After visiting the Tate the Modern and Britain for some visual inspiration, I started to explore ideas relating to form, appearance and shape; especially drawn to the work of Richard Deacon. Deacon’s forms seemed to capture a sort of
energy and almost move as you moved around them. This slight illusion of change
is something I want to bring forward in my work as a theme of telling a story
through subtle change. Deacon works in physical space with metal, wood,
laminated materials and many more surfaces on a huge scale that mean she has an
incredibly broad body of work.
After the Tate to Tate trip I was particularly attracted to a series of monochrome pictures from throughout the Modern and Britain. One of these, 'Untitled' By John Stezaker (https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/stezaker-untitled-t13593) was minimal in its visual form, yet the physical separation of the flat black print to the left was striking in its reflection of the head opposite it. The composition was particularly pleasing, with the head and line matching up with the rule of thirds - a classic photographical composition.
Replicating the photo required taking a photo with two light sources - one strong, unfeathered light to the front and a softer back fill to highlight the neck. Once taken, this was brought into Photoshop and edited, as I increased the contrast and manipulated the colours with an overlay to have a similar sepia tone to the original. I then used a mask to paint out the background, and the back of the hair so that the head appeared to disappear into the background. I originally had tried to make the 'stripe' practically as seen in the photo above, but decided the proportion was not going to work with the head. So instead, it was simply a rectangular shape I drew in Photoshop, with a subtle pattern applied and an inner shadow to create the lowlight to the left. The background too was recreated digitally in flat black colour. Leading on from this, I decided that the best way to tell a story from this piece was combining it with some subtle movement. In this way I move it beyond a frozen snapshot of time, as it was in photo form, and into a small narrative. I tried to imagine what might happen after the photo was taken - would the subject would disappear back into the darkness of the environment the photo was taken in? This time I needed video footage, not a photo, if the subject was going to move:
Using Photoshop again (which supports some video editing features too) I masked out the background around the head and spliced it into my digital background with a black fill and the 'stripe'. This took about an hour to do as every frame had to be individually masked out for the effect to work. After this was complete, I horizontally flipped the footage so that it was in the same orientation as the original photo, and rendered it out as a H.264 file to get this:
This piece I had created I felt was an interesting development of Stezaker's original photo as it acted both as a photo and as a small narrative through the limited motion of the piece. This threshold between photography and animation/film is something I am going to explore in greater detail as this body of work progresses.
As we travelled around Paris and the multitude of museums there, I was more interested in capturing the story of our journey more than the art we were seeing. Whilst the composition, colours and lighting of the pieces we saw was inspiring and useful for film as a medium, the actual art itself was arguably less important for me to document than the narrative of my friends reacting to the pieces and reflecting on them. These are some of the most inspiring artworks I saw, mostly in the Rodin museum. The expressive, kinetic energy the sculptures possessed made them feel like they were almost moving in front of us from many angles, just like the Deacon's:
(You can see all the photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/120003728@N08/sets/72157642144355534) Responding to these works and others led me to experiment with subtle types of animation. The attempt was to inject some of this kinetic energy back into the works I was viewing and capture the feeling of seeing them in the flesh in a digital form. My first experiment ended up being slightly comical. I brought the photo into Photoshop and split the image into a foreground, middle ground and background all on separate layers. From there, I had to remove the fingers of the statue from its palm and figure out a way to move them to demonstrate the effect.
The photo had some overlap, and so this proved harder than I originally thought. I had to create negative space behind the fingers to fill the gap left when they moved. To fill in this background layer I had to first remove the foreground elements obscuring the view, and then use the healing tool, clone tool and content aware fill tool fill in the background. I decided to make a slightly comic image to trial the effect, moving the fingers of the statue in a ridiculous, amusing way. This image is what I eventually managed to create using the 'puppet-warp' tool between the fingers. This let me manipulate the pixels organically, a new feature of Photoshop CS6. The process involved creating a frame animation in photoshop using the timeline feature and moving the fingers with puppet-warp each frame by about 2 pixels. When played back as a GIF animation and looped, this gives the illusion of movement to the images. To progress the animation further, I added parallax movement to imply three-dimensional depth to the piece. This technique requires animating the different layers of the photo to move horizontally at different speeds: faster if it is closer to the lens and slower if further away from the foreground. When played back, this imitates the natural parallax we witness when we move our heads in front of a solid object in the real world - the same basis that 3D films rely on to suggest depth.
