in three lines, with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line.

Haiku examples

Here’s a haiku poem written by a poetry student:

The last winter leaves
Clinging to the black branches
Explode into birds.

Characteristics of haiku

The following are typical of haiku:

• A focus on nature.
• A “season word” such as “snow” which tells the reader what time of year it is.
• A division somewhere in the poem, which focuses first on one thing, than on another. The relationship between these two parts is sometimes surprising.
• Instead of saying how a scene makes him or her feel, the poet shows the details that caused that emotion. If the sight of an empty winter sky made the poet feel lonely, describing that sky can give the same feeling to the reader.

The haiku ‘assigned’ to me is as follows:

Harvest moon:
around the pond I wander
and the night is gone. 

A few rules to think about. The edit can have no more than nine shots of any length and the film has to be between thirty seconds and one minute long. Other than these anything goes although we were warned against the adding of dialog and to keep it as simple as possible (no heavy story lines/characters), the point of the task is to tell a story with edits. Of course the haiku can be taken literally – the scenes could be of a moon and a lake and of the sudden rising of the sun – or in a metaphorical sense like the moon being something beautiful but you spent so long in a daze that morning came and you no longer can see it.

It is important to remember that this is not meant to be an edit that delivers information to the viewer. It is not integral that someone be able to guess your haiku from the film/edit. It isn’t for the brain of the viewer but should be directed at the gut, the generation of feelings/emotions. It could be called an associational edit, what associations give meaning.

Not sure what I will shoot yet.

Changing habits

It has been over 5 months since I moved to Sweden and it’s an understatement to say that I am now settled in. The transition from ‘new place’ to it becoming ‘home’ took only a month at most. But for the past three weeks my comfortable world has been shaken (just a little), which is always good, by the moving in of my new Spanish flat mate. For the previous months I lived with a German guy (Raphael), very pleasant and easy to live with but not to dissimilar to living with someone from England (not anything too extreme anyway). So now I have a Spaniard (Fernando) who is just a s pleasant and who I did know previously to his moving in.

Change is always good I find. After a few months in one place, if I can not leave to somewhere new, I often change my immediate environment (it helps to keep my itchy feet from making me run off to Alaska). By this I basically mean a rearranging of my bedroom/living space. This is something I did when living at home from time to time and I guess I kept the habit. Habits… I digress from my initial point, back to Fernando.

Fernando, being Spanish, has some different, let’s say timings from what I am used to and these have very quickly begun to alter my usual routine (I use the word routine loosely as my days are never the same and a random chaos seems to rule my world). The weather here is not hot enough for the afternoon siesta so common with the spanish and so naps are not included (although now and again I do enjoy a good nap). I guess what has changed the most is my eating times. Breakfast now comes around 1pm followed by a lunch at around 4pm and then dinner later around 9-10pm. Now, I have been temperamental with eating breakfast for years and often don’t have it, so this new eating schedule has given me an extra meal. Part of the reason for the late breakfast is due to the fact that another big change is that my nights have become later. Over the past few weeks I have been working longer  into the early hours of the morning and going to bed around 3 or 4am. As you can imagine this means I am sleeping later into the day. This is probably because of eating so late and (maybe this is why it works) fits nicely if you go out partying as the hours stay the same.

It kind of feels like a bad TV show. One guy living with different cultures every few months and at the end picks a winner! I wonder who is next. Fernando is great and it is giving me the opportunity to learn/re-learn some spanish, which is muy bueno (being able t learn that is, my spanish is not very good).

Starting out

The first lecture highlighted the importance of being specific when talking about the editing of film. To articulate your points on a film or analyse it properly you must be able to have the right language and or terms with regard to editing and to be specific when discussing them. In the book ‘A Short Guide To Writing About Film’, Timothy J. Corrigan describes editing as “the linking of two different pieces of film” and that “the break between… two images is a cut”.

Is the editing fast or slow? An average take is between 3 and 5 seconds, be specific in the speed. How long is each cut? How many cuts are used in one sequence. You should practice counting cuts within a sequence to give yourself a good base for estimating further down the line.

