The idea

I had little to no input in getting the idea at the start as I was ill for the first few sessions and then did not make myself heard during the creative process. If I could do it again I would have been a lot more vocal and given a lot more input into the creative side of this project because I feel I missed out on this element of the module.

The idea is for the protagonist to float out of his bed and then look to a book shelf, he knocks off a tiny version of himself from the shelf that is crushed under a big book. He then looks through the keyhole of his door and can see a strange figure in the corridor coming towards him and the walls are bleeding in the corridor. To make these things possible we have used the following techniques.

Floating off the bed: We shot this vertically and had the protagonist come forward from the bed using a camera track

Book bleeding: We put a syringe full of fake blood just out of shot and then fed a small clear plastic tube through the book so that once the camera was rolling we could squeeze out the fake blood and make it appear as if the book was bleeding.

Keyhole: We actually had a door attached to the set so we used it for the keyhole.

Corridor: We set up a wall four boards long and drilled holes into it to poke the syringes through and faced the wall at the green screen so somebody could be layered in later on. We set up the lighting to make the corridor look moody and interesting then started rolling. We then cued eight people behind the wall to start squeezing out the fake blood so it appeared that the wall was bleeding.

Filming

On the days that we got to do some filming I remained quite quiet and just stuck to doing my own tasks without getting in anybodies way. I did get a chance to help put the bleeding book together which was quite fun though especially as the shot in the end was really effective. I think my favourite shot from filming was the opening shot where Paul floats off his bed as the way it was achieved was really interesting and I think it looked really effective on camera. I would like to have taken a more active role in filming as I usually would do but the group is so big that everybody should have a chance to do something and certain louder members of the groups could easily take advantage of quieter members.

It was good to have a fairly decent amount of time to shoot as I remember on the Cinematography module when the Creative Project Realisation group came in we were incredibly pushed for time and struggled to get everything that the group needed for their film.

After Effects

We had the footage from our shoot at the workstation and needed to do a few things with it. I had missed the session on green-screen/chroma key but managed to catch up just before we all started on the work we were doing in that session. I did this by selecting a colour to remove (the green) and then modifying the settings such as the harshness of how much it would take out so that I could make the green completely disappear without leaving a glow around the person in the shot. I would now be able to put anything into the background and make it look like this character was there and not in front of a green wall.

In this session we wanted to take the footage of the bleeding wall and duplicate it on the other side of the shot so that we could create the illusion of a corridor. To do this we first cropped the shot and moved it to where it would be most suitable and got the bit in the timeline where the blood came out of the wall. We then used the "flop" tool to duplicate the footage but facing the opposite direction (only not upside down) Once re-aligned this footage looked just like a corridor with a little bit of cropping and tweaking.

We then used the tracking dots to attach some eyes to our character in the green screen shot. For this we first opened the shot and attached tracking points to prominent features on the characters face that would not move much or change during film so that the tracking points could latch onto them. We then opened a file to add an image of some eyes from a different shot and attached them to these tracking points just over the eyes of the character giving her some strange eyes that did not look right. The tracking worked quite well for a while but as soon as the character moved too much the tracking points were lost and left a pair of eyes floating in the middle of the screen. If the tracking point had a strong object to pin itself to like a big dot on the character then it may have stayed with the movement of the character.

We could also use after effects to improve the aesthetics of the blood rushing down the wall but the only things I managed to do this session were make it look more red and then do my own version of the blood in paint which did not work very well.

 

Photoshop:

We used photoshop to make mood boards of which I have posted to this blog earlier. The main things we had to learn was how to layer an image and using the lasso tool to cut out an image and delete the background allowing said image to blend better with other images to make a more coherent mood board. I also used to burn tool in order to blend in objects and create shadows to make everything look more realistic and 3D. This programme was good to find images or edit images to make them look how you want the film to look but I still find that I would prefer to just work on paper as I find it easier to express myself like that.

Good examples of CPR

I watched a film recently and found that a lot of the scenes contained over the top violence that was really well created and I could not help but appreciate it from the art direction point of view.

This film was Django Unchained by Quentin Tarantino. I thought that the violent scenes were so graphic and over the top but somehow believable that the art directors/special effects had done an amazing job.

I think that the blood effects in this film are very impressive while being quite over the top and we could use a similar style of effect in order to make the walls bleed in our group project and I could use that style of hyper-violence when the creature strikes out at the protagonist in my personal project film.

Things that have influenced me

Here is a list of films or aspects of films that have influenced my personal project proposal.

First of all the Alien from the Alien/Aliens films has heavily influenced the creature that stalks the protagonist in my film:

As you can see in the picture above the creature has very dark skin and is baring very large and intimidating teeth, this is partly the basis for what I want the creature in my film to look like although I want it to have eyes as I find that done in the right way you can make eyes look really intimidating. 