I believe the image is comical because too much is happening in too unrealistic a way - it needs to be subtler in future. As this method had proven relatively successful with the Rodin sculpture, I decided to extend it to other artworks I had seen as well. Firstly I wondered if I could add this same parallax to flat works, rather than the physical sculptures I had used before to experiment with the technique. I again split the image into a foreground and background, by carefully masking and erasing elements of each layer. The negative spaces were again filled so as not to reveal any 'holes' during animation. Then I took this result and animated it, so that the foreground moved 10px to the right, and the background moved 5px to the left. After being cropped and exported, this is what the piece looked like:
I wanted to try and push the effect slightly further and see what else I could do to alter these images. I began thinking about the limitations of painting a picture such as this one several hundred years ago (it was originally painted by François-Auguste Biard in 1840 - titled 'Magdalena Bay') and concluded that as pairing in its very nature freezes a moment of time forever, it cannot obviously capture movement or subtle nuances of movement. Thus, a portrait cannot move, and a fire cannot burn.
This prompted me to create this quick experiment - adding a fire to the scene, to totally change the mood of the piece by adding warmth and movement to the otherwise cold and tranquil/frozen and icy scene. This was a much smaller movement, and so didn't seem as comical to me. I think the effect worked to certain extent, as I tried to make the fire appear in keeping with its surroundings and feel 'realistic' in terms of Biard's style. This style of photo is often called a Cinemagraph, a partially animated photo that is mostly still but with a small moving element that is usually repeated or looped. Two of the pioneers of the technique were Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck, American photographers who used the technique for fashion shoots in New York to great effect, as documented on their website here.
These are two of my favourite works by them:
The image of the woman looking the mirror particularly grabs me, as eyes are one of the most expressive parts of the human body, and integral to filmmaking in terms of conveying emotion to the audience. The small movement of her gaze redirecting itself really makes the woman come alive before the audience - in my opinion more effective at convincing us that she is a 'real' person than, for example, her lips moving.
The work of Burg and Beck led me to consider how we observe. In their photo, the woman is observing both herself, and fleetingly her audience, as her line of sight changes The idea of watching someone look on at something was fascinating to me. Thus I browsed through some of the other photos I took in Paris and looked for ones I could appropriate into a comparable result. The following are photos of people, and people observing art:
This photo was the first one I experimented with. My friend Dominic looks onwards at a Callum Innes painting at the Pompidou Centre exhibition of modern art, and I captured him deep in thought. I added a very slight head-tilt to his stance, which animates every few seconds to suggest his contemplative nature as he looks on. Again, this is amusing, as it seems slightly 'tongue-in-cheek' and comical.
I then decided to make the observer the complete object of the piece, rather than simply looking on. This allowed me to look at the people as they observed the art, inverting the norm and following the story of them exploring the artworks in the museums. I began to think about the relationship between art and artist as well as art and observer. This is a fascinating connection, and one a lot of artists have explored. This image was a much more natal movement, and so as a result manages to remain convincingly unnoticeable at first glance. Imagining an audience looking at a piece, staring for a period of time before they even realise it's animated is a really captivating idea I'd like to pursue.
