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.