What types of cuts are used? There are many different types of cut and most are used conventionally to represent certain things like the passing of time or change in location. Is it a straight cut? – literally one frame placed after the other. Is it a fade in/out? – where the two frames blend into one another which is also a kind of dissolve. Cuts can be used to show a movement in space and time and often the conventions surrounding each cut can be reinvented to create certain feels. For example in John Ford’s ‘The Searchers’ (1956) we have a series of dissolves (conventionally used to show a change of scene) that last over 30 seconds creating an overlap/montage of images depicting John Wayne riding through different scenery as the seasons seem to change. this sequence shows us a long passing of time.

It is also important to consider the audio and how the cut of a visual very rarely means the audio is cut at the same time in the same way. More often than not we hear the sound of a visual before we see the visual. Audio plays a big part in films and so should be considered as importantly as the visual cut.

We were shown three sequences, Man Ray’s ‘Emak-Bakia’ (1926), Matthias Müller’s ‘Home Stories’ (1990) and Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk’ (2003). All had very different styles of editing and the point was to try and articulate what we saw with regard to how the sequences were edited. The problem we found when relaying our discussions )which we did in smaller groups) to the class as a whole, was that when trying to describe a film we lean towards the theme and move away form the specific editing tools and processes. The Hollywood film is meant to do this. The first films used certain cuts that became convention. (An early experiment in editing involved a long shot of a man siting on the opposite side of a room on a chair looking at his hand. The camera in this case becomes us and us the camera, we are viewing this scene as if we were the camera. What happened next was a straight cut to a close up of the mans hand. All of a sudden we are the man looking down at his hand, people had great trouble getting used to this kind of editing because it was so different to reality. The cut threw us through time and space and body.) So these conventions became the norm we have today and cinema began to try and adopt a invisible style of editing where the audience is unaware of the cuts and the film flows in a way that lets the audience focus on the story. Of course, like any other media, people began questioning the done thing and trying new ways of attacking or engaging the senses. All of sudden cuts are meant to be notable seen and to create a specific felling as a result.

We also watched an example of a film that had an absence of cuts, Claude Lelouche’s ‘Renevous’ (1976) a continuous shot from a camera attached to the front of a sports car racing through the streets of Paris. What does this lack of cuts do/mean when we think about editing and its effects? I have enbeded the clips below.

I could not find the specific clip from ‘Hulk’ but for those that have seen the film it is an early scene where an experiment is being done on a toad. The editing is reminiscent of comic books as frames are split and composite together breaking the ‘frames’ in different ways. (Part of the conclusion to the whole lecture is that are analytical skills within editing will improve so please forgive this brief description of the hulk sequence.)

 

 

Hello Sun

Well it seems my expectations of the Swedish winter have not been reached, not so far anyway. The past two years have seen temperatures of -25 here in Karlstad and for a town situated by a huge lake an epic amount of snow. This year however, decided to be a bit warmer. There has been a severe lack of snow and low temperatures and I have had to venture further north to get my cold fix. One of the things I was most looking forward to in Sweden was an extreme winter. Not just so I could regress and play in the snow but also for the experience of a proper winter. It turned out that this winter Karlstad recorded it’s highest temperature for December at a reasonable +11 degrees. I’m hoping my occasional verbal disappointment with the weather will tempt fate and send the wrath of whichever nordic God handles it upon me.

One of the things I was told about was the lack of sunlight in the winter months and how it affects the locals. I was ready for this long, hard, cold period where the people basically hibernated and I would crave the warmth of the sun. I heard somewhere it could get as bad as only 3 hours of sunlight per day. Now it seems like a lot of talk, unless like the temperature this year has been an anomaly. At the back end of January the hours have already started creeping back and it is getting lighter and lighter with each passing day. The worst it got was that by 3pm it would be dark but it didn’t seem to last long nor had a psychological effect on myself or anyone I knew. Definitely not the winter I had imagined.

My travels north were adventurous enough to give me my fix however and up in Abisko we only had a few hours of daylight for the four days we were there. There was also a lot of snow and the chance to go dog sledging.

