I haven't posted for awhile as I have been busy preparing for the pitch...
However, I think the last week has proven to me how quickly I can pull things together once an idea becomes clear in my head....though it takes me quite a long time to get to that point (unfortunately)!
I decided to make an intro movie for the pitch and filmed my kids galavanting about in George Square to emphasise the play element of the work. All the footage was filmed in just one morning and I came away with about 59 short clips which generally varied from a few seconds long up to a minute and a half. I was really interested in how kids move in such a free, chaotic and unconscious way...which I tried to capture in the footage. Half of the footage was just the kids being themselves, moving in an entirely unscripted way. I also had a definite idea of what movements I wanted them to 'perform'. This part of the movie was much harder to capture than I imagined. I think the saying 'never work with animals and children' came to mind a few times. I think this process also really highlighted to me how difficult it is to give verbal instructions for a movement (especially to young children) and the best way of actually doing it is to demonstrate it. One of the other difficulties was in the filming process in a public place. Being in such a public place meant that people would invariably walk into your frame when you are not wanting it.
As for the editing, I had roughed out a story board for the filming but in the end, I found the footage that I actually got just naturally guided me in the editing process. I wanted the movie to have a definite structure and found that having title cards interposed between different scenes helped structure the movie (I was also influenced here by Mclaren's films and Brinkmann's video documentation of his work Upside Down). Possibly the longest time I spent was on editing the mapping scenes. Rather than taking a large series of frames to create the animation effect, I exported the clip using movie to image sequence settings in imovie to create a number of frames that I imported back into final cut to create the animation. Initially I was just going to use the sequence as it was, but I later thought of drawing on the spots to actually demonstrate the work. Each frame was then worked on in photoshop to create the coloured spot.
I also spent some time experimenting with the different frame rates to create the best animation movement and picture clarity. I the end I chose 2fps as it gave me a more realistic workable number of frames that I could cope with without compromising too much on the movement. The biggest problem I came across here was that I think the imovie process of converting the image to file sequence causes quite a bit of image compression such that when run in final cut, it appears blurry. I will definitely need to investigate why or how I can get around this. The problem with having this blurry image sequence against the sharp HD movie sequences would mean that they would look out of place, so to get round this I decided to apply a projector effect...which helped make the sequence look more believable as a stylistic or conceptual decision. I chose to have silent movie music score to accompany the mapping sequence because it created a kind of light-heartedness feel to the movie.
In the actual pitch I showed a version of the intro movie without the out takes but I think they are almost as interesting as the movie as they point to the process of getting the movie made. The out takes can be viewed in the video clip below:
In terms of the actual pitch I planned to structure it in a way that would come across as an actual pitch for an art work rather than to go through my whole process as I felt that with only 10 minutes I would otherwise not have enough time to cover all the key points about the proposed work.
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