The Attic

To take part in the Edinburgh Movie Production Society's - GOLDEN VIDEO AWARDS - election we had to come up with a story that would encompas the theme: mine.

As head of the THRILLER genre group within this society I came up with a story about a young woman, violin player and prize-winner of the prestigious Young Talent Award for the Music School in Bratislava (Slovakia). I guess I choose this city because the name is such a nice name...

The young woman, Cindy Logan, would have moved in to the Attic of a flat in Bratislava, appearantly. We find her whilst on the phone with her mom.



Cindy Logan, played by the lead actress

The at first warm and friendly surrounding in the Attic changes gradually into a macabre and cold thriller apt environment.



Things are getting colder...

With the right change of lighting and the relating soundtrack, mastered by our coolest Sound Designer from Greece - the TENSION, which defines a thriller movie, is noticable.

I will at some point publicize the short (5 mins) film here on my blog, but for now we are into the competition!



The Attic - a thriller movie created by me and my crew

Hopefully our Edinburgh audience and the jury will get the creeps out of our story and praise us with their judgement.

Something to keep ME up at night ;o)

== UPDATE: The Attic wins Golden Video Award for Best Cinematographic Film ==



Left-to-right: Gabriel (cinematographer), Rob (host), Willem (director), Vivian (sound recordist)

Yes! We have won the prestigious prize with our thriller movie at the Golden Video Awards.

And to include you in our joyfulness below you have the opportunity to watch The Attic for yourself.



CLICK TO PLAY: The Attic, an award winning movie

3 Person Dialogue

Welcome back to film course, with latest assignment; a 3-person dialogue.

We learn from this how to cover a conversation where more than two 'people' are speaking, useful for interview recordings in my future career.

To complete this assignment successfully I made use of Extra-terrestrial powers. Friends played a wedded couple that found some excitement with the inclusion of ... dare I say it... an ALIEN!

Below are the pictures of this short film about a Happy Birthday. Imagine yourself waking up the morning after and finding your 'present' at the breakfast table, a contented wife and a new breeded egg you've become the father of.



Husband waking up



Wife content with the usual 'morning after' sigaret



Green hand of ALIEN grabbing a banana



A new to-be-born alien, calling for its Daddy

Weird??? Yes indeed. But funny too, hopefully.



CLICK TO PLAY: This short film is here for you to watch.

Principles of Magic

For those of us who have seen the recent film about two rivalry Magicians the following division between three stages in a Magic trick performance will sound familiar.

In Act One: The Pledge shows the ordinary.

In Act Two: The Turn, the ordinary becomes extraordinary.

In Act Three: The Prestige, the twist occurs and we see something shocking.

How funny to have discovered that film making also uses the 3 Act structure in their storytelling attempt.

Moreover, being a Magician myself we as the illustrive members of a secret society named The Magic Circle have developed Principles of Magic Tricks. In short, a principle is

When applied to a Magic Trick, each trick follows a certain principle. In addition, each trick has the 3 Act structure as mentioned at the beginning.

My attempt is to draw up a matrix that relates the Magic Trick Three Act to the Magic Trick Principles.

This is how it will look as a first listing... with more Principles to follow. But then again, I will now explain the Principles themselves. That's to be known to Magicians only, sorry.

Principle	Act One: The Pledge	Act Two: The Turn	Act Three: The Prestige
Principle of Restored Rope	A rope is shown.	The Rope is cut in halves.	The rope is restored.
Principle ...	...	...	...

The beauty of these principles is that they can cover a wide range of applications. For example, I have performed the same Principle of Restored Rope with the electronic wire of an ironing apparatus....after I unplugged it from the power socket of course ;o)

Self-reflexive

Literature is said to be self-reflexive when the author deliberately draws attention to the fictional nature of the work.
The play-within-the-play is an example. - The UVic Writer's Guide

This term subject of Art history in my College of Art focuses on 'post-modernism'. This era covers the late 1970s to date. It is a response, exaggeration, and/or evolution of the previous 'modernist' period. A characteristic of post-modern Art is that it reflects on Art itself; it is often self-reflexive.