The second thing that has influenced the appearance of this creature is the Dementaurs from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The smoky effect around the figure is something I would like to use so that the antagonist almost looks as if it is a shadow as this will add to the effect of what I am trying to create. 

Treatment

Treatment - personal proposal (uncanny)

Log Line: A man walks down the stairs of a tall building with very claustrophobic surroundings and as he gets further down the doors on each floor begin to open and creatures pour out of them attempting to harm him.  

The protagonist (Chris) is walking slowly down a repetitive staircase with plain but haggard walls on each side, he is aware of how closed in he is and every door looks exactly the same. Chris becomes agitated as his eyes dart around looking for a clue as to what floor he is on and the surroundings are clearly causing discomfort. The lights begin to flicker erratically and Chris picks up the pace. At this point the doors begin to bang violently as he scurries past them until they are now bursting open just as he passes them. Breathless Chris begins to sprint down the stairs as the banging gets louder and the doors swing open wider and wider. The pace of the banging and flickering catches up with Chris and a grotesque clawed arm grips at Chris tearing a huge chunk out of his shoulder, he screams in pain but manages to contort his body and evade the assault. Gripping his arm he sprints as fast as he can stumble down the stairs being clawed at on every floor but too scared to look at what is attacking him. The light is getting darker as Chris' eyes begin to get heavy but he pushes through and adrenaline takes over. He now has no choice but to look at the creature that is attacking him, a hideous amalgamation of dark oily liquid with huge teeth, claws and glowing fiery eyes. Chris curses as he sees each creature in fear running as close to the inner wall as he can, ducking around and under the claws until finally the floor levels out and a doorway can be seen. Chris manages to conjure a final burst of speed and throws himself head on through the oily creature and the front doors of the building crash open with Chris finally safe he turns back to look at the completely normal and unassuming building and touches his shoulder that no longer has a scratch on in.

 

The idea I have creates comes from walking through the stairways of large blocks of flats, specifically large communist buildings in Eastern Europe and finding it hard to distinguish one room or floor from another. It is a seemingly normal everyday thing but has a slightly mysterious nature to it. The fear of the unknown not knowing what is behind each door and the fact that the protagonist has no idea where he is in the film should convey this fear. The effects that would be on the day would be the injury and the doors banging/lights flickering and making the stairwell for Chris to run down. In the edit the creatures could be added and the illusion of a huge repetitive stairwell would be achieved by tricking the audience within the edit.

 

 

Joseph Cornell

Joseph Cornell creates little boxes that look a lot to me like a small mood board. They all seem to have their own little mood and the use of materials is quite important to me. I think the best thing to take from this work could be the use of materials and specifically tones of wood as the wooden boxes can be influenced very much by the choice of wood it is cased in. We should consider the choice of materials and tones in the creation of our film. 

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman mostly does photography and film stills of women looking quite strange, almost deranged. I think the main aspect to this work for me is an element of subtlety in the strangeness of the photographs.

The photograph is not far from looking normal but small changes has made the picture look wrong and surreal, I like this idea of not going overboard yet still being able to achieve an effective change in mood.

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The Chapman Brothers. These artists mostly concentrate on themes of being vulgar, appalling or offensive as they like to try to shock their audience with the depravity of what they do.

I like the satirical style of these artists when then modify a normal every day object like a £5 note or above: a happy meal box. This is another example of how you can take something completely ordinary and make it something completely different. 

Joel peter Witkin

I thought that the article on The Lord of the Rings was really interesting and showed just how extensive art direction can be and the lengths film makers will go to realise their vision. The scale of the work done to create props and masks was incredible and so detailed.

I could not really see the relevance of the artist to this article if there was to be one as his art was mostly about death and corpses... often dismembered. Corpses and dismembered bodies instantly instil an element of dread into the people that see them so we could take visual influence from the artist in the characters within our film.

Sandy Skoglund

This artist from what I have seen appears to like making the ordinary extraordinary by multiplying it our using vivid contrasting colours.

This is a good example of that as this picture makes the cats seem quite menacing, strange, uncanny or dangerous. To me it shows how such a small change in an ordinary every day thing can suddenly change the mood of it. Also it is a good example of how you can use colour to set the mood of a scene or frame, colour being something we will have to consider for our film this year.

Tomoko Shioyasu

This artist cuts out tiny parts of a huge canvas and hangs them like a painting but projects light through the canvas and causes this picture above: The Blessing Wall. I think this is a good idea to create a very strange and wacky lighting style for a film because if we were to modify a light filter or shine light through shapes we could get some amazing and/or terrifying shadows into the film.

Chiharu Shiota

This Japanese artist creates a lot of instillation and photography work that contain the themes of past and present, life and death and objects that can have memories implanted upon them.