Theory Assignment – Q2

A comparative analysis between ‘Ser Mot’ (2011) and Norman McLaren’s ‘Begone Dull Care’ (1949)

‘Ser Mot’ is a three minute long stop motion animation produced with stills cameras, tripods and a lot of patience. The visuals in the film, enhanced by experimental music and sounds, deal with the growth of nature. You see plants and other organic forms seemingly grow. The production of course was the opposite in that the plants were chopped millimeter-by-millimeter and photographed repetitively and reversed in the final post-production to give the illusion of growth. ‘Begone Dull Care’ is a eight minute long animation paired with music by the ‘Oscar Peterson Trio’ in which simple forms and vibrant colours dance and move to the tune of the music. The animation was made by drawing directly onto 35mm film. Colour is added later through various dupe prints assembled in parallel.

Both movies, as with most animations, had a very large production time – drawing out each frame individually requires this as does making a stop motion where one image is one frame. Differences in the process however can be seen in the structure and editing of the films. McLaren’s film had a very linear process in that he started drawing at the start of a reel and went through to the end. A regular occurrence in the production of animation is the use of key frames whereas McLaren’s “natural sequence” of production “seldom happens in film making” but, as he describes, this natural linear way of working “had a direct bearing on both the detailed and total continuity.” Similarly in ‘Ser Mot’ no key frames could be used to aid production as a ‘scene’ had to be shot from beginning to end because each was a one time deal due to the nature of the work. They differ in linearity, even though both follow this ‘start to finish’ mode, in a few various ways. Firstly the nature of producing ‘Ser Mot’ meant that the captured frames were reversed to create the effect of growth – this turns upside down the nature of start to finish. Secondly, the ‘footage’ collected for ‘Ser Mot’ was not done in a natural sequence and as each ‘scene’ was a stand alone they could be edited (post-production) in any manner or order. It is true that in production each scene had a beginning and end but there was the ability afterwards to chop up, make cuts to different angles or shots, breaking down the linear production nature. With ‘Begone’ the music was driving the narrative and so the frames had to stay in order to keep in time with the music.

A similarity between the films is the freedom that the filmmaker(s) had, in a more spontaneous creative way, because the films were made in real time. Without the aid of scripts or storyboards the maker was able to change decisions or make new ones as he went along.  This is not to say that no pre-production occurred, as a lot of work went into the mapping of music for ‘Begone’ and with ‘Ser Mot’ there was pre-planning of how to attain the best effect and a scouting of locations before production. Both, however, were able to act on the fly during actual production and had no pre determined specifics when dealing with composition. With ‘Ser Mot’ and ‘Begone’ the composition of the  ‘shots’ was an intuitive changing thing, even if a pre planned thought existed it could change dynamically. At one minute forty into ‘Ser Mot’ the is a scene where a small plant grows out and up from the bottom of the frame, the sky is visible and the background is framed by trees, the whole scene looks monotone. Towards the end colourful leaves appear on the plant adding a contrast to the monotone of before. This particular ‘shot’ was stumbled upon randomly and the composition set up on the fly.

Each of the films relies heavily upon music but in extremely different ways. ‘Begone’ is the music, it is driven by it and the visuals were tailored for it and born from it. Although highly important in ‘Ser Mot’ the music had no bearing on the actual production but instead was added later to enhance the film. Around two and a half minutes in to ‘Begone’ we see a yellow background with a blue strip filling the left side of the frame (about one third of the frame) and two potato like objects which start top left stationary but expanding slightly with four beats of the piano and then sliding down to the bottom right of the frame, in time with the piano as the notes slide from high to low, and afterwards repeating the four beats as previously heard. At around twenty seconds into ‘Ser Mot’ you see the branches of a bush come into focus and red and black large berries appearing in pops along the branches whilst over the music you can hear a rustling popping sound which was recorded and placed in that particular scene for effect. So you can see from the examples that one film is driven by the music/sound and the other uses it as a tool.

