In this Workshop Jason was showing us how to use a camera and phone gimbal. That is a device that adjusts to the angle and postions equaly so that the footage is not shaky. You have to remeber to balance it accurately as if you dont then the gimbal will turn wonky and the shots will come out odd. Dont put DSLR on them as they are too heavy and the gimbal could bend and possibly break. You need to lift the black bar on the left so it is nicely lined up with the bar on the front. Also if the gimbal vibrates, it means it was not balanced properly and therefore you would have to re calibrate it.
Phone gimbals which is the one presented in the imagine above is much more simple, you slide the phone inside, attach it so it doesnt drop, it adjusts to the level and height of yourself and then you can press record and move the gimbal around, it will stay in the same position even if you skake it around. that is the whole purpose of it.
We had a session with our teacher about different formats of videos and what speed we should use for frames.
There are two types of video format: PAL format and NTFS.
25 frames a second 1/50 shutter speed in pal format for creating a moving image- cinematic films
Whatever the frame per second is you double that for your shutter speed
Pick your depth of field and Change your iso
The more frames you have the slower it goes and then you develop it further in editing
If you want to see the movement properly like faster action captured then you need it on 25 the normal speed is 50
If you shoot ip too 240 you could stretch it open to edit in slow motion as you have more frames to play with
You have to manually focus on 5d mark 2/3 and 6d
700d and 5d iv can automatically focus by the AF tracking
I want to begin with saying that this was one of the hardest projects I had in this course however I am always up for a challenge. In this scenario it was producing footage to a fashion movie. As I never shot an actual video in my life, I had to use some inspiration from the bigger artists. Two rappers that collaborated on one song called Praise the Lord by Asap Rocky and Skepta shows the contrast between London and New York City in their music video. There are fast shots of both places, they swap from one to the other or even use split screen to show both scenarios at once. By watching this video, it gave me an idea to create something similar whereas I would be using the setting of Cuba and Central London streets to show their differences, the fashion, the scenery and how people act differently in the opposite environments.
Let’s start with London as I want to talk about the city I live in and see on a daily basis. London City is a home for fashion, designer and streets. People that walk in central London do dress in a way to be suited to their lifestyle or their occupations. The Youth will wear whatever is trendy at the time, adults would wear more casual or smart clothes depending on the situation and fashionistas would dress up in a way that they could be seen by everyone. Streets of London do look dirty, they look damp however they are full of life and energy.
On the other hand, people in Cuba are not as wealthy, they mostly care about comfort and not to overheat because of their strict weather conditions. Cuban fashion is mostly to be straw hats, shorts and vests as any other forms of clothes would simply be a danger to their body. Whilst staying in Cuba for a week, I observed that the only humans who actually care about their image are tourists and the natives most likely wear replicas of known brands. Furthermore, Cubans look at life differently the way us British people do. They want to live to their best lives out there, they don’t mind being unsuccessful but as long as you have a loving family and a good job, your life is set there.
My London Model named Konrad comes from a fashion background as he was always interested into it since he was a kid. Curtis which is y model from Cuba doesn’t really care what he wears and that is exactly perfect as it shows the difference between them. The settings that I will choose strictly will definitively pair with the models clothing styles. Such as having a long trench coat and sneakers in the streets and having shorts, t-shirt and bare feet on the beach will explicitly show the contrast. I hope my fashion film will convey my audience into believing that I am shooting two different worlds, cultures, scenery and people and it will really show the opposite lives they live.
To conclude my video idea, I would like to sum up the different aspects and features I want to include in my three-minute film. There should be footage of the beach, pier, swimming pool, rocks, palms, hotel, streets, luxury hotel, low angle shots, slow motion shots, rewinds, fast forward shots, models walking or running, bridges and showing off the clothes or accessories.
Here I present my storyboard that I created for this unit. It includes the two locations im going to use which is Central London and Cuba. It includes the two type of fashion styles I will include. My london model will wear designer clothes whereas my Cuban model will have less of designer and less clothes as I will be shooting in a very hot country.
As one of our workshops this project, we had a great opportunity to have a session with a professional, we entered the IT suite and worked on a video on Adobe Premier pro. We had a task to creative a montage film of scattered video clips which had a narrative and using our creativity and imagination we could possibly create a different scenario each time. I remember that the clips were about a tube platform with a crowd and a man talking about a topic in the library. I know that I contrasted the two as one was a quiet place where people could really focus on their studies and the other was a vivid, loud and flashy environment wich was the complete opposite. to conclude the video I also found a dialouge of the man speaking and a classsical atmospheric soundtrack that was overlayed on top of the film.
