Apocalypse Now. RIGHT. NOW.

The exhibition turned out to be

“a circus that was inventing itself”

to paraphrase Mr Francis Ford Coppola…

The humble beginnings of our space, now a distant and lonely memory

After days of hard work setting up the exhibition, I really do feel like what we were actually able to transform the space into escalated rather quickly. It went from a desk in a room, to regular trips to the Arndale and around Federation House to find whatever we could to make it look like a messy teenagers bedroom.

Our room was attracting a lot of interest from people and the more it developed the more the audience and fellow students actually helped feed into our idea. The feedback offered by people really helped us to craft the space into what it became. Crucially, a lot of people also saw it fit as a place to just hang out, which is exactly the sort of vibe we were going for, this was a key success of the exhibition.

Crash dummies Annabelle and Nick enjoying our ‘Yung Gucci Kush Meister’ internet subculture satire music video.

One thing we could have improved on was the sound. We were originally opting for two pairs of headphones, but with so many people turning up on the night, we suddenly realised we had to play it from the speakers and it was too quiet for some people to fully hear it, so speakers would probably have been a better option upon reflection.

In order to best capture the experience of preparing the exhibition space, Sophie and I decided to make this short behind the scenes documentary. We did our best to incorporate elements of photography, film, time and movement in order to tell the story of how our exhibition space went from A-Z and far, far beyond. We did this through the use of a timelapse mixed with moving image as well as still photography.

Enjoy!

In under 10 hours time, we shall be sadly removing the elements of our exhibition space.

It has been a really incredible experience for me. One which I doubted at first, but as I look back, I have learned so much from all of the optional seminars and lectures I attended (Le Gun, Mr Hussle, various curators), the Bradford Media Museum trip and all of the workshops. Most of all though, working with very different people was a big eye-opener and I am now fully aware of limitations of a gallery space. However, I am more importantly fully aware of the possibilities of a gallery space for a filmmaker. It is something I look forward to being involved in again, though sadly, probably not at Federation House, but you never know!

The Final Piece…

Collaboration…COMMENCE

A Timeline of Events

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Meeting 1 – 23/04/2015

I met with my group for the first time and we got the ball rolling on some ideas. I felt that I didn’t get the chance to properly contribute in the session because a lot of the idea bouncing around were centered around cultural references very different to my own, but I am willing to adapt as much as possible so that I can maximise my contribution.

One of the key points to take away from today is that we definitely want to have some sort of interactive exhibition, which is an idea I am really on board with because I want to explore the idea of audience interaction and intervention.

Meeting 2 – 28/04/2015

This was our first tutorial session with Alan, who seemed really excited by our idea. Some food for thought to consider were the difficulties involved with making our exhibition an interactive website in the style of something similar to piczo. I am definitely more enthusiastic now that it is more developed and we have a clearer focus of what direction we are headed in.

Post-meeting with Alan, we followed it up with a very productive meeting about what it is we want to produce for our interactive exhibition.I suggested some times, dates and locations in order to help set the wheels in motion, it was clear that with so many different ideas feeding into this one big circus of an idea, efficiency would be key to getting things finished.

Meeting 3 – 05/05/15

The final meeting with Alan went well, and he was encouraged by our progress. Emma and Sophie had successfully developed a good portion of what we needed, and myself and Sam had done the same, as well as Harry having wrote part of his rap for the satire music video. However, by this point we were beginning to realise some of the limitations of the space, particularly regarding WiFi. Based on this, we took a decision as a group to abandon the idea of it being an interactive website. The new form the content shall take is a looped film containing video, gif and still image content mashed together.