As I will be writing an essay soon about postmodern filmmaking, I will investigate 'self-reflexity' in filmmaking here.

Starting with a diagram drawn by Gloria Withalm


[source: Types of Self-reflexive Discourse in Film]

Above diagram shows where and when film shows the making of film, its vocabulary, or other references to film in general in the film itself. An example I found in the film 'Lost in Translation'



Lost in Translation with Bill Murray, an actor playing.... an actor

In the field of graphic design a well known example of self-reflexity is seen in the advertisement of Droste cacao powder.



Droste girl, an image of an image... of an image etc.

We can find more subtle examples in film, such as those of Mel Brooks.



High Anxiety starring Mel Brooks

"When in High Anxiety (USA 1977) Cloris Leachman (as Nurse Diesel) and one of the doctors have a conspiratorial talk while having coffee and cookies, we can watch them from underneath the glass table in an extreme low-angle shot (which already draws the attention of the audience to the camera). Unfortunately, Leachman is constantly moving around every single item on the table - the cups, the sugar bowl, the plate with the cookies, the coffeepot - putting them right above the lenses, thus forcing the camera to move around constantly in order to correct the framing."

In photography the following picture can be said to be self-reflexive as it shows a picture of a camera of a picture of a camera (and a squirrel).



Finally I like to quote a web blogger by the name of Johnny Moondog about the art work of Lichtenstein:

by Irv Novick and Russ Heath

		by Roy Lichtenstein

Thanks for the images provided by David Barsalou.

"The original comics aren’t meant to be consumed as “self-reflexive” images, they don’t rely upon the viewer questioning the medium itself and the aesthetic choices characteristic of the comic book style. The viewer just enjoys these comics. While there may be a secondary reading or appreciation of the original comics (these images are also interesting in a historical sense; they’re not so cheap after all; how do these comics represent gender roles etc…), it doesn’t form part of the comic book panels’ meaning to examine the panels as examples of the process of re-presentation at work. They are comics and they tell a story. The do not say, “Hey! We are telling a story. Look how interesting some of the processes involved are!” They do not reflect upon their own processes of creating meanings and enjoyment."

"But Lichtenstein is going for something else. The viewer is asked to appreciate the way in which the comic book aesthetic provides a particular style of enjoyment. We do not just enjoy the pictures and the scenarios, but we also enjoy being aware of the process by which the comic creates drama and pathos. “Whaaam!” This self-reflexive element to the art is crucial to what Lichtenstein is doing."

What do you think...?

Reading Between the Lines

A Christmas break from my Film & TV course has allowed me to practise more 'drawing' of human anatomy. As discussed in an earlier entry of my blog (see Stickfigures), we can limit ourselves remarkably well to lines only when drawing a human figure.

Or in 3D we can use the same concept of the stickfigure.



Click to play: Free Your Mind - Plastic Man

In an attempt to come to re-usable 'skeletons' of stickfigures I have used my drawing pen to get a side view, a threequarter view, and a front view of just the essentials.

Side view	3/4 view	Front view

The above images are replications from sketches by Andrew Loomis, redrawn in Adobe Flash software by myself.

With these bare lines I will be able to draw whichever human being, either small or tall, funny or fierce, fixed or in motion. Whoopie!

The simpler the lines, the easier to animate and the faster to storyboard. The effort should go into the facial expression and body language rather than hair colour or shoe size ;o)

Depth of Field

So you have your camera at hand...

But now that you have decided not to use the automatic settings or the default lens, what choices need to be made? I will discuss one of them; depth of field.

Depth of field relates to the compression of the front-to-back distance in your image. The larger the perceived distance, the larger the depth of field. A long lens tends to give a larger depth of field. A short lens or wide lens does the opposite.

I found a useful demonstration of this on Understanding Depth of Field ...


The above image is that of table, whereas halfway into the distance the image is sharpest. Compare the sharpness of the glass in the front with that in the middle for example.