I learnt from that session to: Start with importing content onto desktop/hard drive or usb.
We learnt about frames per second and how each video is split into little clips; videos are normally filmed at 24fps.
and we learnt about the old school way of making movies by getting our hand on an old tape full of images that when printed could of been put together to create a series of moving images.
Today we enetered studio 1 and saw a green screen being set up in the middle, My first thoughts were that I was so excited to use it. I never had a green screen experience so this by far was one workshop I was looking forward to. To start off we had an intoduction about a camera that can be used for green screen effects. That is called a Black magic camera. Its in a rectangular shape, its black of course and its normally placed ona stand to prevent shaky movements in shots.
I made some notes regarding the black Bagic camera:
Make sure the shadow is not on background,
Black magic takes any lens( fixed and zoomed),
The battery is not that great. Manual focus
(Focus peaking) everything in focus will get a green halo on the subject) Aperture change by rewind and fast forward button, Shutter speed works on it (24/sec), You can change frame size. Normally film in full screen, Set the camera to Progress HQ for codiac under the recording setting.
This was amazing when we were adding different effects to the screen like for example having an ocean behind us and we were pretending to swim whereas we were simply in the studio. I found out the more budget the company has the better and the more realistic the shot looks on the small screen.
A Fashion Film is a series of moving images put together to tell a story, to motivate, to inspire, to sell or to inform a specific audience about a product, a place, a narrative or a brand. Now you see a lot of examples on adverts, company’s website, in stores, music videos, art practices or on social media. It is a way of showing their audience more than a still image, it shoes the movement of the product, the texture of an environment or the creativeness of the company.
The goal is all the same, inspire people to buy the product that is seen in the video. This looks much different than simply creating a commercial. In fact, most fashion films don’t mention the products at all. Instead, outstanding fashion films often highlight the products in a delicate way. A music-driven fashion film will highlight the clothing by cutting incredible cinematography together with a good music track that evokes the right tone for the clothing being presented. the biggest challenge when creating an experimental film is to create an engaging film that doesn’t isolate the audience. You don’t want someone to be so weirded out by the unconventional storytelling that they don’t look at the clothing! When done correctly, an experimental fashion film can be quite effective. The effects that can be used are for instance, zooming in and out the frames, showing light trails, fading, fast forwarding or putting it in slow motion and inserting text onto it to show a bigger narrative if the video is not enough.
Films originally started to be screened in cinemas. People would purchase tickets and view movies on the big screen. Fashion films are too short to be presented in cinemas. Directors would still focus on fashion in a way that could not be visible. Each actor has a specific character which matches a different clothing style. For example a higher class gentlemen would wear a high top hat and a suit whereas a Pop Star singer would wear flashy and sparkling clothes to be seen out of the crowd which therefore means that fashion was always related with films.
Slow Motion – can use to add a tense atmosphere to the video and make it look extraordinary.
Tracking – busy scenes will attract more detail to the subject.
Close ups – Shows more texture and detail in the shot.
Fast forwarding/ Time lapse – It shows very rapid movements in fast fraes per seconds. Speeding the pace of a video makes it sometimes more interesting because there more things going on at once.
Sound – Without noise the video can be empty and have no energy in it.
Lighting – Different tones of lighting are used to create suspense, set the scenary, show spotlight onto the models and so on.
From what I learnt from lectures with Dr Francis is that time never goes away, time will always tick and tock, us humans can create modern looking photography by freezing or speeding up time using Time lapse. Back in the days, artists would take photos or paint foods that are decayed, whereas with our technology and great cameras we can freeze a motion in differnt frames and have one imagine that technically could be a video in a flash.
Time-lapse can compress real-time actions that take place over a long period of time. For example, the construction of a building or the changing seasons.Whatever the subject, time-lapse photography is based on taking a series of photos at regular intervals. You then combine the images into a continuous sequence in the form of a video file. The rate at which we view the individual images in the sequence is much faster than the rate at which they were originally recorded. Most time-lapse sequences are taken with the camera in a fixed position. Sometimes auxiliary gadgets are used to introduce panning or even zooming. And more and more photographers experiment with moving the camera position for each shot in the sequence. This allows the viewer to enjoy a more immersive experience in so-called ‘hyper-lapse’ video.
