In-class critique notes for Time-based project 2.
I have decided to go with my image-based countdown concept.
Tracy and Stephen critiqued my video so far. They said:
- I should have thematic connections between the image in the inner circle and the outer part.
- I should also have one theme per number.
- I should also consider having an overall theme.
- I should make sure I keep the frame still so that there is no change perceptible as the number changes. They said that the second will seem longer if it doesn't move at all which is a good point because I was disappointed with how short the second was.
- There was a suggestion that the numbers should also be made up of patterns but I am concerned that this might get too busy.
- There was another suggestion that I choose a different font for the letter. Stephen suggested a more angular sans serif like Neutra or Akkurat.
- WE also discussed whether there should be an obvious line going around as it rotates but I think it might be better without.
Overall, this critique was very helpful. I will take up a bunch of these suggestions, especially the thematic ones.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Project 2
I have been having a lot of trouble deciding on a topic for my project 2. I had first decided to do a really conceptual project that didn't contain the actual numbers but rather a group of x's representing days that would disappear gradually throughout the countdown. I have revised this concept to include the actual numbers.
CREATIVE BRIEF
TIME BASED MEDIA
SARA CWYNAR
WORKING TITLE
One Second Year, Macro/Micro Countdown
OVERVIEW
The idea is that a whole year of time is represented in each second of my countdown. Someone is crossing off the days of a ‘calendar’. Originally it was going to be a giant sheet of squares (like days in a calendar) will have chunks of x’s crossed out that correspond to the numbers 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2. There will be fewer X’s for each number in the countdown. These shots will be filmed normally and then played backwards so that the x’s continue to disappear. In each shot of the countdown another chunk is missing. A mouth was going to say the corresponding number in slow motion while a voice that clearly does not correspond to the voice says the number much more quickly, making the mouth seem outside of the timeframe of the rest of the video. .
I have revised this concept so that a year's worth of month-long calendars (in a big grid corresponding to an actual year) will be filled up with only the x's that correspond to the number (that make the shape of the number). After the number appears the rest of the X's will fill up very quickly and the calendar will peel off the wall revealing another year. I will count down through ten years.
AUDIENCE
This will lean more towards being an art project than a design project (I hope!) so it will be directed towards and audience who is well-versed in contemporary art, probably educated, but not necessarily so. People who aren’t necessarily looking for a really literal project, who are prepared for some level of ambiguity. But really it is for everyone!
KEY MESSAGE
Originally the video was about simultaneously counting down to the end of a life and counting up as the days pass. Time accumulates and disappears simultaneously. I will still retain this concept but in a more literal way (although still not too literal!)
Now the key message is a of macro/micro countdown. A year will disappear in a second. It is about our obsession with time and youth and the feeling that time passes way too quickly. It will also be about the difficulty of conceiving of time and representing the passage of time and about the impossibility of thinking about a tiny chunk of time like a ten second countdown relative to the rest of your life or a year of your life. What does ten seconds mean in the giant time frame between birth and death?
CONTENT
Originally the frames of the x’s being crossed out were going to be cut quickly to the shots of the mouth and back again. There was going to be a fluid sountrack throughout, featuring the numbers being said at each second.
Now the camera will stay on the calendar the whole time. During the second, the x's will fill up to form the letter, then all of the x's will fill up, then the calendar will peel away to reveal the next year. The x's will appear in different ways. Some will appear gradually and sporadically to form the letter, some will appear top-down, others will appear as dashes and then will cross themselves to form an x. This will hopefully be filmed in stop-motion on a super 8 if it works out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
None as of yet.
VISUAL REFERENCES
I have been looking at a lot of Roger Ballen black and white photos of really stark sort of dingy looking rooms with strange-looking people and objects in them. This is the sort of aesthetic I want for my video. I’ve also been watching some Cassavetes films like the Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under The Influence and I really like the sort of washed out colours of them. I am hoping to achieve this with super 8 film.