Using depth of field effectively can change the perception of the viewer, thus assisting in telling a story. Examples are pictures that at first sight look like miniatures, but are a result of what is called tilt-photography.



Example of a tilt-photograph using depth of field by The Bitter*Girls

An in-depth (no joke ;o) explanation of tilt photography is available at Photo.net.

16 millimeter filming

You haven't made a film, until you filmed on film.

That was the outset of my first experience with filming on 16 millimeter film in a KODAK competition.

So WHY is filming on real film so 'cool', compared to filming on video? Here's what the experts say:

For the record:
"If what you want to shoot is precious to you, try to shoot it on film. If it is to "practice", shoot it on (video)tape. Most people advise beginners to shoot on digi, to save the money. I say, if you are drawn to film, you will be looking at it again at the end of your life, and it will look the same as the day after you shot it." - cineman at http://www.cineman.co.uk/film.html

For cost-savings:
"Try to shoot on film.. It may not be as bad [in cost] as you think. You can always borrow the camera free (any major equipment house will lend cameras to students), you can do a deal with Kodak and a deal with the lab. All these people really try to help students for good sound business reasons, as well as the fact they are all nice guys. Don't forget your costs are the same once that image is on tape." - cineman at http://www.cineman.co.uk/film.html

For looks:
"Neither is better, but they are different. Most people prefer the “look” of film, for it’s grain, it’s texture and it’s tactile qualities. But if you need to shoot a lot of material (like interviews) then (digital) video might be a better option. Again, it depends on the kind of magnification that you will be subjecting the image to: if you end up viewing your film on a video/DVD player then the 8mm footage would not be as “different” as would be the case if you are final viewing on 35mm or 16mm. Don’t forget also that digital video can mean a host of things, from very low-end consumer formats to very high-end Panavision/Sony 24P." - cineman at http://www.cineman.co.uk/film.html

Being offered 10 minutes worth of film recording stock by KODAK, we've been filming on film. 10 minutes of film correspond to ca 400 feet (120 meters) of filmroll. A professional filmmaker will be charged about 12 pence per 1 foot of 16 millimeter film stock, whereas a student gets it at a discount for 8 pence.



The film is called 8, 16 or 35 millimeter depending on the width of the filmstrip.

8 millimeter film strip, each image in an aspect ratio of 4(width):3(height)	16 millimeter film strip, each image in an aspect ratio of 4(width):3(height)	super 16 millimeter filmstrip, each image in an aspect ratio of 16(width):9(height) called anamorphic or widescreen	35 millimeter film strip, the wider the more image, hence sharpness and cost.

We filmed on 16 mill. with aspect ratio 3:4, but will end up with widescreen therefore cropping the image. In order to not loose vital information in our image, we made sure we had abundant 'space' on the top and bottom part when recording.

Cropping 3:4 to get 9:16 (widescreen)

Stickfigures

All art including human beings can be downsized to the plain and simple stickfigure. If drawing a storyboard for a movie, an animation for a comic book, or designing your Christmas card for Santa, you can start with a simple shape.

Stickfigure 1 This is the basic stickfigure. You can see the head, torso, arms and legs. You can't do much with this one, except practising the proportions of these body parts	Stickfigure 2 With this version you can do something more. You get to decide the proportions of the arm- and leg-parts.	Stickfigure 3 Now this must be the most advanced stickfigure there is: I bet you never saw any kid draw it this way! Added are the width of shoulders and pelvis.

Simple to Advanced Stickfigure
(source http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/farp/figure/williamlibodyconstruction.html)

The basics of a good stickfigure is that it is anatomically correct. It has a head, arms, legs, and a spine in the right proportions. Only then can we as a viewer relate to its emotions and behaviour.

A wonderful example of how a simple stickfigure can tell a compelling story is shown below.

Paper Wars by Ed Skudder

I will use stickfigures for drawing storyboards and visualizing ideas I have for movies.

I hope to show you some examples during my Christmas break.

Try if you can draw Santa as a stickfigure, or perhaps your cat or next door neighbour and see what great story there is to tell.