Photography can ‘catch time’ and kill it, it can photograph in a ‘deathly’ way and let the imagination wander. food cultures can speak of histories and cultural narratives beyond luxury – addressing visibility and invisibility, hidden structures within taste and legibility.
Michael Wesley
German photographer MichaelWesely has spent decades working on techniques for extremely long camera exposures — usually between two to three years. In the mid-1990s, he began using the technique to document urban development over time, capturing years of building projects in single frames. Michael shows us a great example of using shutterspeed, By having a camera on for a year takes skill because he has to know that the settings set for the picture will work out well.
Irving Penn
A notion of photography as stilled matter
Irving Penn was one of the twentieth century’s great photographers, known for his arresting images and masterful printmaking. Although he was celebrated as one of Vogue magazine’s top photographers for more than sixty years, Penn was an intensely private man who avoided the limelight and pursued his work with quiet and relentless dedication. At a time when photography was primarily understood as a means of communication, he approached it with an artist’s eye and expanded the creative potential of the medium, both in his professional and personal work.
Still life can claim that which is abundant; that which overflows (a reflection on luxury and wealth). Food in still life ‘today’ always touches upon consumption as a social process. Food in still life as a genre touches other systems of organisation, the wealth of the land and the turning of the seasons. It embraces the ‘stuffness’ of the world
Ai Wei-Wei
Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
Artist, thinker, and activist Ai Weiwei was born in Beijing in 1957 and grew up in difficult circumstances. One of Ai’s most famous pieces, Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), incorporates what Ai has called a “cultural readymade.” The work captures Ai as he drops a 2,000-year-old ceremonial urn, allowing it to smash to the floor at his feet. Not only did this artifact have considerable value, it also had symbolic and cultural worth. The Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) is considered a defining period in the history of Chinese civilization, and to deliberately break an iconic form from that era is equivalent to tossing away an entire inheritance of cultural meaning about China. With this work, Ai began his ongoing use of antique readymade objects, demonstrating his questioning attitude toward how and by whom cultural values are created.
Ai shows his timing and photography skills by making sure the urn is caught right in time, in focus and worst of all he only had one shot at this as theres only one traditional urn from this dynasty.
This workshop taught me how to create time lapse photography. The camera’s shutter speed was set on 1″, iso on a 100 and the aperture on F13. The broncolour flash was set on 4.0 and could go from 10 flashes a second to 50 flashes a second which allowed us to have the flexibility of choosing the time frame. we had a camera attached to a tripod that held up the light that akso holded a timer for the falsh to start. For us to have an effective outcome we needed movement in the shot so we catch the trail of action. walking, jumping, skipping or squatting was our options to start with. To further develop I would have a couple or a single person dacning salsa in a red dress and the guy in a white suit and I think the colours would of been so vibrant and interesting.
Do you remember the last time you went out and printed a snapshot? Or filled up a chunky, leather-bound photo album with a set of family portraits? With the immediacy of digital recording and the convenience of smartphones for organising and sharing images, the act of printing physical pictures has become something of an anachronism for anyone but hipsters and art photographers. And this is what i truley learnt from the lecture that Dr Francis took about Photographs being an object within an image. The generation nowadays dont really collect photos in physical albums eventhough that is one of the safest and oldest ways of storing photographs. Now you can have photographs in your phone or cloud albums however they cannot be touched with your hand, and they could easily be deleted or damged online.
INTRODUCTION: Photographs as objects. from PHOTOGRAPHS, OBEJECTS, HISTORIES, Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Elart, editors. Routledge, 2004
“The photograph was very old, the corners were blunted from having been pasted in an album, the sepia print had faded, and the picture just managed to show two children standing together at the end of a little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory, what was called a Winter Garden in those days.“
In this introduction I can explain that the writer is aged, he is talking how a physical photograph is getting old and faded and that is because of how long ago it was taken, that photograph must of been decades old as he even says that the corners were blunted which shows that it was being flipped in the album book quite often. The central rationale of Photographs Objects Histories is that a photograph is a three- dimensional thing, not only a two-dimensional image. As such, photographs exist materially in the world, as chemical deposits on paper, as images mounted on a multitude of different sized, shaped, coloured and decorated cards, as subject to additions to their surface or as drawing their meanings from presentational forms such as frames and albums. Photographs are both images and physical objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience.