STORYBOARDS
Here are the storyboards for my initial concept.
Here are some other concepts I was thinking about:
Girl Countdown, numbers made of different items associated with ideas of femininity. Number made of iconic hairdos, number made of flowers, madonna imagery, bathing suits, Rosie the riveter types assembling a number, etc. All on a flowery background.
Flowers
Hairdos
Updated old-fashioned countdown. A countdown like the old fashioned ones with the circles but made of paper and photographs. More of the photo is revealed as the clock-arm countdown thingy goes around.
Other concept where I was going to make 3 rigs and move papers gradually across them while crumpling and uncrmpling and then speeding it up a lot so they look like they're blowing across the screen. One paper in front would uncrumple to reveal the number.
Pigment concept - for this idea I wanted to have the letters appear out of coloured pigment and then wipe them away with my hand. But this is a bad idea because pigment is unhealthy!
CREATIVE BRIEF
TIME BASED MEDIA
SARA CWYNAR
WORKING TITLE
One Second Year, Macro/Micro Countdown
OVERVIEW
The idea is that a whole year of time is represented in each second of my countdown. Someone is crossing off the days of a ‘calendar’. Originally it was going to be a giant sheet of squares (like days in a calendar) will have chunks of x’s crossed out that correspond to the numbers 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2. There will be fewer X’s for each number in the countdown. These shots will be filmed normally and then played backwards so that the x’s continue to disappear. In each shot of the countdown another chunk is missing. A mouth was going to say the corresponding number in slow motion while a voice that clearly does not correspond to the voice says the number much more quickly, making the mouth seem outside of the timeframe of the rest of the video. .
I have revised this concept so that a year's worth of month-long calendars (in a big grid corresponding to an actual year) will be filled up with only the x's that correspond to the number (that make the shape of the number). After the number appears the rest of the X's will fill up very quickly and the calendar will peel off the wall revealing another year. I will count down through ten years.
AUDIENCE
This will lean more towards being an art project than a design project (I hope!) so it will be directed towards and audience who is well-versed in contemporary art, probably educated, but not necessarily so. People who aren’t necessarily looking for a really literal project, who are prepared for some level of ambiguity. But really it is for everyone!
KEY MESSAGE
Originally the video was about simultaneously counting down to the end of a life and counting up as the days pass. Time accumulates and disappears simultaneously. I will still retain this concept but in a more literal way (although still not too literal!)
Now the key message is a of macro/micro countdown. A year will disappear in a second. It is about our obsession with time and youth and the feeling that time passes way too quickly. It will also be about the difficulty of conceiving of time and representing the passage of time and about the impossibility of thinking about a tiny chunk of time like a ten second countdown relative to the rest of your life or a year of your life. What does ten seconds mean in the giant time frame between birth and death?
CONTENT
Originally the frames of the x’s being crossed out were going to be cut quickly to the shots of the mouth and back again. There was going to be a fluid sountrack throughout, featuring the numbers being said at each second.
Now the camera will stay on the calendar the whole time. During the second, the x's will fill up to form the letter, then all of the x's will fill up, then the calendar will peel away to reveal the next year. The x's will appear in different ways. Some will appear gradually and sporadically to form the letter, some will appear top-down, others will appear as dashes and then will cross themselves to form an x. This will hopefully be filmed in stop-motion on a super 8 if it works out.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
None as of yet.
VISUAL REFERENCES
I have been looking at a lot of Roger Ballen black and white photos of really stark sort of dingy looking rooms with strange-looking people and objects in them. This is the sort of aesthetic I want for my video. I’ve also been watching some Cassavetes films like the Killing of a Chinese Bookie and A Woman Under The Influence and I really like the sort of washed out colours of them. I am hoping to achieve this with super 8 film.
STORYBOARDS
Here are the storyboards for my initial concept.
Here are some other concepts I was thinking about:
Girl Countdown, numbers made of different items associated with ideas of femininity. Number made of iconic hairdos, number made of flowers, madonna imagery, bathing suits, Rosie the riveter types assembling a number, etc. All on a flowery background.
