After attending friday's screening of our work so far, I felt confident in what I could do to improve my piece. Simon suggested allowing all 3 clips to run at the same time rather than pausing each one, which tends to make the piece not flow. In addition to this, there were slight editing errors with the shadows and the phones which needed to be resolved. In addition to this, he also suggested removing the green screen phone at the end, as it didn't look right. This constructive criticism has helped me think about my idea a little bit more and I am going to go off and think about ways in which I could improve my piece further.

Originally, I intended on going into London and using light writing to write words in front of historic landmarks, however that idea was quite difficult due to time I had so I decided to take photo's within the Farnham area that had a meaning that everyone could understand. Overall I am relatively pleased with the outcome and I got some interesting shots. Here is a tester shot, followed by various other shots. The camera itself was set to ISO of 100, Shutter speed of 30 and an F stop of 5.

I decided to look into known photographers work who do light writing. I came across a website called 'http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/07/10-amazing-light-graffiti-artists-and-photographers/'  which showed several light writing pieces, created by different photographers. Here are a few pieces I liked the most:

This piece was created by New York painters Ryan Warnberg and Michelle McSwain. They're a group of light painters for hire who generally do light writing work for parties and special events. I like this piece in particular due to the contrast of dark and light and the colours contrasting with the dark, sombre atmosphere given off by the photo. I like that you cannot see the face of the body, hiding the identity and adding to the mysterious feel of the photo.

This piece, produced by German duo Cenci Goepel and Jens Warnecke, who create imagery that brings a ghostly quality to the beauty of nature that turns dark scenery into brighter atmospheres, through shapes and words. There's almost a sci-fi feel to their work, which I like. I also light the contrast between light and dark and how it makes your attention focus on the only bit of light in the photo, which I would like to do with my work. 

I decided to research into the history of light writing, and some good examples of Light Writing that might influence my work. For example I looked at one of the first pieces of light writing, for example In 1889 Demeny attached incandescent bulbs to the joints of an assistant and created the first known light painting photograph “Pathological Walk From in Front”. I found this interesting as it was one of the first forms of writing using light. I then looked at Frank Gilbreth's light painting photography in 1914, where him and his wife used small lights and the open shutter of a camera to track the motion of manufacturing and clerical workers. 

'Cyclegraph'

I then found an interesting time lapse video involving light writing, however instead of shapes they were writing sentences. The piece itself, called Light Writing Proposal , was created by Derick Childress on Vimeo . Its 00:03:06 long and has over 400,000 plays on Vimeo. The long exposure and making of the film stretched over three nights in Raleigh, North Carolina. The final image was made up of approximately 800 individual 10 second exposures.

'Light Writing Proposal'

On MyUCA, Joe posted a link to http://www.creativetourist.com/articles/art/sheffield/inside-the-circle-of-fire-a-sheffield-sound-map/ which is interesting to read of Chris Watson's latest sound piece. There are some interesting parts within the article. For example, it says that 'Inside the Circle of Fire is a way of understanding place using hearing rather than vision – and yet here the imagination replaces the work usually taken on by the eyes.' This influenced the idea of my piece as I want the listener to imagine that they are there on this farm, looking at this object. 

I decided to look at different tutorials for my Time Art piece. I decided to look at Green Screen tutorials when keying out the green on the mobile and tracking tutorials to replace the green with a picture and make it move with the video. Here are screenshots of the tutorials:

Green Screen tutorial:

Tracking tutorial

When looking into Anish Kapoor's work, I found a lot of his sculptures fascinating, in particular 'The Bean', which confused me when I first looked at it. I found a lot of his pieces of work fascinating, but most importantly 'Untitled' (2009). I was able to find pictures of the object from different angles and I found an interesting blog that spoke about the piece in more detail. His work is illusions within itself, in the sense that whenever I see his work I become fascinated and confused by the structure and astonished at how he created some of these pieces.

