Friday, 8 January 2016
Adobe story - The Lost Boys (1982)
I need to watch this again.
For those of you who haven't watched The Lost Boys, go and change that. This probably isn't the best advert for it. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut...
Just trust me.
Character Design - 01
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| Chubby Hitchhiker Hulk |
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| Swamp-thing Hulk |
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| Simplified Hulk |
The importance placed on shape and character cannot be understated, and It was eye-opening to see how much of an effect a triangle in the right place can change the way your character is viewed.
Thursday, 7 January 2016
Soundscape image selection
Whilst the start of a project can be a time of apprehension, confusion and palpitations - I remain quite excited by the prospect of these three images. I guess that is the power of the mysterious blue box?
The first, on initial inspection, strikes me as something very lovecraftian, something of the deep, perhaps subterranean though perhaps not.
I struggle with this one, perhaps to resist becoming too dark in thought, but from distance it looks as though lost souls are vying to escape this shape. Although it is colourful my mind has already decided that it is an eerie sight. Some weird Miasma floating in the sky.
I am reminded of a cracked LCD screen, its contents bleeding out to form this patternation. Though there is something insectile about it also.
I'll be fleshing these thoughts out further, I know better than to immediately trust first impressions, though they do indeed offer a fertile starting place. Ideation incoming!
Life drawing update, the sixth!
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| 5 minute poses |
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| 20 minute pose, edited. |
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| Experimentation with pointillism |
As this was the first life drawing class since the christmas break, It was good to have a subject to draw again. I tried to do something different in each piece, this session. I think I will be taking pointillism further in my own studies, but I also quite enjoy the second image as I tried to be a bit bolder with colour, and further to that, making something altogether "new" in a post edit.
Wednesday, 6 January 2016
"La Jetée" (1962) - A review.
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| Fig 1. |
La Jetée (1962) directed by Chris Marker is an experimental short film concerning time travel, the extent of its reach felt in movies such as Terminator, 12 Monkeys and scores of other lesser films concerning time travel - perhaps “Somewhere in time” (1980) which utilises a similar device for time travel, sending a mind through time. Primarily utilising still imagery with rapid cuts to convey the story. At 28 minutes, La Jetée never outstays it’s welcome despite its use of media, and in fact benefits from it. Centering on a young boy at an airport that spies a beautiful woman before witnessing the mysterious death of a man by an unknown assassin before skipping through an atomic war that has rended Earth inhospitable and unable to support life; the boy - now a man - becomes a feasible test subject for time travel experiments due to his strong connection to the past, in particular the image of the woman, and the dying man; resulting in a series of time travel experiments in order to obtain supplies to restart the human effort.
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| Fig 2. |
Perhaps most notable of La Jetée is its use of still imagery. A device it uses almost narratively during proceedings, for it replicates a sense of the dreamlike; but also a sense of recollection, of memory; scattered and nonsensical. It is an examination not only of time travel and memory on film“...but for the way in which the form can twist our most cherished versions of reality inside out.” (Sellers, 2005) This idea crystallizes in a moment where La Jetée breaks its visual rules with a longingly held shot of the woman that has held the traveller's obsession through his disjointed life. In this ‘shot’ stills begin to merge to form a rudimentary animation before giving way to a full shot of her eyes opening in gaze towards the camera. But even so “The film emphasizes the illusion of time lapse and movement perceived both by the characters within the film” (Filmslie, 2016) and it is with these editing tricks that La Jetée becomes more than the sum of its parts. Michel Gondry once stated of the film...“The human brain forgets the cuts” and this is important in further distinguishing the still technique as more than a stylistic flare, as though it is intrinsic to the themes of La Jetée; memory, mortality and our relationship to past events. Are we beholden to the past? Is our recollection unreliable? Do we perhaps cling to the fragments of happiness?
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| Fig 3. |
In terms of sound design, La Jetée shines, an article discusses that “The sound is the only truly continuous element in La Jetee. As such, it is the main source of temporality and rhythm” (Filmslie, 2016) as it is with the narration and constant audio interaction that the audience is pulled through the short, making the photo-novel increasingly accessible until it is as though you are watching a moving picture, and indeed this interaction between the still picture and almost chaotic soundscape is moving in itself, adding poignancy that would be lost if done otherwise.
It is easy to draw comparison to much later films, but it is in La Jetée that the deconstruction of the contained themes is perhaps most pure. A powerful and utterly mesmerising 28 minutes.
Bibliography
Sellers, Simon. 'Retrospecto: La Jetée'. ballardian.com. [online] Available at: http://www.ballardian.com/la-jetee [Accessed 6 Jan. 2016]
Filmslie ‘Chris Marker’s La Jetee Analysis: Mortality and the Illusion of Time’ Filmslie.com [online] Available at: http://filmslie.com/chris-marker-la-jetee-analysis-temporality/ [Accessed 6 Jan. 2016]
Illustrations
Fig 1. La Jetée poster. [image] Available at: http://citygallery.org.nz/sites/default/files/lajetee%20at%20City%20Gallery.jpg [Accessed 6 Jan. 2016]
Fig 2. La Jetée still. [image] Available at: https://allfordeadtime.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/fetch.jpg [Accessed 6 Jan. 2016]
Fig 3. La Jetée still [Image] Available at: https://s3.amazonaws.com/criterion-production/product_images/1505-b2cd0ce10ae50ccaddf336cd797dbd2c/LJ_SS_Page_Still_original.jpg [Accessed 6 Jan. 2016]
Monday, 4 January 2016
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