A huge difference in the films was the techniques used to create them. On one hand with ‘Ser Mot’ you have camera equipment, tripods and real things to be photographed again and again, not to mention computers and editing software to put the images together post-production. In comparison you have the more analog technique used in ‘Begone’ where a real piece of film was drawn upon by hand frame by frame with ink and a pen. The images in ‘Begone’ are man made, not taken from real life, and as a result quite inviting and mesmerizing. It is always intriguing to see the inanimate made animate even with simple lines and shapes. The interesting thing about ‘Ser Mot’ is that the images are made from real life but placed into the realm of the unreal in that they show something, or propose to show something, which we do not usually see. We cannot say that we regularly see change occurring in fact it is very rare. When we see footage of something in super slow motion or a time lapse of a flower blooming we are instantly intrigued because these are things we do not see every day.

A massive help to McLaren’s piece was the ability to correct mistakes by wiping clean the film – “one swipe of the damp cloth affected all the traditional processes from script through to negative cutting”. With ‘Ser Mot’ this was not possible, if a mistake was made like too big a cut of a plant then the shot was abandoned or would have to be re worked post-production. Often at times people were caught in one or two of the photographs, which could be amended by cutting out said photographs, as long as the effect was not too jumpy or unrealistic. McLaren says that “with hand drawn technique, one slows down, to observable speed, the world of frantic mobility” as with ‘Ser Mot’ the desired effect was to slow down but actually the post-production was about speeding up the process we had gone through. “When beginners draw footage by hand and the result is projected at normal speed, the image-flow is so fast that it gives the impression of looking at thought, if thought were visible” – we also had a problem in that when first playing back the images the sequences went very quickly at 15 fps and so we ended up slowing most down by fifty percent. This is something we were able to do as a fix whereas McLaren would have had to plan this from the beginning. That, however, was part of his pre-production set up with the music – “Measurements are put against the notes on a dope sheet, which is usually a simplified musical score, and, by subtraction, the length of each note in terms of frames is written in.”

+ Quotations taken from dossier on Norman McLaren from the reading list

Theory Assignment – Q1

 Summary of the texts.

The Cinema of Attractions – Sean Cubitt

Cubitt in his review essay ‘The Cinema of Attractions’ uses a wide range of theorists within the field of cinema to discuss distinctions between narrative film and the earlier film characterised by “their interest in spectacle and astonishment” (pg 276), the idea of ‘attraction’. He talks about not having cinema continuing just as a story-telling medium but to have it “astonish, surprise and amaze its audiences with actions, gestures, movements and effects” (pg 276). With this, story telling becomes optional rather than a necessary part of film and the ‘cinema of attractions’ theory is showing possibilities for the development of contemporary animation. He goes on to describe stop-motion films as fascinating in this respect as they give “inanimate objects… the gift of moving themselves” (pg 277), and these objects do not need to rely on a story to be engaging. Shock, however, is not the only non-narrative resource to come from early cinema as Cubitt describes with the help of Diderot – “viewers are invited… to wander into the scene portrayed, and to lose themselves in it and in reverie” (pg 278).

Cubitt continues this thought with examples including Zhang Yimou’s Ying Xiong (Hero) (2002) in which slow motion is used during fight sequences offering a contemplative, visually beautiful, deeper look at the world. Moving on to 3D animation he discusses the need for technological advancement and whether there is need for the fur on an animated mammoth to be so perfect because of our desire to excel. Moving to the opposite side he talks about the YouTube culture and how success is not necessarily dependent upon image quality.

Concrete Animation – George Griffin

Griffin describes the importance of the process of animation, born from his desire to put on a show, to control his audience (he describes frustration as people would spend too long looking at one of his drawings and miss another entirely), and conjugates his ideas into ‘Concrete Animation’ – “It suggests the tactile, the tangible, the real, the stuff which is often forgotten in the river of illusion. Just as concrete, used in building construction, is formed by the coalescence of discrete particles into a solid mass, so too is animation more than the sum of its parts, be they frames on a strip of film, pages in a book, or a sequence of objects” (pg 261). He believes something has been lost with the technological advancement of animation and looks to understand the attraction of “real stuff.” – “Concrete animation is experiential and pervasive; it may take many forms and exist in a wide range of sites” (pg 262).