I wanted a more symbolic catalyst for my work, to inform the direction I took it in and shape the future pieces. Many artists have explored the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins through their art. The sins are a controversial topic, introduced by the Catholic Church as the counterpoint to the Cardinal virtues. They display the seven characteristics of a person who has rejected God, and offer a list of behaviours to avoid if you are to become closer to God and one with him after death according to traditional theology. Of the sins (Envy, Anger, Greed, Lust, Pride, Avarice and Sloth) some are more easily depicted through metaphor and allegory than others. Telling the story of the sins and people who have succumbed to them is an avenue I am interested in pursuing. At the Tate Britain, I saw this artwork 'an Allegory of Man', by an unknown artist:
Painted during the 16th Century on board, it signifies several of the sins on the arrows being fired at the man attempting to enter heaven. This is symbolic of the struggle that the church believes everyone has to overcome during our finite lives on earth to gain entry to the afterlife and pass St Peter at the Pearly Gates.
Bearing this in mind as I looked around the rest of the museums, I tried to find common links between these images and sins an the other works I saw. The most obvious connection was Rodin's famous sculpture 'The Kiss', depicting a couple embracing and kissing passionately. With a clear parallel to the allegorical painting through it's depiction of lust, I sketched it in pencil whilst there and photographed a closeup shot of the point of contact of their lips. The physical sculpture lent itself well to explorations of three dimensional space through photography and later animation.
The deadly sins as a topic made me think predominantly of the Catacombs of Paris, where the bones of 6 million people were transferred to prevent overcrowding of the cemeteries. Thus, the ossuary was created and filled with bones to become an 18th century tourist attraction. This makes it a uniquely sombre but gothic and macabre resting place, with many photo opportunities.
The bones are piled above each other in haphazard heaps. As the sins are so closely tied to the afterlife and the ideas of mortality, I feel this reminder or death - a memento mori - is particularly poignant. The photography of things like these skulls on a very small, intimate scale, but not macro, also does something to remind me of our small place in the wold - this many bones certainly reminds you how fleeting our lives are at any rate!
Skulls in particular caught my attention in regards to this:
I want to bring forward this sombre atmosphere, as well as an awareness of human mortality and sin as I work towards a final outcome. Thus these photos are more my visual inspiration than anything else.
Following my exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins through other artworks, I now began to use my own works. I set up a series of photos with one model to illustrate six of the sins, bearing in mind I would be continuing to animate the photos afterwards. I wanted to try and avoid h comic element of my earlier work by going for a darker, more serious feeling.
Looking at other artists, like Rosie Hardy and Aaron Nacer's Seven Deadly Sins series above, and a few others (here and here) gave me inspiration to come up with a list of keywords for each sin to try and portray:
A page from my notebook with my preliminary planning for my own photos
Wrath - imagery of anger, knives, kinetic motion, blood, pain, death
Gluttony- imagery of food, excess, chocolate, luxury, appetite, hunger
Pride- imagery of mirrors, excess, self-portraits, vanity, makeup, obsession
Greed- imagery of covetousness, wanting, clsoefisted, excess, yearning
Sloth- imagery of tiredness, sleep, waste, unfulfillment, yearning, boredom
Envy- imagery of betrayal, magazines, loathing, hatred, media, cowardice
I decided to follow these photographer's by also using a female model, inspired in part by the classical art world's use of female models.
The first image I shot was Wrath, with a knife as a prop and a natural light from a window to cast stark but not too harsh light on the girl. I shot several photos, but chose to go with a standing shot, not lying down shot in the end to balance out against the other final photos. The girl holds the knife in her mouth, to symbolically convey her mental wrath and aggressive speech through imagery. The animation I added in photoshop afterwards makes her mouth twitch and eyes open to look at the viewer in hopefully a shocking way - at first they won't notice that it's an animation as there are several seconds of pause between each motion.
'Wrath' Animation
Following Wrath, I opted to shoot Gluttony - the sin of excess appetite. For this I bought a box of Belgian Chocolates to signify the luxurious nature of this sin. I got the model to try and gorge herself on the chocolate, trying to eat as many as possible at once. This was easier said than done, as the food was incredibly rich! The movement I added to this one was slightly subtler, with only a small movement of the hands to indicate motion and eating.
