Auckland International Film Festival - Homegrown: Quirky Tales

Homegrown - Quirky Tales was an event held at the Academy Cinema in Auckland, it was described as a "spicy mix of funny and imaginative stories that span animation, documentary and experimental genres."

This event was made up of a series of short films so I will tackle this review by talking about my favourite from the selection entitled "Fruitless Journey". Written by Jeremy Herbert and directed by Jodie Stack this 12 minute film told about the journey of a banana who was proudly taken to the South Pole as food for the expedition of Captain Robert Falcon Scott.

What makes this film interesting is that it actually retells the fateful journey that had Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition crew try to be the first team to reach the South Pole but instead saw them die in the attempt. In 'Fruitless Journey' however this tragic story is told with such spunk and good humour that it is truly captivating and the unlikely character (the banana) wins the hearts of all in the audience.

Set in the fruit crate of the expedition and narrated by 'banana' the story is told from an interesting perspective quite unlike that of any other film I have seen, the narrative includes the proud destiny of banana to be consumed by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, his love affair with 'navel' and his intense disappointment as he ages without being consumed.

This film is incredibly clever as it utilises a truly unique perspective, it also manages to be accessible to all because of the clever nature of the story telling. I especially enjoyed the fruit orientated humour and judging by the laughter from the audience I was not the only one. The ending of the film in my opinion did leave something to be desired however, in the last minutes of the film the aesthetic changed somewhat and there was replacement of Captain Robert Falcon Scott with an animal that represented an ape, this change in the narrative was quite confusing and jolting for the audience however I accept that as an experimental film it is safe to expect the unexpected.

This film works on the level of simply challenging what we consider as a character, the level of rapport and emotional connection we formed with banana through this film was quite extraordinary as a piece of fruit wouldn't frequently be considered a character let alone one that we are attached to. This experimental film was well worth watching as a piece of home grown cinema and a film from a fresh perspective.

Reflections Experiment

Our initial fascinations have been with the vast number of different, and largely unnoticed reflections present in a city. I think a reflection can be very symbolic and produce some good and really simple footage where effects can be created through the contrast between the real world and the reflected image, I also like text that is shown mirror image that can turn any image from plausible 'real' life to a 'reflection'.



This experiment was quite fruitful, it really helped us to consider the city in a new light and made us think more in depth about what footage could include for our experimental film. It did however make us realise that at this point the concepts for our apparatus are somewhat lagging in comparisson to the actual subject matter of the film. We all really appreciated the different types of reflections we found but at the same time we felt that the footage should largely be reflected/ distorted by the actual camera rig we are to construct rather than elements of city scenery.

Nevertheless I think we all have the feeling that we are getting close to deciding on a direction to take this assignment and that is exciting.

Cinematic Flaneur Project

Our first studio project for the semester is to "invent and make video equipment that allows you to explore the city in new ways. That allows us to see the previously inaccessible/ unnoticed, or reveals something new about the every day city to us."

For this project I have the pleasure of working with Christine, Charlotte A and Theresa.

Together we will be designing and fabricating a rig that will carry two cameras and will be used by all of us individually to make an experimental film 2 -3 minutes long.

We also have to contend with the idea of the Flaneur and work some of the perspective of this character into our projects. I feel this will help challenge us to look at the city in a new light and hopefully inspire us to make films with the same intention.

Bullet Effect

The first day back in studio we tried our collective hand at 'the Bullet Effect'. This is a technique that is most famous from the movie 'The Matrix' and we achieved it by getting into large groups and setting up our laptop cameras in an arc and taking photos in close succession so they could later be turned into video by playing them at 12 frames per second.



This is the resulting film

Review Day

For my review week presentation I showed my Serious Fun project 'The City' to a small group. This was one of the most productive type of critiques we have had so far, with a small group and a designated time slot we got a lot of feedback and a lot of questions and challenges that really make you consider your work and develop your ideas so that you might think more critically in our next assignments.