Flowers
Hairdos
Updated old-fashioned countdown. A countdown like the old fashioned ones with the circles but made of paper and photographs. More of the photo is revealed as the clock-arm countdown thingy goes around.
Other concept where I was going to make 3 rigs and move papers gradually across them while crumpling and uncrmpling and then speeding it up a lot so they look like they're blowing across the screen. One paper in front would uncrumple to reveal the number.
Pigment concept - for this idea I wanted to have the letters appear out of coloured pigment and then wipe them away with my hand. But this is a bad idea because pigment is unhealthy!
Friday, October 10, 2008
Thatthatisis
Here is our Project 1 Video about language
This video uses abstract shapes to represent language. The shapes being passed between hands depict the ways in which human beings use arbitrary word to make up the language with which they communicate. The shapes are simple and abstract to show the randomness with which a word corresponds to that which it depicts in a language. The shapes are passed between disjointed arms and finally assembled into coherent but still abstract shapes. More mechanical shapes come in later to show the nature of language as a construction and the fact that eventually language will be gone, and that it is increasingly being replaced by artifical representations, and all that will be left are these mechanical representations of language (or the remains of them). Our noun was language and our verbs were bloom and fracture. We used a stilted quality of movement and a sporadic-sounding soundtrack t represent fracture and a slow start building up to a frenetic ending (both in the music and in the pace of the images) to represent the word bloom.
This video uses abstract shapes to represent language. The shapes being passed between hands depict the ways in which human beings use arbitrary word to make up the language with which they communicate. The shapes are simple and abstract to show the randomness with which a word corresponds to that which it depicts in a language. The shapes are passed between disjointed arms and finally assembled into coherent but still abstract shapes. More mechanical shapes come in later to show the nature of language as a construction and the fact that eventually language will be gone, and that it is increasingly being replaced by artifical representations, and all that will be left are these mechanical representations of language (or the remains of them). Our noun was language and our verbs were bloom and fracture. We used a stilted quality of movement and a sporadic-sounding soundtrack t represent fracture and a slow start building up to a frenetic ending (both in the music and in the pace of the images) to represent the word bloom.
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Everyday Sounds
INSIDE
For my indoor location I am in my living room in my apartment at 504 Roxton Rd. in downtown Toronto. This is one street east of Ossington about half a block south of Bloor. It is 7:30 PM on a Thursday.
There is a low humming I never noticed before. I presume it comes from some sort of fan outside the window. It continues for the entire ten minutes.
A car horn that I can just hear. Two quick beeps.
A muffled voice talks for about five minutes oustide. A woman's voice. She sounds about 30 years old. I can only hear the peaks in her speech but for some reason I feel like I know her age. I can't hear who she is talking to or what she is talking about.
Another car horn. A long hong this time. Muffled.
A drill goes off for about 3 seconds.
The fridge hums constantly behind of all the other noises. It take me the first few minutes of listening to even notice this, it is so familiar to me.
My roomate is playing some music in her room. It is a low man's voice. It sounds nice with the high woman's voice talking outside.
The drill goes off again, this time for much longer.
The stove clicks regularly, about every thirty seconds three clicks.
And another car horn. The horns are sporadic but feel almost inevitable when they happen.
The drill, the woman, an airplane outside the window, the stove noises and the refrigerator and the music are all going at once.
I realize that the music is Leonard Cohen because 'So Long, Marianne' comes on and I can just make out the melody. I think I recognize it because it is from my childhood.
My phone rings six times beside me and jars me out of my listening. I always thought it only rang five times if I didn't answer it.
A police siren far away outside the window.
The stove again and a cough. The song changes and I don't recognize it anymore.
There is a long 'silence' where the fridge hum sounds almost deafening.
A door slams outside and the stove clicks.
OUTDOORS
I am in my backyard at 8 PM on a Thursday. My backyard face onto an alley then another set of houses, then Ossington. The noises from Ossington sound very loud from out here.