'Gluttony' Animation
Following Gluttony, I shot Pride, one of the more complicated sins to portray through a small animation. I positioned the model in front of a dressing table and mirror to show her obsession with her own appearance. I posed her looking into her own reflection as she applied lipstick - an indicator of exploiting your own appearance for gain. In post-production I had to digitally remove her eyes, to allow me to move them. Drawing them back in required a light gradient for the white of the eye, and a dark ring around the iris as well as a thin eye light to make them look shiny.
'Pride' Animation
Greed is a sin on excess as well, but of material possessions. It is often referred to as covetousness, and I wanted to convey the sheer opulence that a greedy individual would desire and revel in. For this, I thought that the ultimate display of materiality is wearing jewellery. I began by covering my model in chains, rings, bangles and necklaces whilst she was lying on the floor, but decided this did no adequately show her possessiveness over the objects - it was also slightly too much of an action and not subtle enough for this effect. Therefore, I reshot the image the next day with a different pose, this time the girl held her wealth in hand and clenched her fist over it to show how much she protected it and wished to greedily hide it from others:
'Greed' Animation (Final)
The next sin I shot was sloth, the sin of boredom and wastage which I tried to emulate by using clocks as a prop to illustrate the abundance of time left unused in our daily lives. I collected all the clocks in the house and laid them on my model whilst she 'slept' in a bed. I used natural light from a window, and later animated the chest to move to illustrate deep breathing of sleep. Unfortunately, this effect was not very convincing as the movement was much too exaggerated and quick. I should have been more subtle in my animation.
'Sloth' Animation
The final sin I captured was envy. This made me think of betrayal, loathing and the effect the media has on our society. I toyed with the idea of having a multitude of cut out magazine pictures of what the media deemed 'attractive' surrounding a model, but decided it may be a visually overwhelming image. Instead I had her sit cross-legged on the floor, holding a piece of paper with a symbol for death covering her face to show how our envy of image and beauty can lead to broken morals. I had trouble making this animate well, so decided to invert it momentarily almost as if a flashbulb had gone off, as if photographers were taking photos:
'Envy' Animation
Throughout this series, I went with a classic 'movie poster' colour scheme. This meant that I highlighted areas of importance with a warmer orange tint, added with photoshop through an adjustment layer and radial mask. The background and areas I wanted to focus the eye away from were coloured blue to make them colder and slightly defocussed and desaturated. This meant the eye was drawn to to the more colourful areas and helped me draw them in to notice the small movements within each piece.
I would have changed a few things, mostly with the sloth and envy photos to make them less jarring and more subtle. The more subtle and small the movement, in general I think the better the effect, although I think the greed and pride images worked the best, but weren't necessarily the simplest or most subtle movements.
After the experiments with the small animations within pictures, I decided the idea could take on a broader, larger scale. My intention is to have a physical manifestation of the digital materials I create, trying to blur the lien between the two planes. I experimented with new images and animations, the aim being to make them longer and more expansive - closer to reality, but retaining some of the slightly disconcerting joltiness and unrealness of the earlier animations for the Seven Deadly Sins. I began with photos like this taken in series to capture the walk cycle of another student. Photos were taken at an interval of several inches of movement so that it would slightly jerky, reminiscent of an old film projector perhaps. These photos were brought into photoshop and one by separated from the background using the lasso and pen tools to cut out the figure fro their surroundings. Once this was done, I placed them in order and animated them into a series, so that when played at a speed of 0.01 seconds per frame, they suggested walking. This left me with a walk cycle on a clear background, which left me to decide what to superimpose it on:
I wanted to keep the slightly jerky and unsettling motion of the animation as a nod to the seven deadly sins. The sins series of photos were meant to feel creepy and odd, and keeping this feeling helps to generate an uncomfortable feeling in the viewer. I had several ideas for what setting to use for the animation, but settled eventually on a dolls house. Dolls houses have an intrinsic level of miniature reproduction and potential uneasiness, as the child has full control over the destiny of the occupants of their dolls house. Rather than using dolls, I would use people and video to blur the line between what is a toy and miniature, and what is reality. I didn't have a dolls house to hand, so used shelving boxes as a stand-in until I could experiment with one. I first decided to experiment digitally, before making the transition to physical presence. I shot a photo of the boxes, and super-imposed my earlier animation onto the image:
Imagining this actually being in front of my in the dolls house got me thinking about how to transition from the digital to physical. I wanted this piece to have a physical presence as an installation or moving sculpture, not just an easily destroyed digital manifestation of movement. I considered placing LCD screens in each box, but realised that would require specialist equipment. Using mechanical motion with mtors and actuators would not work either as the level of detailed movement required would be impossible to achieve with animatronics. I remembered a technique I had seen once at a theme park, called 'peppers ghost' invented for use in theatres and haunted houses by John Henry Pepper. The effect allows a 3D projection of an actor to appear like a ghost on stage, by utilising properties of reflection and light in dark rooms.