KENNETH JOSEPHSON:
Kenneth Josephson is recognized as one of the pioneers of conceptual photography. He has explored the concepts of photographic truth and illusion throughout his career, producing a varied oeuvre that utilizes a range of techniques from collage and construction to multiple exposures and single negative photographs. Focusing on what it means to make a picture, Josephson’s work playfully highlights the illusive nature of photography.
His interest in the ways the camera manipulates what we see, how it abstracts space, compresses three dimensions into two, divorces subjects from their context and arrests time and motion—draws attention to the physical act of making a photograph and what that implies. Throughout his body of work, Josephson’s incisive commentary on the curiosities of photography as a descriptive medium and our belief in the image places his work at the vanguard of conceptual photography.
Maurizio Anzeri
Maurizio Anzeri makes his portraits by sewing directly into found vintage photographs. His embroidered patterns garnish the figures like elaborate costumes, but also suggest a psychological aura, as if revealing the person’s thoughts or feelings. The antique appearance of the photographs is often at odds with the sharp lines and silky shimmer of the threads. The combined media gives the effect of a dimension where history and future converge. The image used in Round Midnight is an early 20th century ‘glamour shot’ that at the time would have been considered titillating for both the girl’s nudity and ethnicity. Anzeri’s delicately stitched veil recasts the figure with an uncomfortable modesty, overlaying a past generation’s cross-cultural anxieties with an allusion to our own.
John Stezaker
John Stezaker’s work re-examines the various relationships to the photographic image: as documentation of truth, purveyor of memory, and symbol of modern culture. In his collages, Stezaker appropriates images found in books, magazines, and postcards and uses them as ‘readymades’. Through his elegant juxtapositions, Stezaker adopts the content and contexts of the original images to convey his own witty and poignant meanings.
In his Marriage series, Stezaker focuses on the concept of portraiture, both as art historical genre and public identity. Using publicity shots of classic film stars, Stezaker splices and overlaps famous faces, creating hybrid ‘icons’ that dissociate the familiar to create sensations of the uncanny. Coupling male and female identity into unified characters, Stezaker points to a disjointed harmony, where the irreconciliation of difference both complements and detracts from the whole. In his correlated images, personalities (and our idealisations of them) become ancillary and empty, rendered abject through their magnified flaws and struggle for visual dominance.
In using stylistic images from Hollywood’s golden era, Stezaker both temporally and conceptually engages with his interest in Surrealism. Placed in contemporary context, his portraits retain their aura of glamour, whilst simultaneously operating as exotic ‘artefacts’ of an obsolete culture. Similar to the photos of ‘primitivism’ published in George Bataille’s Documents, Stezaker’s portraits celebrate the grotesque, rendering the romance with modernism equally compelling and perverse.
Photography & Materiality: Window or object
In this particular lecture we learnt about how a photograph could be a picture or an ‘imprint’ ( iconic or indexical), We thought about how is a picture ‘constructed’- the snap-shot, the tableau or the montage.
We looked at the Western picture, the window through we are looking through. It is the depiction( or authoring) of a view/ the historical construction of seeing in a particulaer mode.
Dating back to the late sixties and early seventies, these rarely exhibited works chart Mapplethorpe’s experimental approach to subjects and mediums, demonstrating how the sensibilities shaped during this time would continue to inform his creative practice. These first gems of his artistic path undeniably present a sculptural quality and can be read like visual poems. For him, photography was a means to an end in a search for original self-expression. His utilitarian use of the medium resulted in a revolution for art photography. During Mapplethorpe’s lifetime, photography wasn’t a respected means of art making as it is today. He was able to bring photography into major museums during the course of his career, most notably one of his final shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989, and many museums posthumously.
Ken Jacibs, Windows, 1964
The picture as window can be understood more ‘photographically’ as the picture as de- limited frame. The moving camera shapes the screen image with great purposefulness, using the frame of a window as fulcrum upon which to wheel about the exterior scene. The zoom lens rips, pulling depth planes apart and slapping them together, contracting and expanding in concurrence with camera movements to impart a terrific apparent-motion to the complex of the object-forms pictured on the horizontal-vertical screen, its axis steadied by the audience’s sense of gravity. The camera’s movements in being transferred to objects tend also to be greatly magnified (instead of the camera the adjacent building turns).
Damian's Reflective Journal 