Griffin goes on to describe some of his work, which uses physical objects that remain as evidence afterwards. ‘Block Print’, allowed a city block to be bound into a “round book” giving it an endless cycle and ‘Step Print’, as an installation, allowed viewers to interact and discover the piece rather than just watch it. He describes the process of his work and that the outcome should also be a description of the process. Another thing Griffin talks about is no matter how amazed we are at developments in CGI we still stand mesmerized by “whirling objects in real space” (pg 269). Using the example of Barsamian’s and his own work he describes the importance of sculptures as animations and flipbooks as sculptures. Hw gives credit to Breer, commenting that his “penchant for randomness, particularly in his insouciant shuffling of sequence cards and stuttering mutoscopes of differing shaped pages, has helped a generation of animators to free themselves from the obligations of methodically smooth motion” (pg 272).

Invisible Culture – Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault

Like Cubitt, Dulac and Gaudreault focus on the idea of attraction or ‘cinematographie-attraction’ as they put it – “Full of interruptions and sudden starts, this experience was a chain of shocks, a series of thresholds”. They start by looking at early animation techniques and why they held attraction. The phenakisticope for example took away any sense of beginning and end. The images mounted on a circle meant that linearity gave way to attraction. The zoetrope on the other hand with its longitudinal nature gave more of a linear feel – “the zoetrope infused them with a hint of self-realisation” – but in the end could not offer more than to “start up again attractionally”.

Their discussion is based around the technological advancement of techniques and the birth of narrative within the animation world coming around with Reynaud’s machines – “The narrativity… was possible because Reynaud was able to give his series of images the development required for any narrative to occur.” With the developments made with pictures using first the kinetoscope and then the Lumiere’s cinematograph, which originally kept in the realm of attraction eventually moving into more detailed narratives. The main focus of the article is in the differing thresholds with regard to attraction animation and narrative. The first animations lacking the basic thresholds of start and end were defined with different thresholds as they developed not just in a linear sense but by framing also. Of course with the advent of celluloid, of shots and of editing thresholds and narration grew a great deal. Even so, with the new technologies we have in the internet using flash and quick time we saw new technologies repeating a similar timeline in the creation first of short animated (digitally) loops and moving on to short and feature length films made with computers.

The Sharpest Point

The book, edited by Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke is a collection of essays from a wide range of practitioners within the scope of animation (including some who would not consider themselves primarily as animators) to look at it in different ways and to ask and answer surrounding questions. Not all the essays talk about animation directly but as Gehman and Reinke put it, “all relate to question’s about animation’s position in contemporary theory, criticism, and industrial and artistic practice” (pg 7). The essay’s range from looking at the role of animation within special effects and 3d modeling to Zoe Beloff discussing her desire to ‘open up’ the moving image using new technologies. As well as philosophically toned writings, we also get insights into different practitioners including Daniel Barrow’s ‘Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry’, which reads like a diary entry with no explanation, adding a strange diversity to the collection of essays. Also included are examples of works whether to make a point about the psychological effect of ‘not seeing’ as Reinke describes in the first essay using the death of Bambi’s mother as an example of how not showing something can be stronger than showing it, or to describe different computer generated, code-based works like ‘Long Division’ (2005). Another ‘chapter’ is nothing more than the script of Jude Norris’ ‘Red Buffalo Skydive’ (2001) a juxtaposed installation/animation where you see a loop of a buffalo running and listen to a man and a woman (Norris herself) regaling an account of an encounter with a paraplegic skydiver. The book is an interesting mismatch of philosophical thoughts, contemporary ideas and descriptive informative writings on styles and devices of animation.

In the opening essay, ‘Stray Notes on Animation’, Steve Reinke delves interestingly as mentioned previously into the psychological effects of death within animation and film. He uses two examples that although deal with the same thing use different visual applications which offer differing results. The first is Jean Renoir’s live action feature ‘The Rules of the Game’ (1939) and particularly a scene in which a rabbit hit by a bullet, falls, twitches and lies dead. He compares this ‘in your face death’ with the more subtle technique of Walt Disney, in particular ‘Bambi’ (1942). Both films deal with death but unlike ‘Rules of the Game’ it is only visual seen once in ‘Bambi’, when the nervous pheasant flies into the air and is shot down, at a distant from us, and falls to the ground. The most traumatic death in the film is arguably the that of Bambi’s mother, a strange effect as nothing is seen, no narrator confirms what has happened, we just hear the gunshot and see the startled face of the young deer as he fears what has happened. Why is it much more powerful to keep the actual killing hidden from the viewer, does the absence make us want to believe it did not happen and make the trauma worse?