The actor is lit below stage, with a glass pane or thin screen hung at a 45 degree angle above them. This reflects their image to the audience, making them appear as a ghostly apparition - partially translucent and pale. The effect was popularised for this reason in theatre and haunted houses as an effective and relatively cheap way to create convincing ghost effects.
Now that I had a technique that may possibly work, I needed a way to appropriate it to my task. The issue with using Peppers Ghost is that you require a whole room either adjacent to or below the projection area that is hidden from sigh. With the dolls house I wanted to use I cannot achieve this very easily without losing rooms to use, as if I use some rooms for projection then they cannot be also used for display. Thus I needed to figure out a way to reflect the light in a way that works more effectively.
I drew some mockups to start with, trying to calculate the light bounces and different angles. I realised that mounting a projector above the audience may be difficult, whilst also bouncing light mostly downwards - this would require the dolls house to be very high above the viewer's head so that the reflected light hit their eyes.
As I result I realised I would have to invert the assembly, so that the projector was below the house and projected upwards, reflecting the light upwards towards the viewer's eyes.
I tested this with some still images first, to prove that it worked. My primary issue was with reflection: the plane panes of glass didn't reflect very well at all - instead light passed straight through onto the wall behind and the image was incredibly faint, only reflected by the smudges and fingerprints on the glass.
To fix this and get an image that was usable, I researched several methods. Easiest to achieve was frosted glass spray, which is an aerosol which results in a slightly frosted screen when lightly misted over glass or perspex. I did consider using tracing paper, but thought it would be too opaque and ruin the effect. The test with frosting spay on a section of glass was incredibly successful, resulting in a crisp image:
Having a black background to the image meant that anything black didn't show through as it was not reflected by the glass. Only lighter portions such as the boy and his suit effectively reflected to the audience. The frosted portion is on the left:
The final step would be sourcing the dolls house and finalising what footage to place in each room…
Luckily, a friend had a dolls house I could borrow and adapt for what I needed in the exam. It has a hand built, and has aged with disuse, so suits the aesthetic already of a 'haunted' or slightly eerie feel.
I measured the boxes or rooms next, as I needed to calculate what size perspex would fit into the units. This required some pythagorus - maths I hadn't used for several years! The panels would fit in the boxes at varying angles so that all light is reflected back to the viewer. To add to the feeling of the piece I wanted to think about how it would be displayed. We have small portable LED projectors and a dark room at school, and considering the limited brightness of the projection, this would be the perfect place for it to go. The projector would be beneath the dolls house, pointing up at it. The lightly frosted panels of glass then would reflect light from inside the house back and slightly upwards at an angle towards the viewer, who would be behind a curtain with a small hole in it to look through - hiding the projector and anything unneeded below the angle of the curtain.
This way, the dolls house will almost float in front of the viewer, with the ghostly images floating inside each room. Each room will play out one or two of the sins I photographed earlier, but on a slightly larger scale… there will be full body movements and performances, not just close ups, as the actors will have whole 'rooms' to move about in in the dolls house. This makes it more of a commentary on the sins, as the audience is looking in on a domestic, miniature scene, observing the sins we all commit.