I suggested the idea of having physical interactions as an alternative, such as pictures on the desk. The group began to feed further into this idea with suggestions such as; wires around the chair/desk, an empty mug and even something like a hidden find/treasure hunt to create a more inclusive experience for the audience. It shall be interesting to see what becomes of our exhibition space from here, but there is much work to be done yet…

Filming, Music Recording, Mixing, Editing & The Endless Abyss of Work

When will it end? Hopefully before the Monday we arrive at our exhibition. We had great fun recording/mixing the track, filming the music video and then editing a large chunk of the video content we had shot and gathered. One really interesting thing was getting to collaborate with everyone during the post-production phase, particularly Sam, seeing as we were doing the large majority of our cutting on two computers in the edit suite. We were handing projects back and forth and feeding back to each other about different aspects, getting everyone’s thoughts about decisions to make our project stronger. It was good that Sophie got the edit suites arranged for most of the days in the week leading up to the exhibition. I think that there would have been a lot less collaborative input into everything if that action had not been taken.

We held a final session to decide what was left to do on the video and decide what order to bring everything into, seeing as we had ran out of time during the week. It was up to Sam to take it home and use the decisions myself, Sam and Emma had collective input into, in order to bring together our looping project in a form of organised chaos. Every decision we made was carefully measured and designed with the purpose of keeping the audience in the room for as long as possible, the full 10+ minute duration if we could.

The Motionless in Motion

Moving a Still Image

The concept of moving a still image is something I have always been interested in so I was incredibly optimistic about this workshop. I am pleased to say that Andy did not disappoint! He delivered a really informative and interactive workshop where we had the opportunity to apply the parallax effect to still images and manipulate them.

I really don’t mean to sound like a broken record at this point but there were more negative vibes from photographers about producing any sort of collaborative work; incredibly disappointing.

I learned a lot of skills in After Effects and Photoshop, though my Photoshop skills remain incredibly basic and this proved to be a baptism of fire when it came to layering the image for applying the effect in after effects, I still did sort of okay. It has encouraged me to practice more with this effect and experiment with it to unleash it’s true potential. I did make this very simple little video utilising the effect.

A Colourful Experience

R O Y G B I V – Colour as symbolism

This workshop was hosted by Maria Ruben, and gave many different examples of how colour has been used to create meaning primarily in film. I learned a lot from the workshop, and the examples were very powerful. I think that whilst it opened my mind to how colour can be used almost as a standalone device for creating meaning, my personal opinion is that it is always much stronger amidst contextualisation.

However, having said that, the film Blue by Derek Jarman was, for me, the most unique and inspiring example of colour as symbolism.

I was incredibly keen to produce a small project based on this workshop, but photographers were once more unwilling to collaborate. This sort of reluctance on their part was unfortunately a recurring theme in my experience of Unit X…

Mazebooks…

Muybridge, Movies and Mazebooks

I will keep this one short, this was an incredibly disappointing workshop. I considered not writing about it until I had a revelation that one aspect of it was a genuinely beneficial experience.

Making the actual Mazebook was a useless skill for me personally, and I’d question why it is available to sign up to for Filmmakers at all. However…however…there was one redeeming factor, and that was the exercise we were asked to do for the workshop (other than the making of the actual Mazebook). We were tasked with going out in a group of three – 1 Filmmaker, 2 Photographers – they didn’t seem particularly keen on the idea of collaborating, but after a while we managed to complete the task.

The task we were set was to capture 36 still images without deleting any. By using a similar, though not exactly the same, discipline as 35mm Photography, we were forced to really think about the composition exposure and the way which things were represented through the medium of still photography.

Our chosen theme was unique perspectives, and below are some examples of the 36 images that we captured. Communication was key to the collective input about what we were capturing and all the elements that made up the images we took. This has really made me want to experiment with analogue film and photography in future, and the discipline that comes with not being able to delete the images will really make me think more about my shots in future!

Card swiping as you’ve never seen it before…

Letterbox to the outside world

A long way down

Chris Marker on the Wall

Durational Photographs + Motionless Films

This was an interesting first workshop and one I thoroughly enjoyed. Despite there only being myself and one photographer in the room, it was easy to engage with and contribute to the material Bella Probyn had to show us. It got me to think about how to break down, analyse and experiment with the individual elements that make up images, and what makes us categorise them as either photo or film.