Like many I remember the scene from ‘Bambi’ vividly, but another animated film stuck with me more and that was Martin Rosen’s production of ‘Watership Down’ (1978), a novel written by Richard Adams. Like Bambi it involves talking animals and follows a group of rabbits as they try to find a new home to escape an impending danger. Death is a major theme throughout the animation and even a grim reaper like character called the ‘black rabbit’ features numerous times, to take the dead. Within the hour and a half you see rabbits fighting each other, caught by snares, killed by dogs, run over by trains, and eventually at the end an old rabbit just lying down and dying form old age. What is interesting is when I recently watched the film again it wasn’t the blood or the ravaging dog tearing holes in the rabbits, not even the flat hedgehog on the road that I remembered but the one rabbit that is taken away by a hawk at 21:00 minutes into the film. The rabbit in question runs out of the cover of some crops to eat a weed, we see a shadow pass over then a squeal and the close up of talons before returning to where the rabbit used to be where now is just a bit of fur. Strange that this had more effect on me as a child than some of the more graphic scenes in the film (which is still talked about amongst friends as a nightmare inducer), and growing up in the countryside I am certain I saw my fair share of road kill and dead animals, yet what stuck with me was what I did not see. Reinke describes it so with regard to the two films he talked about – “The off-screen deaths of cartoon characters can pack an incredible wallop as they raise the spectre of symbolic (and actual) maternal death, while the on-screen death of an actual rabbit is likely to cause a much slighter psychic disturbance, even as it directly raises a complex of moral issues” (pg 17).

Assignment 2

A comparative analysis between ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ (Sauper, 2004) and ‘Värmland Stories’ (Collaborative, 2011).

To introduce ‘Värmland Stories’ it is a good idea to first talk about (and compare with Darwin’s Nightmare) a short film I made over the duration of the course. The film entitled ‘Turning Points’ was a one-minute documentary about a Swedish Girl who rode BMX. Although ‘Turning Points’ is only one minute long and ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ runs for one hundred and seven, similarities can be found between the two seemingly different films.

Both films use the personal lives of people to deliver a story, with ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ numerous people are interviewed and their stories are told to get a wide view of the effect of one particular problem (the introduction of Nile Perch to Lake Victoria). ‘Turning Points’, however, only focuses on one specific person and the point of the film is not to highlight a major economic problem but just to tell a small part of a seemingly normal persons story. Although the aims and ends of the two films seem different both use similar devices or techniques to get there. Interviews are integral to both films. For the first forty seconds of ‘Turning Points’ we have a continuous interview shot of ‘Emmy’ the character, talking about a situation involving her brother. It is a head and shoulder shot of ‘Emmy’ sitting on a couch in a dimly lit room, she takes up a third of the frame positioned slightly right of the centre, and there is the bottom of a painting visible by the left of her head. She talks about her mother, revealing subtlety some feelings about her – “and she’s just always right” – the point is not about her mother but about finding out that her brother had been injured. The fact that she is hugging a red pillow in this shot also shows vulnerability, possibly due to the nature of the talk or her nervousness in front of the camera. The fact that the pillow is in shot seems to suggest that we are looking at ‘Emmy’ in her own environment which is also true of the interviews conducted in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare – twelve minutes in we have a scene in which Sauper is filming ‘Dimond’ who owns a fish filleting factory, the interview is conducted in his office.  Another similarity between these two specific scenes is that you hear the filmmaker from behind the camera in both cases. This seems to add a personal feel to each movie, showing that each filmmaker has an interest in what they are doing. At thirteen minutes into ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ just after we have a black screen with text telling us of the Nile Perch ‘experiment’ it cuts back to Dimond saying how the Nile Perch have helped and from behind the camera Sauper speaks. At nineteen seconds into ‘Turning Points’ when Emmy says that her mother has never said sorry about anything we here the filmmaker from behind the camera as he adjusts the height of the shot.