My actual display was okay but I do wish when comparing it to others that I had the other assignments represented as well. I was much happier with my poster when it was in onscreen size but this is perhaps because it is my first time making an image with Photo Shop and therefore I didn't have any experience in how the reproduction would look. I used a cardboard box beneath my poster to hold all my journals for viewing but this would require the viewer being interested enough to pursue my work further before these would be viewed, instead I think it would be much better if there was as much work as possible on display without overcrowding the space. This would show the scope of my work and there would be a higher chance of one of the projects interesting the viewer.



With this first experience I have learned a lot that I would like to apply next time I have a presentation week. Although I was not unhappy with my own display, viewing it I think there is quite a bit more I could have done to really make my own work standout.

All in all I have been very happy with my work over semester 1. As with most things in life there are things I would like to have improved had I had the extra time but I am on the whole happy. It doesn't feel like we have been in the BCT long but looking at all the work presented this week it shows how far we have come and how much of our studio practice has developed throughout the year so far.

I can't wait to see what is in store for semester 2.

Study Week

Study week is an opportunity to redo or improve upon anything that needed further work as well as to create a display of our years work focusing on one main project that we consider our strongest. Part of the presentation requirements is to create an A1 poster promoting one of our works so I intend to present my 'Serious Fun' assignment so I really want to get the building growth and decay working as well as learning to use an illustrating program to make the poster as of yet I'm not overly familiar with any.

Editting and the Popcorn Premier

The saying whatever can go wrong will go wrong is at times very true! Editing day was a little like that. To speed up the initial editing we split it 3 ways and worked on Final Cut Pro on our 3 laptops, that worked really well until we tried to move the sequences between computers and would you know it all the clips were going offline. This caused major problems and a lot of wasted time for our team that we couldn't afford so close to the premier. This unfortunately was one indication that it might have been wiser to stick to our assigned jobs.

With the premier coming up fast we had to sacrifice some quality and get the movie showable so we exported the sequences as quick time movies and used them in turn as clips in a new sequence that made up the whole movie. This was a disappointing day for us as we felt the time that we lost in complications could of instead been used to bring our movie up to a much higher quality.

We did however with a team effort manage to scrape together all the remaining factors we needed to present the final movie and were very happy that we did have a finished product to show on the day.

Our movie will be re-edited and named in the study week so we can hand in a finished product that we are all happy with.

Filming Days 1 and 2

The last two days have been quite hectic in getting with the filming. We have managed to keep the filming locations all within a 3km span so that has been quite a time saver for us but on the whole everything has taken a lot longer than we would of liked, the full two days in fact. Hold ups tend to be caused by the things that you aren't pinning as a problem, waiting for minor cast members left us with questions about how best to order our filming, we found makeup quite a problem as we wanted Dorothy to look continuously sicker the longer the shoes were influencing her and this amount of dark makeup made it hard to do things out of sequence if her face was to be seen. For next time it will be a big priority to find cast members that are flexible with their time. Now for the race to edit before 4pm tomorrow.

Filming Tomorrow

Today has been a day for working out all the little things, we have had Anneke researching makeup, I have been raiding our infinite dress up box to put together some costumes while Charlotte is going to be liaising with her friend who is to be our lead actor and will be organising the bathtub for the climax. We have all been going over our script and making decisions on how we want things to look, we have a voice over written that will be spoken by Almira Gulch (the same person Dorothy will get the shoes off at the beginning of the film. I think this will prove to be quite cryptic and give the viewer the feeling of inevitability about the possession of the shoes.

Tomorrow we all meet bright and early to see how we are going to pull this thing off.

Organising

Today is the day that we are trying to get things organised, which for me as Producer means a busy day. Anneke and I came up with a fantastic idea on how to get a filming location after we decided that the ones we have easily available to us don't really fit our chosen aesthetic. So book-a-batch is now one of my best friends, we sent a very well worded emails to people with holiday rental houses that were local and we liked the look of asking if they would please consider allowing us to use their house for filming free of charge. Surprisingly to us we got several positive replies and we have ended up with a small, creepy house in Long Bay that we will be using as Dorothy's house and the setting for the majority of the plot.

We also worked today on the story board and script, our script so far is less to do with dialogue as I think of conventional scripts having and a lot more to do with the who, what and where of each new scene and discussing how might be the best way to shoot it. This is because as a horror with only one character present for most of the screen time we found it more constructive to focus on how we were going to create the right mood and excite tension in the audience when they are watching the film.

