Where did the time go?
Oh my goodness, it’s the end of March already and I return to Uni next week! Where did all the time go!
I suppose it didn’t help that I’ve been stuck on my back for the last couple of days because of hurting it at work 
oh well it just means I need to get my act together.
As an update though, I’m still carrying on with the Sound Art idea, I still haven’t pin-pointed how I’m going to present it or get my ideas/views across.
The more I think about it, the less I like my idea of doing different sound pieces, I also think in order for it to be effective I should have started it at least 2 months ago which was even before I got my idea.
So once again it’s back to the drawing board for me, but I definitely want to keep the sound art idea.
Reading again up on both my essay and the books I used for my essay, try get some inspiration nothing has yet struck.
I am a bit tempted towards showing the different views on Sound Art…but no matter what I think about doing I just think it’s only my idea on what Sound Art is and not really critical enough.
For instance John Cage’s view on Sound Art differs from Max Neuhaus opinion on sound art as the latter artist says this ‘“Now even in the aftermath of the timid “forever Mozart decades” in music, out response surely cannot be to put our heads in the sand and call what is essentially new music something else – “Sound Art”…”’. (Licht 2007: 10).
With ‘new media’ being a termed used for the type of art that John Cage creates using silence and noise which is also similar to the artist Pierre Schaffer who dealt mainly with background/environmental noises.
On top of which you also have the ‘electronic music’ area as sound art – which in my opinion isn’t sound art either as it’s produced to be music and to listened to as music rather than perceived as sound art. Considering that music is an established art form itself.
Again though – how could I show this and would this answer the brief?
Problems!
I should have known something was bound to go wrong the project was running too smoothly for me which is unusual, and now I’ve hit an obstacle.
I imported the filming we did, and then tried to play around with it in after effects to get the distort right…however no matter how many masks I put on it I can’t seem to get rid of all the background without getting rid of them!
I’ll work on it really hard on getting most of the background masked out and it’ll look fine, but then the scene plays on and because their moving the colours change and different parts of the background and them disappear!
That was for the digging so I thought I’ll have a break from that and do the world war 2 scene, which I didn’t think would be too difficult as their fairly still and are under blankets…but the background is white and one of the boxes their holding is white, and one blanket which is green comes up whitish on the screen so also disappears.
this leaves Simon with floating head, it occasional blogs out Ken’s blanket too which is more blueish. So I just have to do my best, render it (which takes ages because my laptop isn’t that fast) and show Chris Speed tomorrow!
But it does look like I will need to do some more filming asap as I only have a week before presenting it and I’m working all weekend!
Presenting Sound Art
Having thought about it more I think I will go down the Sound Art route, after all I’ve got an essay on it already as well as having my own opinions what Sound Art is. As well as having a bank of references and books/websites that I can use.
Now I just need to decide on how to make a project around it, I do really like my idea about making a piece of sound which I feel is sound art and asking others for their opinions.
I got my view of Sound Art during my essay research, where I mentioned that I agreed with the artist Annea Lockwood says this ‘“I apply it [sound art] to the pieces I make using electroacoustic resources, and which I intend to be presented in galleries, museums”’ (Licht 2007:10).
As I agree with her definition of sound art, I was thinking of making something (it’s hard to describe what it is as it’s neither noise or music which in my opinion are separate things also) which is made entirely on the computer using electronic means.
I’m not sure what I’ll make or how to go about it without delving into the art of music or into experimental music such as the art done by John Cage.
A couple of Artists that I will be considering though, will be John Cage, Annea Lockwood, Yoko Ono, and Pierre Schaffer who like John Cage was an experimental artist.
Presentation
We had the presentation of our idea today, to run through the design of our applicatio and show Katina and others more about our application.
You can see details of the presentation and the work so far at http://claudnoir.wordpress.com
I’ve been given the job of editing and filming the video that will be used for the application as well as doing the sound or parts of it.
Unfourtantly when I went to edit the footage we took orginally on Claudia’s phone I was unable to do so as Samsung (the make of her phone) adds an encoder to any of their recordings and I haven’t yet found something I can use to convert it.
I am still looking though.
Scenes
I’ve sort of given up on doing the timeline for the moment, thought I’ll have a bit of a break from it…and instead work on turning the scenes I filmed yesterday into holograms!I have about 3 different clips of us digging, with us standing at different angles, with different lighting so I’ve got to try it all out first to check see which one is the best clip to use for the final thing.
Once I chosen which clip, I then changed the effects, which didn’t take me too long but it wasn’t as distorted as I wanted it to be so I’ve changed it since then and I spent most of the time getting the timings right so that it worked out fine and looked ok.
I then had to repeat this for the War Scene also, although I only have one clip for that…I also had to make sure that both the War and the Digging scenes were consistent with the effects and the timings so that everything would fit together and not look as if two different people did it.I
know that doesn’t make much sense but it does to me lol.
Below are the two holographic scenes that I’ve done and uploaded onto youtube. The first is of us digging and the second of is of us huddling in an air raid shelter in world war 2.
Timeline
I’m a bit stressed at the moment, I’m trying to figure out how best to get the timeline to move across the floor effectively, which is proving more tricky than I hoped it would.
The footage I filmed yesterday with the plank didn’t work quite as well as I hoped, I was able to mask out my foot, and change the colour of that to blueish to fit in with the scenes and the photo’s which will appear on the floor as they walk along it. But in order for me to do that I had to place the same video onto the timeline twice and then mask out bits of both video to show the floor and then the plank…but as the timeline went on bits of the plank on the floor layer where showing and vice a versa.