When looking back on my original idea, and the comments Rosie had given me on my blog, I felt that I should change my idea and try to come up with something that isn't too common and isn't just personal to myself.

I thought of the idea of Typography and words in photo's expressing the meaning the photographer is trying to convey. I decided to research into typographic, more specifically the 'Light Writing' which I have previously roughly experimented with. (Picture shown below)

When researching into 'Light Writing' I came across an interesting PDF (http://www.cagrimmett.com/illum/lightgraffitiguide.pdf) explaining how to get the best result and it also posted examples of the work and linked several blogs that produced excellent light writing results, such as http://www.flickr.com/groups/lightjunkies/. The techniques however are too advanced for me as I am relatively new to the technique.

My idea was to research into iconic London landmarks/locations and capture light writing spelling out memories/events that occurred there that are important in time, such as The Olympic Stadium, which holds different memories for different people. I want to also ask people on the streets of any memories they may have of a certain location, or my friends and use what they say as inspiration for the words I want to spell out. This makes my project more interactive as I'm not just using my memories, I'm, collecting memories from other people too.

The 5 photo's will be of different locations, such as The Olympic Stadium, The 02 Arena, Camden Market and so forth. Originally I was thinking of making the project more personal by writing out emotions/memories that I had from a certain location such as my student accommodation or my local park at home, however when reading the comments I was given, I was informed to not make my project too personal to myself. I am yet to take tester shots, however I am going to test with the technique and familiarise myself more by testing with my camera. I intend on going home next weekend, so I plan on taking all my shots then, as I live in London.

I decided to look into another time-related film that is somewhat similar to my idea. I decided to look into the film 'The Butterfly Effect' made in 2004. The film itself follows a young man who blocks out harmful memories of important parts of his life, however as he grows up, he finds a way to remember these lost memories and a supernatural way to alter his life. The film relates to the actual idea of 'The Butterfly Effect', an interesting popular example of chaos theory that discusses how small initial differences may lead to bigger consequences over time. Again this is very similar to the idea I have, and the way in which the film was shot was quite interesting. 

Today, I went into the Sound Studio to record some sound. I wanted a low bassy wind sound to replicate the sound the large red horn in my photo would produce (picture shown below). I had an interesting time recording my sound and got some interesting sounds that I hope to use. I also have borrowed Thomas' Zoom sound recorder. This was used to record some nature sounds, for example the sounds of tree's blowing.

My idea initially is the sound of nature, for example the wind blowing the leaves in the trees, but throughout we will hear a distant bassy sound
coming from this large red object and suddenly we will hear echoey, distant footsteps. I recorded some rough footstep sounds however due to the high level of wind, I found it hard to use the audio.

My insipiration for the piece was from photo's I saw of Anish Kapoor actually standing inside this red object (photo's shown below) so I thought it would be interesting to recreate an echoey sound of what it would be like with him walking inside.

So far I have collected the sound I have and simply positioned it in a way I like, however I am still to record various sounds such as footsteps and I am still to play around with some of the effects that Adobe Audition has to offer. I hope to do both over the next following days. Here is some of the sound so far put together:

In today's editing session we managed to organise all of the audio clips and managed to cut to the keywords we wanted. The process itself was very long as we had over an hour of footage to cut down to between 5-10 minutes. Some of the interviewee's also included a lot of 'Um's' which made the process a lot more picky and difficult. Adobe Audition itself is quite an easy program to get used to if you give it the time and effort and we wanted to incorporate what we had learned in Joe's sound lessons into our Reflections work.

                                                                      Finished Timeline of audio clips.

Currently after our first day of editing, we are still cutting up the clips and cutting the audio that we want, which is keywords in the interviews we did. The process however is quite time consuming, and we've spend the first day only managing to collect up some of the sound we want, however when working closely with Lauren and Tom (Thomas has a wider knowledge of sound editing programs than we do), we came across several sounds that we'd like to include in the film, and several ways that we could approach this, for example we've decided we want a low bass frequency at the beginning titles and that can be achieved with programs such as Audacity (shown below).