I contributed to this workshop by suggesting we take a look at how Director David Gillanders utilises movement in still images to tell story in his short documentary “The Neglected” street children of Ukraine.

It got us thinking about how movement within a still photograph can impact on stories and I asked if they have ever considered using the start and end point of a moving crop for displaying work in a gallery space in order to reveal more aspects in the next photo for emotional impact on the viewer. I was surprised when the answer was no, but it is an interesting thought to consider for the collaborative project.

We looked at a wide array of work from various artists, filmmakers, photographers and even one creative who categorised themselves as a ‘video-artist’. The one that stood out to me most was my favourite ever short film; Chris Marker’s, La Jetée.

Based on this, myself and photography student Lauren Trevor decided to produce a piece of work that deviated from the original task a bit (with the full support of Bella, of course).

We put 18 images from La Jetée on a wall in chronological order in Village Green and placed a sign above reading ‘Chris Marker on the Wall’, inviting people to re-arrange them to formulate a story that most made sense to them. Lauren and I worked together to select which sequence the still images were taken from, and carefully chose the original placement of all the images in order to get people to notice and engage with the work.

It garnered some really interesting arrangements, unfortunately I don’t have any images of them, but it was positive to see that people were engaging with the work in the intended way. This was a very interesting exploration into how the audience and not the artist could be a primary influence on the work, and is something I will certainly experiment with in future. Overall, this was a really eye-opening lecture and one that I managed to fully engage with creatively and more importantly collaboratively!

UPDATE 16/05/2015

In hindsight, I now realise how much of an impact this exercise had on the final exhibition piece. This was about encouraging audience engagement and not just a typical observation piece. Much like the final exhibition, people were essentially invited to come in and feel part of the experience, as oppose to just observing it. Whilst observation was a key element in the form of the film being looped on the laptop, much of the inspiration with sculpting the exhibition space to be something unique came from my personal desire to experiment with audience engagement!

The Research Phase – Inspiration, Intuition, Illiteration

Inspire Lectures

I attended a range of optional lectures in order to fully engage with Unit X as much as possible. I have chosen to write about my the best three.

Household

The first one from a Northern Irish curator opened my eyes to the possibilities of where and how work can be presented. He spoke about a range of different examples and it was really interesting to hear about the humble beginnings of the Household project in Northern Ireland. It would be interesting if something like that could be done for independent film, a collective movement between Manchester Filmmakers with the idea of being noticed whilst changing things up often to remain fresh.

Le Gun

My second lecture was about art collective and magazine Le Gun. I am not going to brush this one over, it blew my mind. The work on show from the two guys was ridiculously good. It strongly reminded me of the sort of imigary seen in The Mighty Boosh, one of my favourite ever TV programmes. I would like to think that the colorful, sadistic and largely satirical nature of their work will have impact on what I produce for Unit X.

The weird and wonderful – Le Gun

The Fantastic Mr Hustle

What. A. Story. This one hit the nail on the head in similar fashion to Le Gun. Charlie told an unbelievable story that really did inspire me. He is the perfect example that pushing yourself forward, having a great attitude and putting your ideas out there will get you noticed. Definitely some lessons learned from one of the most down-to-earth people I will ever have the pleasure of sharing a lecture theatre with.

Bradford Media Museum – Updated on 02/05/2015

The trip to Bradford was really interesting. It was crazy to look back at some of the TV old technology and how big it actually used to be. There were some really striking still images on show, particularly one depicting a soldier the moment he sees his fallen comrade during the Vietnam war. It was incredible. After we left the museum we went to the art gallery in Saltaire. This was a really beautiful, scenic location and the artwork on display was really nice.

Yung Lean Inspiration – Updated on 09/05/2015

For the music video we shot and edited this Thursday, I looked at this example from Yung Lean in order to capture the style of video we were going for.

Art Gallery Satire Inspiration – Updated on 10/05/2015

For the Art-Satire section of our exhibition film, I looked at TV series Facejacker. In one episode, character Brian Badonde visits Blackheath Art Gallery in London, hilarity ensues…