This resulted in pretty pants video, and doing it on the wall didn’t work either, as you couldn’t tell it was on the wall, and I wanted to fit in the hand rail so that the people would know they were walking down the stairs (a bit hard to explain).
And the worst thing is, I need to get this sorted for tomorrow as it’s the last day I’ll be able to test it before the presentation date.
Now I’m really stuck on what to do…and I haven’t even gotten round to doing the scene footage yet, and that takes hours to render!
Great day of me turning 20 it is lol
Filming Part 2
Yesterday I went and booked a green-screen room for today, because I needed to film the whole thing again, to try and get the right footage.
Filming against a green screen should make it easier for me to mask out the background and to get rid of most of the extra colours using colour keys which means when they do move in the film most of them won’t disappear quite so much.
I also got them to wear dark clothes with as little amount of green as possible, Ken couldn’t make it this time (it was short notice) so I had to stand in instead, I hate being filmed but I kept my head down and with the distortions I’ll add you shouldn’t be able to check it’s me…I hope.
Not only did I bring everything back the spade, ruck sack, and pickaxes I also brought in a massive bag with a tri-pod in so that the camera would stay still…as when I held it it did move or jerk a bit. Although with the wave effects you can’t really tell.
But luckily it all went well, I also got Simon to film Portland Square for me as my footage wasn’t the best used…I also couldn’t figure out how I could get the timeline to follow the way they walk so I brought in a plank of wood to push along the floor with my foot as I moved (will mask my foot out)
When we got to Portland Square though their was a career’s fair setting up, so we couldn’t really film walking right through it, just ouside the lecture theatre’s, and a tiny section of the floor, which I’m just going to have to repeat..
Got to capture the video now, and hopefully this time it’ll work! Fingers Crossed!
Scrap that
I had the meeting with Joasia at the Plymouth Arts Centre (where iDAT have an exhibit which is quite interesting)
Orrin and Ken where there also as they had changed their ideas since their crit too. Orrin went first he got his idea sorted (lucky so and so).
As for my idea I was a bit disappointed in how I presented it, I don’t think I explained everything that I wanted to in a clear concise way for Joasia to get what I wanted to do.
She doesn’t think I should go along with it, she said although there is plenty of references and sources I could look at for this project she doesn’t think it’ll answer the brief…it can’t be tied to any traditional art forms let alone digital art forms…or something along those lines.
Although this has helped as it means I don’t have to learn php and have to struggle with that to be able to produce this application…which could fail I am still a bit stuck with what to do now.
Joasia did suggest I do it on what I did my essay on which is Sound Art as I had all the references and research there…but I’m not sure what to do for that.
I was thinking of doing a piece of sound art on what I feel is sound art, then send it to my friends and get them to tell me whether they agree it’s sound art or not and then with their views on what sound art is I’ll make another piece and send it out again to different people and ask the same questions.
As Ken said it’s more of a evolution on people’s opinions on what sound art is, and they can criticise what others think and what I’ve made. I’m not sure if I got this idea across clear enough for Joasia because she didn’t like it…which again has made me a bit stuck.
At least I have the Easter holidays to think about it, she did suggest I look up DJ Spooky and the work he does so I’m going to be doing that and thinking how to incorporate Sound into my project…going to be a busy Easter
Demo
I did do a bit of a demo from the video I filmed on Thursday to Chris Speed, he seemed to like it, said that’s what he think it should look like or something similar…I’m still not happy with it though, as you can’t see what’s going on in the scene as all you can see is a slightly blue white background…which is still in the rectangle shape of the composition in After Effects.
Anyway I thought I’ll show you a bit of the film I did
New Idea – Tribes
I have another idea, which hopefully Joasia will like a bit more, a couple of students and I are going to be meeting up with her next week to discuss any of our new ideas as it wasn’t just me who after the crit have changed their idea or approach to it…which has made me feel a bit better.
I’ve been trying to rack my brains as to what to do now, I think it’ll be easier to go at it from the sub-culture idea it’s just trying to get the references I need, Ken had kindly let me borrow a book called “The Goth Bible” which talks about the different types of goths from their point of view…he also said that Goths tend to make fun of themselves so it’s not too bad.
So I’ll have a look at that and see if I can use any of it, as well as look at other sub-cultures etc.
However saying that me and Aqeel did come up with something similar but more of a historical context than current cultures and that was the idea of Tribes.
Throughout history there have been Tribes, you’ve got the Native Americans and different African Tribes, and the Aboriginal in Australia.
For each tribe they defined themselves by their clothing, their rituals, their practises, wherever they had body markings/tattoos, and their dances – which got both of us thinking “social networking” because they also traded with other tribes.
Which then got me onto the idea of a facebook application, where you create your own group and choose certain features (all of which have come from a tribe throughout history) when you make your tribe you can decide what clothes (if any) they wear, their body paint, rules etc and you can add your friends to your tribe.
And at the end hopefully they’ll be different tribes around, all with different features and could see a pattern emerge as to what people find socially acceptable depending on their type of sub-culture today.
For instance someone who thinks piercing’s and lots of them is fine and don’t find anything wrong with that and their friends agree, whereas someone who belongs to perhaps a different sub-culture doesn’t therefore their tribe will have little or no facial pericings.
I am actually really excited about this project now, and looking forward to doing it even more so than my original idea. I just need to get some references, draw a couple of diagrams to see what I could do and present it to Joasia.