We now after the weekend and a day of discussion have a basic plot worked out for our short film, the main things we have to focus on now is finding actors to play all our roles, a bathtub and a location for Dorothy’s house.

Our basic story line will include Dorothy and Toto finding the shoes somehow, perhaps in an attic or at a garage sale ect. We want Dorothy to have a very pure, (undeserving of curse) appearance, we want her to appear genuinely kind and likable so that when things go bad for her the viewer will have formed an attachment and feel sad or otherwise emotional about Dorothy's plight. The main action in the story will be Dorothy's transition from normal to possessed which will be shown by an afterwards unaware Dorothy surveying the damage. We have a couple of ideas about slightly about disturbing things that could happen but I'm not yet ready to publish our intentions. The end is also very important in the horror genre, we need to make sure that evil succeeds and we see the it set to move on to the next person and repeat the cycle. ie. the shoes will find a new, undisclosed owner (by not knowing who this increases the 'could be me' sense).

Reverse Cinema

Today we were given our final brief for Reverse Cinema, we have been instructed to film and edit a short film based on the Wizard of Oz and to make it in the genre of horror. My group for this task is Anneke Crouse and Charlotte Couttie. (insert links to their blogs.)

We have assigned each of ourselves a job title, my assigned role is that of Producer although there will be a lot of work and its more important to provide help where it is needed, the role will foremost give us an indication of what our personal responsibilities will be and anything extra will be taken care of by whoever it proves most convenient for. Seeing that we have such a tight time limit there will be a lot of work to fit in to a short amount of time and we will need to be very flexible to make sure it all gets done. Our initial ideas for the plot are to create a curse of the ruby slippers, similar in concept to the mix up of scenes from the original movie that we did prior to this.

Reverse Cinema

Day one: Final Cut Pro

The Finished Product

Come presentation day this is a demonstration of how our finished Max Patch and Unity model work in conjunction to give a fun playful experience that encourages both experimentation and a greater appreciation of the control and character we give the environments around us by adding our personality to everyday life.

We worked on the principle that no two people are the same, we monitored the colours they wore ( the way they present themself ), the amount of noise they made and the amount of movement they produced. There were two ways you could look at our work; One it was simply god fun, it was colourful and set up in a non-linear arrangement, because it displays a variation of the participants own colour scheme back at them they are sure to recognise themselves in the installation and this encourages them to experiment to uncover what corresponds to what in the city and what what is causing the changes they can observe. On a deeper level this installation challenges the participant, asking questions like 'what are you contributing or what effect are you having on your environment?' Because each new participant will bring a new set of variables to the environment it is unlikely to look the same twice; this to me symbolises the perspective of an individual, we all see the world through different eyes, having different backgrounds, morals and circumstances the big question really is do we like what we see? Are we having our desired impact on the world? Set in a human made environment when we have the power to make all the decisions do we like what we contribute and in return what we see?

Our installation gives us the ability to explore these questions and more through manipulating the world you are given to preside over, I really enjoyed both creating and testing this work and I really think it is a pity I didn't take video footage of it being used by others at the critique because it was clear that they were making the most of and enjoying the situation just as we had intended.

The Model and the Patch

Below are some screen shots of the 3d model we are going to use for this assignment. I have only covered 28 blocks to correspond with the 28 mini screens we have split the webcam footage into. We like that the city is quite contained as we only want the participant to control the immediate, urban environment. This is kind of like a statement on nature but instead getting the participant to engage and consider man-made environments, their aesthetics and our role in giving them character and life.



Below is a plan view of our city, we used a map to give the blocks of the city a realistic and diverse set of shapes. I really liked how simple the starting aesthetic is, I think this will make a very good contrast for when the buildings are brought to life by the participant.



There are a few things we have accomplished on our Max Patch already and a few more that we will need to complete before we have this installation all up and running. We've downloaded Macam that allows Max MSP to use an external USB webcam with the grab component, this will make the installation a lot more professional and adaptable as we will not need to use the built on webcam in our laptops. We also have with the use of jit.scissors and jit.3m have the RGB values of the average colour detected in each of the 28 mini screens, this is also affected by the ezadc~ object which lets us monitor the amount of audio it receives and outputs a value, we have used this value to set a number of volume thresholds that will change the level of saturation of onscreen colours, from greyscale for no volume to technicolour with a lot of perceived noise.