Any Body Home

"The trick to a good pet photo is to capture the pet's personality."

- School of Photography

This can be achieved by communicating with the animal, such as simple commands to the animal.

Another way is to put it through a favourite routine like a dog catching a Frisbee. Whatever the pet, they all have their "party pieces" that keep you amused. In most cases these acts can be captured on a still image.

With this in mind I am currently planning on filming an advertisement for KODAK's new digital camera. My main actor: a turtle.



Turtle from The Aquatic Centre, Edinburgh (UK)

This fellow is 'on-rent' as he costs a mere £150 to buy. Like wine, aging pushes up the price ;o)

And here is my concept:

===================

SCENE 01: INT. PHOTOSTUDIO - DAY

We see a TURTLE on display, tail, legs, and head hidden inside its shell.

Next, a HAND appears into view with a WHITE FEATHER, which tries to move the turtle's tail by its tickle.

However, the turtle does not respond.


SCENE 02: INT. PHOTOSTUDIO - DAY

We see the same TURTLE on display, tail, legs, and head hidden inside its shell.

Next, the HAND appears into view with a BRASS BELL, which tries to wake the turtle up by its sound.

However, the turtle does not respond.


SCENE 03: INT. PHOTOSTUDIO - DAY

We see the same TURTLE on display, tail, legs, and head hidden inside its shell.

Next, the HAND appears into view with LETTUCE, which tries to attract the turtle by its smell.

However, the turtle does not respond.


SCENE 04: INT. PHOTOSTUDIO - DAY

We see the same TURTLE on display, tail, legs, and head hidden inside its shell.

Next, the HAND appears into view with KODAK's New Digital Camera, which tries to capture the turtle by its lens.

The sound of a snapshot followed by a flash!


SCENE 05: INT. PHOTO - DAY

Image of the turtle fully unfolded and looking into the camera with a smile.

KODAK ... everybody included.

===================

As always I have done some research into the topic. Have a go at being a tickle yourself!


Click to play; courtesy Axe Feather Girl

Face Transformer

Ever wanted to change your origin... upload your (passport)picture and play with it below...

Face Transformer Image Upload

Please select a JPEG (.jpg or .jpeg) or GIF (.gif) image on your computer that you want to transform.





Please fill in the information below to register this image.

The sex of the face in this image is
Male
Female


The age group of the face in this image is
Child
Teenager
Young(Adult)
Older(Adult)


Please select the face below that is most similar to the face in this image:

Afro-Caribean	Caucasian	East-Asian	West-Asian
Courtesy University of St Andrews

Whodunnit

So, you want to know who played Santa Claus this year. Or who stole that old lady's handbag. Better, you what to try on a pair of glasses with a moustache, although you are hardly 13 years of age ;o)

Well below is your pen palet... click the link, go ahead and put the face pieces together as you see fit!

Pen Palet
Courtesy of Artem Melnikov at http://flashface.ctapt.de

Moonlight Serenade

This night we celebrated my girlfriend's birthday.

Virtual Figure Drawing

An amazing discovery... nowadays one draws life models from computer screens; Virtual Figure Drawing.



Virtual Pose (source http://www.virtualpose.net)

Soundtrack - The End of Alfredo

Well, what to do if you've been given a video without the corresponding soundtrack? You create one yourselves...

That has been our assignment at last weeks Art College Lecture.

The underneath image shows the story of an elderly man, who experiences his passing away.

Meet Alfredo, and listen to what we've come up with regarding sound.

Click below image to download and watch the movie "The End of Alfredo".


Movie of The End of Alfredo, soundtrack added

NOTE: To play this movie, Quicktime - available for free at www.apple.com/quicktime - is required.
Enjoy!

Artificial Intelligence Markup Language

Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (AIML) is for textual-responses with a 'robot', where Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) are text and images for a web page.

Since HTML is most familiar to you, as you look at web pages everytime you read my weblog, I will show what AIML is next.