I decided to film part of my film on Friday and part on Saturday. Filming took place after Joe's sound lesson and me, Thomas and Lauren came back to my house and filmed the first half of the film. The problem I automatically faced was that my room is very small, meaning it was hard to set up all the equipment. However filming itself only took around an hour however it took several takes to do due to the tight timing of my film. Also, Lauren looks great in a blonde wig.

On day two, I met Lauren and Thomas' in Farnham town and due to the weather luckily being good, we decided to film the couple meeting in a park instead of on the street, which would also come in handy because the town was very busy that day, meaning that filming there would've been hard.

The remaining shots only took an hour to film, and I ended up recording extra scenes in case I didnt have enough footage. Thomas' gave some good input during the day on how I could film certain scenes and Lauren gave a good performance. Overall filming on Both Friday and today were successful and I look forward to editing the film and seeing what final result I can get.

                                                        Panoramic view of the park.

When thinking of my idea, I decided to look at several pieces of work. Simon suggested some time-related films that have a similar narrative to the one I want to follow. A film simon suggested was 'Sliding Doors' , a 1998 romantic comedy following the life of Hellen Quilley. Her life alternates between two parallel universes based on the two paths that her character's life could take depending on whether or not she catches a train which causes her life to have different outcomes. The film itself much relates to what I want to do for my time art piece, which is that the slightest change in everyday life can make a big difference in the events that follow. 

During today's Experimental Sound lesson, we looked at several different features in Adobe Audition. Sadly I was unable to attend last week's lesson, meaning I had to use Thomas' work as a template to edit the sound. The sound itself is a scene from Toy Story 3, where Mr Potato Head is on top of a train, and then falls over. The clip itself had several different tracks and sounds that needed to be synced up accurately with the footage. We looked at tools such as dynamic range, compression, mixing, routing and final export of sound to industry standards.

I found compression and mixing generally quite hard, however I feel with practice I will become a lot better at it. I am fortunate enough to have Adobe Creative Cloud, so I can practice a lot in Adobe Audition and get used to its tools a little bit more.

Shooting began at 9:00am when I met Lauren and Shahid to pick up all the equipment from Lauren's. We then took all the equipment over to the studio, set up and began filming at 10:00am. Our first interviewee, Rosie, arrived around 10:30am followed by Rob. The problem that we faced was that people turned up at different times throughout the day, however by 6:00pm we had filmed everyone and got more than enough footage that we were satisfied with.

On the day, we decided that our first shot of each interviewee would be of them holding a photo that meant something to them such as a time when they were at home with their friends, which seemed to be the most popular kind of photo. There were some interviewees that felt nervous and didn't speak too much, which may be eventually cut out, however there were some that spoke a lot unexpectedly, which was great. After we finished packing up, we took all the equipment back to Lauren's and took all the footage off of the camera, and put it on Lauren's main PC and Hard Drive, so we had a back up in case anything went wrong. Overall the shoot itself I felt was successful.

If I was to do the shoot again I would organise the shoot in a more detailed way, so that we would not have to wait around for some people, which sadly happened at times during the day. In addition to this, I feel that we could've possibly got more out of some of the people that were interviewed due to some being quite shy about opening up to the questions.

Here are some behind the scenes photos:

During this meeting, we checked to make sure that we had our production pack in order. That day we decided to book G27 (Green Screen Studio) however we discovered the only available date was Wednesday the 12th of March, which was the second week that was available for us to film, rather than the previous week. We then decided that we would talk to Rosie on the Monday and explain the situation.

On the Monday we discussed the situation with Rosie and it was okay for us to film the following week. This gave us just over a week to prepare for the next shoot permission tutorial with Rosie, so we went off to the library and made changes to the dates of filming and the risk assessment. Because we had came up with a list ourselves of the people starring in the film, we then went off individually and collected up the donated footage we needed for when it came to the editing process.

I started by collecting footage from Julia and Charlie (shown below).