A long honk of a car horn.
Cars pass by every few seconds, they make 'whoosh' noises and quickly fade away.
Thewind periodically blows the grass and the leaves and then fades away again.
Whenever the wind picks up it is accompanied by various pitches of creaking noises and what sounds like a low rumble int he ground that I can almost feel instead of hearing.
A door slams.
A truck idles for about two minutes in front of the house and drowns out all of the other noises.
The truck stops, it feels very quiet for a few seconds then the other noises seem to start up again.
The Ossington bus goes by. It is a much lower, louder rumble than the other vehicles.
The sound of the outdoor motion detector light goes on with two 'click click' noises every time I pick up my pen.
A motorcycle drowns out everything else.
Three long horn honks.
Two raccoons shriek periodically. They are probably fighting over some garbage. This is by far the most disconcerting of all the noises. I find it funny how accustomed I have become to this noise that truly sounds like one animal killing another. I remember when I first moved to Toronto being terrified by the raccoon fight noises, now I barely remember to write it down.
They are making random high pitched screaming noises followed by lots of rustling of leaves.
Another car horn, one quick beep, higher pitched than the others.
The woman from before comes out again. I hear her distinctly say "I would take that $1000".
The wind picks up really loudly this time, it feels like it is in my ears.
Another bus goes by, presumably the Harbord bus this time. (Or maybe the other way around). Drowns out all the other sounds.
More raccoon shrieks
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you're listening like this it feels like one sound quickly follows another. It is never quite silent. It starts to feel almost like a performance for my benefit or something.
The most prominent noises were car horns, the motorcycle, the time my phone rang, and the raccoons. Anything louder or higher pitched. The least prominent were the really persistent white noises that I am completely accustomed to. Like the fridge humming and the fan outside the window that is always there. These noises sounded really loud during quiet periods but would then disappear completely, and they are only there if you listen to them, other noises are impossible to ignore, particularly when they're high pitched.
The sounds were all very different from each other. There are the low, steady sounds and the ones that break through the other noises. Some of the sounds were surprisingly nice together. Like the wound of the wind and the quiet clicking of the outdoor light, and the sound of the man on the record and the woman in really life talking and singing over each other. All of the sounds were very familiar even though I've never actively listened for them before.
I also noticed that when I was inside I still heard more outside noises than indoor ones.
I also never noticed how many different car horn noises there are.
I also found it interesting how I could recognize the various noises just because I listened in such familiar surroundings. For example, I knew exactly that any bus I heard was either the 63 Ossington or the 94 Harbord just because I know.
I found it interesting that it is never silent. There is a whole variety of background sounds and white noise that I just never listen for. Also, even when I could hear five different noises at once, I still realized that I would not have noticed any noise if I hadn't been listening. It was really interesting to notice that there is all of this layering of noise in my house all the time and I just never listen for it. And that what I generally perceive as silence is actually myriad noises playing over each other. Some of the sounds were really nice like music coming through two sets of doors and the wind outside and the steady hum of the refrigerator.
For my indoor location I am in my living room in my apartment at 504 Roxton Rd. in downtown Toronto. This is one street east of Ossington about half a block south of Bloor. It is 7:30 PM on a Thursday.
There is a low humming I never noticed before. I presume it comes from some sort of fan outside the window. It continues for the entire ten minutes.
A car horn that I can just hear. Two quick beeps.
A muffled voice talks for about five minutes oustide. A woman's voice. She sounds about 30 years old. I can only hear the peaks in her speech but for some reason I feel like I know her age. I can't hear who she is talking to or what she is talking about.
Another car horn. A long hong this time. Muffled.
A drill goes off for about 3 seconds.
The fridge hums constantly behind of all the other noises. It take me the first few minutes of listening to even notice this, it is so familiar to me.
My roomate is playing some music in her room. It is a low man's voice. It sounds nice with the high woman's voice talking outside.