As a good example of the use of AIML, look at the example below, and try and type some questions in the little SAY textbox at the bottom followed by the <ENTER> key on your keyboard.For example, type: What is your name?

Courtesy Yuichan at http://www.travisjmorgan.com/bot/zen.html

The code underneath this 'intelligent' dialogue is what is called AIML and looks like:

<category>
    <pattern>What is your name</pattern>
    <template>
        <think><set name="topic">Me</set></think>
        I name is Yuichan, but you can call me Yui.
    </template>
</category>

See the enormous source of information about AIML and its use for the Artificial Intelligent ALICE at http://www.alicebot.org
Combine with a human-looking image this could well be our future helpdesk assistant.

One day I hope to answer your questions on my blog with the use of AIML... if I am able to give intelligent answers ;o)

Headstrong

Augh... that hurts!

This morning early (1.00 AM !) I was acting as a henchman (= bad guy) for a film called A Fatal Murder. I had to approach the table of Detective RADAR in a bar and generaly make a fool of him. My boss, VAN HEEMSTRA (notice the inclusion of my family name in this movie), would want the girl VANESSA that was hiding underneath the table.

At the point of confrontation, RADAR would throw the table at me and my fellow bad guy. He would next hit me on the head with a (prepared) chair!



Chair fight as seen in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much"

In reality, RADAR managed to break the chair on my head, leaving me with bloodstains and a wrecked chair to the ground.... CUT! Yes, that was luckily all filmed in one go.



Head hurt

I would not have opted for a second take of my 'stunt'.

Sometimes reality creeps into film, and the scars remain with the actor. I hope VAN HEEMSTRA will deal with this detective to get even ;o)

Showing Fog

Today I have to crack the mystical formula of ... fog.

Fog is a series of particles, primarily water vapor, that obscures our vision.
(source: http://www.corelmag.com/0703/foggy/intofog.html)

As such it is a great attribute in film making, to (dis-)cover part of a scene or set focus to the main object of interest (such as your knight riding through the forest).




'Knight in the mist' by Coen de Moor;
Fog used as a storytelling attribute

Fog seems to want to lay flat in the lower areas of a scene, whereas smoke tends to move upward. Obviously the further away from the viewer, the thicker the fog.

Now here is why I had to learn how to show fog. I am drawing a storyboard for a story named "Stealers of Light", by Martin Yuille. The opening scene is as follows:

FADE IN

Fog obscures our view and we can hear inaudible menacing whispers 
in the distance. A figure enters from the left, wandering 
and searching as if lost. 

Confused he moves into the fog, we follow. 

The whispers gradually grow nearer and the fog grows thicker...

From the previously cited website I found out that to show/draw fog we need to layer two effects on top of each other;

1) The fog - a blurred shape that moves from side to side.

2) The actor - a silhouette who changes in opacity (see-through vs solid colours) and possibly moves as well.

Starting with the first layer, the fog itself. For this layer I have used the photo editing software called Photoshop (www.adobe.com). To end with the image underneath, I applied the Filter > Render > Clouds effect to a black rectangle a couple of times (see tip). Then to make the left and right edge form a seamless joint, I widened the rectangle's canvas by 200 percent and stuck the previously generated clouds on the righthand side in reverse.



Fog, created in Photoshop (75% transparant)

This foggy layer we can then move from left to right continuously to act as the fog.

Next, we need fixed objects (e.g. a tree) and our actor on layers below the fog.



Silhouette of our actor.

Now if above image is reduced in size (smaller if further away) and made slightly transparant during the movement, the illusion of this person walking through fog is achieved.

In addition, to increase awareness of where this person is walking we add a tree, that alternates in transparancy too.



Tree image, courtesy cornell college



Illusion of a figure walking through fog

Right for the Job

Hello and welcome back to the world of make-belief!

I have had the honour to participate in one of my fellow student's film, about a job interview... a particularly scary one.



Still image from Job Interview (left-to-right; Vicki and Willem)



Still image from Job Interview (Willem as Interviewer/Monster)

Ah well, maybe not the most subtle approach to find new recruits ;o)