Month: November 2015

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Evaluation

For my final piece of this module, I aimed to communicate to the people a different way of seeing Leeds. To do this, I made a short video representing Leeds from a one-point perspective. I composed most of the shots by placing the vanishing point at the centre of the frame, capturing the beautiful symmetries of Leeds. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick and Wes Anderson’s style and techniques of filmmaking, I thought that this would give the public an appealing and unique view of Leeds.

From my research of the two director’s films, I found that symmetries play a big role in what we find attractive, and this as a design technique helps create beautiful and impactful imagery. To further understand this claim, I set out multiple times to take photos of Leeds to capture the city’s symmetries. This also helped with the scouting of locations for the video.

My time management and planning for this project could have been much better. After testing my initial idea, I found that it was too boring, and realised that I only had a week left to improve on it or come up with another and actually shoot and edit the video. Also partly due to poor time management, one of the biggest challenges of this project was finding an actor to help make the video. As it was the final week before deadline, I found that most of the people I knew were busy and unable to help, but luckily I did find a friend from the University of Leeds who was able to spare me a few hours of his Sunday to help me with the video. We started in the morning at 9am until noon when it started raining.

I shot the entire video in 3 hours which consequently gave rise to a number of difficulties and mistakes. Firstly, I did not get all the shots as planned. I was also unable to capture a good range of locations to properly represent Leeds. While filming, as the weather conditions constantly fluctuated between cloudy and sunny(which produced inconstant temperatures and tones in my video), expecting the rain, I rushed through many of the shots, occasionally and carelessly setting some camera settings wrongly, such as shutter speed and frames per second. I even forgot to properly focus the camera in some of the shots. On a positive note, I found that it was a very good idea to film on a Sunday(even though I didn’t have any other choice), because most of the shops were closed and the city was practically empty in the morning. This gave me a lot of space to shoot and surely saved me a lot of time.

Through this project, I realise the importance of planning and organising my schedule properly, taking into account future weather conditions and schedule of others if help is needed. I now also recognise the dangers of rushing, and will remind myself to be mindful of the simpler and easily overlooked things such as camera settings.

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Wes Anderson & Stanley Kubrick

I’ve always loved director Wes Anderson’s films, favorites being The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. His movies always include elements which distinguish itself from others, namely a limited yet vivid color palette, strange characters, intricately detailed set designs and perhaps more recognizable, symmetrical compositions. Another director sharing the same obsession for symmetry, director Stanley Kubrick has a signature style by composing many of his shots in a one-point perspective, often placing his subjects over the vanishing point in the center of the frame, using symmetry to create beautiful images. But symmetrical shots that look good isn’t just a coincidence, research has shown that humans naturally find symmetry appealing, and we tend to judge others’ appearance based on their facial symmetry.”That’s why humans almost universally tend to find features like high, prominent cheek bones (and Brad Pitt) beautiful. But symmetry doesn’t just make things look beautiful, they also help direct the audiences attention to the main subject.

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/48425421″>Kubrick // One-Point Perspective</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/kogonada”>kogonada</a&gt; on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/89302848″>Wes Anderson // Centered</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/kogonada”>kogonada</a&gt; on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

 

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Bonfire Night

In search of ideas for my final piece for Visual Exploration, I went to the Bonfire Night in Woodhouse Moor park.

This was an extremely low light situation. With either the bonfire itself or the fireworks being the only light source, the lowest I could go on the ISO was 2000, occasionally 1600 when the fireworks lasted longer than just a flicker. Hence this noisy video of that noisy night.

I also had to compensate for the low light with an ‘incorrect’ shutter speed of 60, when filming at 60 fps for some of the shots, instead of 100-125, producing that ugly flicker in some clips.