In the second part of ‘Turning Points’ we move away from the interview shot to a section of cuts of the character riding BMX in a skate park. The multiple shots of jumps and falls into a foam pit seem to show a need in the character for a cushioned environment even though she talks about how she needs a sport where she “only has herself to blame”. This revealing conversation is a part of the interviews conducted in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ as is the shots where the interview continues over the top of footage of the characters doing their jobs or on the streets. At minute twenty-seven of ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ we meet a character called ‘Jonathan’ who is the only painter in town. He describes his paintings and how he used to sleep on the streets as we see shots of kids on the streets. This acts as a visual confirmation of what Jonathan is saying, whereas in ‘Turning Points’ it is used as a contradiction to highlight insecurities.

‘Turning Points’ was one of a number of short documentaries that were edited together into a longer film called ‘Värmland Stories’. The similarities between this bigger project and ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ are much more observable than with ‘Turning Points’ on its own. For a start both ‘Värmland Stories’ and ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ seem to have the same structure. ‘Värmland Stories’ is made up of twenty plus short documentaries placed together to form a wide look at one place. Not all the documentaries have direct links to each other but all offer a bigger insight into Värmland as a place and what it is to make documentaries. Similarly ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ is a collection of stories from people and places surrounding Lake Victoria giving us an better view at the effect the Nile Perch has had on many different communities and people, as well as asking questions about the illegal arms trade and the connection this has to the fish.

Throughout the two films there are changes in stories and both use two different tools to make the distinction between ‘chapters’. Although these ‘chapters’ are different to one another every part of each film flows as one story. In ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’, Sauper used black screens with text often to introduce the characters we were watching but also to set a mood or give information about what we will be watching next. A few examples are at forty minutes in, “Two million white people eat Victoria fish every day”, sixty-three minutes in, “A few million Africans eat… what the big planes would not carry”, and at ninety minutes in when talking about the Congo, Angola etc, “…the bloodiest conflicts in history since WWII”. All of these screens are used to augment what is being seen on screen or what is about to be seen. In ‘Värmland Stories’ a very different approach is used. Instead of having screens with information, throughout the film were hear a narrator who is never seen. The quality of the sound mixed with the fact that when we hear the voice we are often watching footage from a moving vehicle be it a plane, bus or view from a car window. The voice, much like the text in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ is a reoccurring theme throughout the film and acts to break up and inform the audience of specific traits the documentary films and filmmakers have. A few examples are at three minutes and twenty seconds, “…one of these principles is curiosity…”, at eighteen minutes, “…turning the unfamiliar into the familiar…” and just before the thirty minute mark, “…not that concerned with technical perfection…”.

The films start and end in a very similar way. With ‘Värmland Stories’ we hear the buzz of a plane as a shot looking out the window of a plane fades onto screen. The wing is seen extending into a dusk sky as it slowly turns into night all the while the flashing light on the end of the wing lights up the screen in controlled beats. Around twenty seconds into this sequence a melancholic tune is heard played by a guitar, which takes us through the credits and the title and into the first short documentary. With ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ the credits come in first, red and white on a black screen and then a sad tune played by a string instrument partnered with the noise from an air traffic control office. As a shot of the sea comes on screen we see the shadow of a plane and singing joins in with the strings as the shot pans up until the shadow moves out of frame and the plane casting it moves in. The shot is taken from another plane, we then cut to a shot taken from underneath a plane, looking down onto the passing landscape where the huge shadow of the plane sweeps over the ground like the grim reaper. The plane is low in the sky as if coming in to land and so in both films we start with the feeling of arriving by plane with a musical accompaniment. The shadows of the planes in ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ also mirror the end of ‘Värmland Stories’. At minute forty-seven from a black screen we hear – like at the beginning of the documentary – the buzz of plane engines. After a few seconds the image appears taking up the left hand side of the screen and leaving the right side black. We see the shadow of the wing as the plane moves down the runway before the narration kicks in and the plane starts climbing, leaving the ground behind. As it pulls up the full shadow of the plane comes into view along with the landscape spreading to the horizon, which is when the title appears on the right of the screen before all goes black. In the same way we have a plane taking off at the end of ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’. Instead of being shot from within the plane it is tracked down the runway from atop a hill a few kilometers away from the plane. There is a woman watching and smiling as the plane takes off, looking from the plane to the camera. The camera pans, following the plane down the runway and then stops letting the plane take off and exit the frame. Both films start and end with this device of arriving and although use the departure of a plane as an end sequence they have different feels. Because in ‘Värmland Stories’ the shot is from within the plane we are leaving with it and so an end is more definitive but with ‘Darwin’s Nightmare’ we watch the plane leave from a distance leaving us behind with the sense that the story we just travelled through is not yet over.