I quickly drafted a story of sorts to portray the six sins I was going to place into my narrative (I decided to exclude the seventh, lust, as my acts were my family members) and worked out how they would progress through the house. A few days later, over the weekend, I set about filming the footage I needed for in the exam. I ensured my actors were expressive, and moved in an unnatural way to compliment the unnerving feel I was trying to achieve, hence things like how they walked were altered. This is an example of the last scene I filmed, scene 5:
For the footage to appear transparent, a lot of work had to be done - this was by far the most time-intensive portion of the project. First I had to create what is called a luma matte, a black and white version of the footage that is hand traced (which some help from the computer) to create a map of where I would like transparency to appear. The purple line is where I am tracing the figures using a tool called the 'rotobrush' - advancing frame by frame and correcting the trace until it has all been separated from the background.
Once this trace was finalised, I had to fill the resulting outline with white and export it for use in the main composition. This generated the following clip, where black will be transparent, white will be preserved:
Once this has been created, by painstakingly tracing around all of the bits of the image I want to remain behind, then it can be used in After Effects to remove the background where video is black in the luma matte, leaving me with this:
This process was repeated with every single video clip, until all of the footage had been removed from it's background - an arduous process, but necessary for what I had in mind! These various clips were then arranged and timed to play at different rates, and scaled so that when projected they were the correct size. This was mostly a process of trial and error, testing every time I changed anything to make sure it fitted properly.
With all the movement of the projector in between trials, I created this alignment tab to be projected so I could line up the image correctly, roughly lining up with the walls of the bottom two floors of the dolls house I would be projecting onto:
With this finished, I began work on the intro section, which had to match the slightly creepy aesthetic I wanted the final installation to have. I drafted several ideas before arriving on a scratchy, very angular look. As I already had a classic tv reel countdown to begin the film, I wanted to preserve the film projector feel, with the organic movement it brings.
To capture this, I drew out the text three times each on paper, scanned it in, isolated the text from the paper in Photoshop, and flicked between them several times a second so that although they were visually similar, they also jumped about and slightly altered with each frame.
In After Effects, I then looped the composition, so that it jitters for as long as I need, not just through three times. I documented this with screenshots:
Import
Isolate text
Bring layers into comp
Cascade layers for 2 frames each
Pre-Comp
Time-Remap the Pre-Comp
Add the expression: Loop out ("cycle") 0
Alter the comp settings and check loop!
In the final film, as I am projecting onto black, I inverted the text colour to be white so it would show up better. The cross underneath sins was also coloured red so that it stood out more effectively. My final intro sequence looked like this, and is projected at the start of the installation playthrough:
Finally, I repeated this process to add text accompanying every sin in the installation, so that the audience was in no doubt when they occurred, and could see how readily they occurred during a relatively banal exchange between a few characters.
Displaying the dolls house was the final stage, and consisted mainly of placing some of the dolls house furniture I had acquired within the rooms, and using a hot glue gun to secure in place the perspex sheets I cut by hand to fit into the three bays of the house I would be using. I also cleaned it up slightly, removing any modern stickers or blemishes but preserving the mould and discolouration of the house as I thought it added to the atmosphere I was trying to create.
In the style of the old mutoscope ('What the Butler Saw' slot machines) I decided to have a peephole in a sheet to spy through at what happened in the house, almost as if you were looking in on a real family behind the curtain shrouding the exhibit. The walls and sides were lined with black card, and the projector shrouded from view below the peephole so it was not necessarily clear where the moving images walking around the dolls house were coming from. All of this was intended to add an element of intrigue and 'magic' to the viewing, and I do feel I succeeded in this - many people were surprised on first viewing the installation when the dolls house came to life.
The pico projector I used was easily portable and adjustable, but relatively dark an image at only 30 lumens - most normal projectors for work like this operate at closer to 2000 lumens for projection onto real buildings, but as I could control the light level in the room, this was more than enough power.
As the final installation will be removed after some time as it occupies an important space in the department, I have included a video recording of it in action here too, in case it cannot be seen in the flesh. Bear in mind the issues with darkness for a DSLR camera though and the relatively strong dynamic range and image noise issues before judging too harshly!