Still to achieve is getting the Max Patch to increase the value of the height for buildings on each block when movement is perceived within the corresponding screen, then decrease again when no movement has occurred for a certain length of time. I also need to get Max to send the specified values to Unity via netsend and change the colour and scale of buildings.

The Beginnings of the Max Patch and the Modelling...

Tasks are to be divided as follows... Anneke is going to start work on our Max Patch and I'm going to try to master Unity 3D and model our city.

There is a bit of research to do with both but we have the first concept of what we want to create.
Max Patch

• We want to register the amount and location of motion for one or more participants
• We want to register the colours worn by the participant and use the changing values in our visualisation
• We want to monitor the level of sound

For the city we want to make a rather simplistic and ambiguous model. We want to represent a city without reflecting too closely any real city or having overly complex buildings that might detract from the actual subject matter and the ideas that are driving the project.

Our basic ideas of how the two might work is that we will use the jit.scissors object in Max to split the screen into a large number of smaller screens, from each of these we will take the main colour and send the RGB values from this and send them to Unity to colour a corresponding block of buildings. We don't want to be too linear with this so the buildings will be built upon a city map to give a random and realistic set up, when we colour the blocks they will not be left to right and top to bottom as with the screen but instead will be randomly distributed to encourage experimentation and a more abstract aesthetic.

Theme, Character and Interactive Art

We had a bunch of things we that we wanted to start with; a discussion on what we were going to use as our character, research on existing interactive art and a discussion on which theme we could tackle with this assignment.

Right from the beginning we decided our existing characters were quite limiting considering the potential scope of this assignment. We were also quite reluctant to use a traditional character as the interaction would be quite predictable and likely complicated to both 3d model and to program.

I found two installations online that involved traditional style characters, these were Pussy Weevil and Interacting with Virtual Characters, they were both quite effective in their own way but they were limited because all the interactions had to be pre-programmed and the characters all have a certain repertoire that they work their way through and is then repeated exactly the same no matter who the participant is, I don't like this as I don't think it encourages experimentation or a particularly playful interaction. Swamped came much closer to an interesting and meaningful interaction, I liked the fact that they used a soft toy puppet as a prop to engage with the environment, I think this gave it a unique and fun twist and really encouraged the participant to experiment and find what was possible within the installation.



Anneke and I found that we much preferred the simplicity of installations such as Text Rain and Dance Floor Moves. The videos of these were delightful to watch because the concepts were so simple but the participants were really experimental and were genuinely enjoying the interaction. I liked that they were trying things out to see what reaction was produced and every person's experience was unique, and not pre-determined by a set of programmed behaviors.



We want to create a project that is nice and simple and encourages experimentation and learning on the part of the participant; I also want something that is unique to everyone who uses it, a fully adaptable work that takes a lot of information from the user and adapts and presents it back to them.

Serious Fun

Today we were given our brief for our next studio project. We are required to "make an artwork in which the audience playfully interacts with the content to reveal meaning." I will be working with Anneke http://annekeinstudio.tumblr.com/ for the remainder of this brief and we will be developing our character further to contribute to this interaction.

Stop Motion Clay Animation

Today we rediscovered our youth as we modeled our chosen character out of coloured plasticine. However the joys of which were soon forgotten when we had to animate them through stop motion, which I have discovered is the bane of my life, a minimum of 12 frames per second means a lot of manipulation of the model and very steady cameraing to create the appearance of a movie.

See below porcupine and his banana.


In the afternoon I joined with Anneke and Dylan to do a 10 second group film

Illustration

Day one of our third studio project we had Beck introducing us to illustration and the ideas of what makes a character. We saw work produced by her and other illustrators and developed some characters of our own. We finished the day by producing a flip-o-rama, very reminiscent of our youth. I'm quite curious to see where we're going with this studio assignment and look forward to the next few weeks although hope there's more thinking than labour as drawing at least 12 images per second is hugely labour intensive.