The drill goes off again, this time for much longer.
The stove clicks regularly, about every thirty seconds three clicks.
And another car horn. The horns are sporadic but feel almost inevitable when they happen.
The drill, the woman, an airplane outside the window, the stove noises and the refrigerator and the music are all going at once.
I realize that the music is Leonard Cohen because 'So Long, Marianne' comes on and I can just make out the melody. I think I recognize it because it is from my childhood.
My phone rings six times beside me and jars me out of my listening. I always thought it only rang five times if I didn't answer it.
A police siren far away outside the window.
The stove again and a cough. The song changes and I don't recognize it anymore.
There is a long 'silence' where the fridge hum sounds almost deafening.
A door slams outside and the stove clicks.
OUTDOORS
I am in my backyard at 8 PM on a Thursday. My backyard face onto an alley then another set of houses, then Ossington. The noises from Ossington sound very loud from out here.
A long honk of a car horn.
Cars pass by every few seconds, they make 'whoosh' noises and quickly fade away.
Thewind periodically blows the grass and the leaves and then fades away again.
Whenever the wind picks up it is accompanied by various pitches of creaking noises and what sounds like a low rumble int he ground that I can almost feel instead of hearing.
A door slams.
A truck idles for about two minutes in front of the house and drowns out all of the other noises.
The truck stops, it feels very quiet for a few seconds then the other noises seem to start up again.
The Ossington bus goes by. It is a much lower, louder rumble than the other vehicles.
The sound of the outdoor motion detector light goes on with two 'click click' noises every time I pick up my pen.
A motorcycle drowns out everything else.
Three long horn honks.
Two raccoons shriek periodically. They are probably fighting over some garbage. This is by far the most disconcerting of all the noises. I find it funny how accustomed I have become to this noise that truly sounds like one animal killing another. I remember when I first moved to Toronto being terrified by the raccoon fight noises, now I barely remember to write it down.
They are making random high pitched screaming noises followed by lots of rustling of leaves.
Another car horn, one quick beep, higher pitched than the others.
The woman from before comes out again. I hear her distinctly say "I would take that $1000".
The wind picks up really loudly this time, it feels like it is in my ears.
Another bus goes by, presumably the Harbord bus this time. (Or maybe the other way around). Drowns out all the other sounds.
More raccoon shrieks
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When you're listening like this it feels like one sound quickly follows another. It is never quite silent. It starts to feel almost like a performance for my benefit or something.
The most prominent noises were car horns, the motorcycle, the time my phone rang, and the raccoons. Anything louder or higher pitched. The least prominent were the really persistent white noises that I am completely accustomed to. Like the fridge humming and the fan outside the window that is always there. These noises sounded really loud during quiet periods but would then disappear completely, and they are only there if you listen to them, other noises are impossible to ignore, particularly when they're high pitched.
The sounds were all very different from each other. There are the low, steady sounds and the ones that break through the other noises. Some of the sounds were surprisingly nice together. Like the wound of the wind and the quiet clicking of the outdoor light, and the sound of the man on the record and the woman in really life talking and singing over each other. All of the sounds were very familiar even though I've never actively listened for them before.
I also noticed that when I was inside I still heard more outside noises than indoor ones.
I also never noticed how many different car horn noises there are.
I also found it interesting how I could recognize the various noises just because I listened in such familiar surroundings. For example, I knew exactly that any bus I heard was either the 63 Ossington or the 94 Harbord just because I know.
I found it interesting that it is never silent. There is a whole variety of background sounds and white noise that I just never listen for. Also, even when I could hear five different noises at once, I still realized that I would not have noticed any noise if I hadn't been listening. It was really interesting to notice that there is all of this layering of noise in my house all the time and I just never listen for it. And that what I generally perceive as silence is actually myriad noises playing over each other. Some of the sounds were really nice like music coming through two sets of doors and the wind outside and the steady hum of the refrigerator.
Friday, September 12, 2008
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