 

 

 

Reinvention of Photography

I find myself in an odd mood today. I have been looking through the work of some of my fellow students back in Coventry and suddenly had a feeling of guilt. The guilt stems from my lack of progress with a professional attitude and or presence with regard to my photographic practise. To name a couple, my friend and 3rd year undergrad Dorrell Merritt who recently was published in ‘Dazed and Confused’ magazine (visit his website here.) and a first year Alex Mason who has been increasing his professional portfolio with musicians like Ben Howard and Kasabian. I know Dorrell works very hard and has done for the two years I spent with him at university, and I’m sure Alex has the same drive in the pursuit of his professional career as a photographer.

The question I find myself asking today is, ‘when did my drive leave?’ I love photography and from the start I was proactive in making contacts initially around the university and then further afield, partly for work, partly to spread my name around, and it worked. I secured numerous jobs in and out of the university through word of mouth. Recently though my aspirations have dwindled somewhat with regard to my photographic career. I was always interested in travel, seeing new cultures and places is how I envision the next years of my life, and the plan was to incorporate photography into this as a ticket or money maker. I don’t know what has happened over the past few months but I just don’t see myself in that way. Photography is something that I will always have and will always do, but, for the present time anyway, not necessarily a career choice.

Maybe it’s the fear of narrowing myself into one line of work, maybe I just got lazy. I have always worked hard at what I do and possibly this feeling has come about because of my distance from the course and my involvement with different work here in Sweden (which was never the intention). The work I am doing here was meant to augment my story telling abilities learnt at Coventry and it is, I just need to get back into the swing as it were.

My cameras have been collecting dust a little since being here, mostly because of the intensity of the courses I am taking and because (maybe this is a bad thing for a photographer… I don’t think so) I needed a break from looking through my view finder. I always find myself in the predicament of photograph or take part. Often is the case when a photographing opportunity arises that I have to choose to take part (for an example jumping off a waterfall) or photograph the event. Another thing I have learnt to love from being involved with photography is to just enjoy a moment. A good example is my recent trip to Estonia across the Baltic. We were on the deck of the ferry having some drinks and the northern lights were lighting the sky off the stern of the boat. It was an amazing experience and a rare time that I did not have a camera around my neck. Instead of rushing back to my cabin and grabbing my camera i opted instead to stay and just enjoy the moment. It is an experience that will stay with me always, regardless of my lack of photographs.

I think it is important as photographers to let go sometimes and just enjoy the world with your own eyes and not through a lens. I met an american guy here in Karlstad, a student from Georgia, who was big into photography. He didn’t study it academically but always had a camera with him, constantly taking photo’s of everything. One thing he could not understand was the fact that even though I was a photography student he would take more photographs than me. Maybe my teachers back home would scorn me for it but I feel I have reached a point that unless I have a specific idea/project/aim, whatever you want to call it, I don’t feel the need to take photo’s. I often do, just for the sake of taking photo’s as I enjoy it, but I have learnt to enjoy things without it.

I was going to write that it feels as though I have lost my drive or desire but I do not think this to be true. Even as I write this I am becoming more excited by my photographic existence. I think I am at a point where I am reinventing what photography means to me and what it means for me professionally speaking. I consider myself a story teller first and foremost, photography is one of my tools and my time here in Sweden is giving me even more tools. I don’t know where this is all going, but that’s the exciting part.

Ser Mot

This is the completed animation. Made with stop motion photography and sound. Shot over a three week period in the wilds of Sweden.