I like the idea of objects implanting memories out of Chiharu ideas because I thought the other themes in the work were so predictable and boring but this idea of memories was an interesting a slightly fresher idea to me. I chose this Picture above as my favourite to show this for a few reasons, firstly a lot of my childhood memories are of being in different cars that my parents had owned and driven but also the car I own is 42 years old and I thought that having been around that length of time it would have a lot of memories, some perhaps very interesting. I like the fact that this seemingly inanimate object can be tied in with hundreds of different events and memories even if it is not the focus of each memory.

Putting the set together

We all met in the workstation in order to start putting the set together for our film. The whole group has been told what the set should look like and in the first week we simply cleaned up the boards to be pained by ripping off the wallpaper and then putting it into position. We put the walls into position and then got out the red paint that we had decided on for the walls, we used a roller to paint the walls and to cover up the gaps between the boards we used masking tape, which was a difficult job in the corner parts of the wall. By the end of the day we had painted walls, the shape of the room we wanted and wallpaper on the wall as well. The day of making the set did feel like it was quite detracted from making a film but on the other hand it felt very practical and creative in a way which was quite nice. Literally building the set for the film means you can make it look exactly how you want (if the budget allows) and leaves a sense of satisfaction when it is done.

A mood Board to show what I think the set could look like

I have added Edward Scissorhands as an idea of how the protagonist could be dressed up in our film (minus the claws) as I have always thought that this character looks amazing and would lend itself to an uncanny film really well. The background is bookshelves that are quite messy as I thought you could do a lot with that such as books flying off, or blood coming out from between the books, things like that. I have also added a dark wooden floor as it reminded me of a room in an old house we used to live in back in Lincoln that always creeped me out even thought it was just an empty room with dark dusty wooden floors and nothing else in it apart from when we first moved in and it has a random assortment of scrap metal and old broken toys. I then added the dark green curtains to suggest the colour scheme and overall style of the room that I had pictured. The old gothic sort of style with very dark colours and dark wood. I used the burn tool to age and darken/add shadows to the image as well as I think that helps to get across the style I am trying to portray.

My Idea

I created this image by manipulating the aliens face from Prometheus and layering it into a strange looking window I found on the internet. I made it black and white and tidied up the area around the window to try and fit the figure in as naturally as I could. The idea I had for this small scene would be for the person inside the house to notice somebody at the window, maybe a neighbor and recognise them but to do a double take as they appear normal but then flicker to having this strange grotesque face. After which they shake this off and go to greet the person at the window but when they get closer the persons reflection in the glass shows their true appearance. I think at this point a dramatic dark lighting change would be good as the figure realises that the protagonist can see their true appearance and then it should advance quickly through the window towards the camera with a POV shot. This would only be a small scene but this is what I envisioned from creating this image and thinking of things that I find normal but could in fact be considered uncanny... such as a neighbor. The thought of something uncanny immediately made me think of neighbors because we tend to trust them and act friendly with them almost right away but when you think about it, they could be anybody and that could be the premise for something quite scary.

Das Unheimliche: 1919 (Uncanny)

I have thought of an idea for my proposal for a two minute film that would fit the requirements of the brief for the uncanny proposal. I read the first few pages of the Das Unheimliche article by Freud and got an idea of what the word uncanny was and this helped me think of how to realise this word successfully. The general idea of it was that familiar things could become unfamiliar and in turn cause fear because of their uncanny nature. This instantly triggered images in my head of things that I had seen in my life that were part of normal life and seemingly familiar but out of context or just under close examination would invoke a sense of fear for no apparent reason. One of the most immediate things this reminded me of was an old house we used to visit when I was younger which had wooden floors painted black and all of the wood/furniture was dark/dilapidated. Other things this reminded me included my Grandparents old house which is a very old and very large house in the middle of the countryside and has big black beams on every ceiling as well as strange old appliances like big metal irons, a loom, big book cases and a few other strange quirky little things that while being familiar and obviously ornamental always seemed a little out of place and strange to me especially in comparison to the quite modern flat that I lived in.

I would also compare the idea of uncanny stemming from something familiar to the way in which many good scary films have took familiar aspects from everyday life and re-shaped them in order to make them grotesque and scary but somehow believable. A clear example of this would be when horror films say things like "Based on a true story" and one that I find quite relevant is the repeated use of small children which you would usually consider to be quite innocent suddenly turning horrific and screaming/killing people violently such as the small girl in "The Grudge" or the creepy girl in "Silent Hill". Many creatures in horror films are also based on real animals so that they can stay somehow believable to the audience such as Alien being quite loosely based on an insect or a lot of films taking average people that would blend into society and making them a psychopath behind closed doors.

Considering the above points I would like my idea to reflect these ideas and hopefully be as effective in utilising the same techniques that I have highlighted.