FINAL FILM TO BE SHOWN AT MOSI

We have now approached the deadline of our piece and can see what a jounrney our project and final film has been through. We had so many different ideas for our final film and have chopped and changed it countless time so that it embodies everything we wanted it too. We all finally decided on our final film thanks to the input from Alex, Kate, Julie and Mary.


Wearing group 3 Final film dan dan daaaaaaaaa 'Inside Manchester'

Group Evaluation

Coming to the end of our project we have learnt so much about working in a group and taking ourselves completely out of our comfort zone. We have really enjoyed the experience and process and have all  applied ourselves to the project. We now realise how challenging it is to include everyones thoughts and identify everyones strengths and weaknesses. Although at first we had so many ideas as the weeks went on we managed to narrow down our concept and make it more clear. Unit X was a new way of working, we worked professionally together and well as a team. We were lucky to really bond as a group and used our group time to bounce ideas and concepts off each other. The concepts then developed throughout the process and we started to get some very strong ideas coming through that we started to explore and develop in order to create our final film.

When it became clear that we had to have some sort of digital outcome we were slightly unsettled. We had very little digital knowledge or Photoshop skills at the start of the project which was something we had to confront. Sometimes being forced into a situation your not entirely comfortable with can create some really interesting results and we think that considering this we actually extended our skill set.

Working in a group allowed us to be able to work off each others personal strengths, each taking something different to the table, for example some members of the group specialised in hand embroidery, machine embroidery, print and dye. This enabled us to combine all our knowledge of textiles together and use different processes to develop a final outcome. Our samples being projected onto the human body worked well. Although it was challenging and difficult at times, we worked together and completed this task successfully. We feel as though our initial projected images were in fact stronger as individual images rather than put together in to the film.

We spent quite a lot of group time at the beginning going to galleries and doing relevant research around the city collecting photographs and videos. This was useful in the final week of editing as we had so much to work with. The concept of embroidery on the inside started to develop well through the middle of the project. From our samples we really tried to continue this idea.

It could be argued we almost had too much to work with which soon became a detrimental flaw to trying to put our film together. We had worked so hard throughout the sampling process and had so much work that trying to narrow it down and fit everyones pieces in became very tricky especially with our lack of imovie knowledge.

Development of film sandwich section

After I went to go and test out our films at the Museum of Science and Industry. Katie and Julie had a look at the different bits of footage we had done and really like our group drawing and the footage of Vincent and Emma with our samples projected. However they said that at the moment they looked like two separate films and we need to find a way of linking them together. Trying to find the 'filling to our sandwich' so it would flow and be more successful. We realised that we had footage of our drawing projected on Vincents body and though this would be a great way of combining everything. So the film would go: Drawing- parts of drawing projected on Vincent - Vincents body with our samples projected - Vincent and Emma projection footage combined together with our samples - just Emma with our samples projected - end.  As a group we decided this footage would make the best  'filling to our sandwich'.

This week we have been in uni as a group from 10am until 7pm! We have put lots of hours in to make sure we are all happy with our final film.

We had lots of edits of the film(on group blog) and realised the problems with trying to combine files between MACs and laptops!

Monday; We started trying to collaborate all of the filming we had done over the project, we soon realised this was too difficult, we had too much variation in filming and our ideas behind the project were not clear enough.

Tuesday ;we focused alot on making it clearer and using the parts that we thought best represented our project.

We thought the projection work and our drawing film portrayed our project well. 

The whole editing process was very exhausting but we are slowly seeing the end result.

We always had the idea of a 'hidden' element to our project and so at the start of the week we did envisage projecting our film onto a shirt. But after experimenting, we found that the quality of the film would not be as clear, and so we had to abandon this idea.

projection on shirt

Once our film was complete we wanted to project it onto a shirt that was open to show our concept of inside Manchester, however we felt that it just didn't look right, as a group we thought that the projections on the shirt looked better live maybe we could project onto a shirt in MOSI?
We have a short clip of what it did look like.




http://vimeo.com/user11738357/movingshirt

Second Stage of Trousers

After I machine stitched into the trousers I passed them onto Emma, she decided to dye them. The dye worked really well and it's interesting to see that different areas of the trousers were dyed different shades, some threads also got dyed in the process. 

Group Stills

Part of our initial final idea was to project our best images from our sampling throughout the project onto the inside of a shirt. However once we started projecting we thought it was starting to loose some of the colouring and the effectiveness of the individual images. Here I have put together a small slideshow or our images..

Final Film

We have been working really hard the last few days to edit all our film footage to a 4 minute long film. We wanted to get all the elements of our project into the film, the idea of hidden Manchester (we spent a day filming hidden areas of Manchester), the water dissolvable fabric films, the projections and our samples. We started by mixing all elements together but this came across as quite confusing and not making sense to the audience. We decided to simplify it and just have projected images onto our model flashing to the beat of our chosen tracks, this works well and looks exciting and intriguing. Another idea was to project the film onto an open shirt to show our concept of inside Manchester and hidden gems and film it then use this as the final film, we experimented with this but decided that this was not as successful or as clear as just showing the original film. Here are some images of the film being projected onto the shirt..

PROJECTING FOOTAGE ON THE INSIDE OF A SHIRT.

Once we had created out final film, we thought it would be a nice idea to project it onto the inside of the shirt - taking us back to where we started and complimenting our concept well. Although it looked great in person, we felt that once recorded, the quality soon changed. If we were able to have it projected at MOSI it would be a great idea, but since it is just a film, we all agreed that the quality of our samples etc. looked better just on film. Here is a taster of what it looked like:

Josie and Emma Drawing

Josie and Emma where ill when we did our drawing and so did their own version which really complemented our drawing because it looked as though there mark making they did could be a really close up version of our Drawing. I edited it by fast forwarding it and adding a sephia tone so it links with our drawing. 

GROUP TROUSERS.

As a group, we decided it would be a good idea to all add to a pair of plain white trousers so that they all reflected something about us and what we enjoy to do. Josie started with the trousers first, she used machine embroidery to stitch into them and create the patterns of brick work in Manchester using our colour scheme. Here are photos of the trousers before she gave them to me:

I decided that stitching into them wouldn't be enough to show my personal interests and wanted to change them a bit more drastically, so therefore I decided to dye them. Using a variety of dyes allowed me to create different patterns of colour over the trousers and I think they turned out really well, reflecting different shades of Manchester with the colour being lighter on the inside and darker on the out. Here are some photos of what the trousers look like now:

Story Board Ideas continued..

This is a progression of our first story board ideas. Our group finally came up with a final story board for our inital video. We wanted elements of our samples that were growing and decaying, but we didnt want it to look as though we tried to stick everything in so we had to make it flow. Weve been playing around with some of our videos and we came up with an idea to start with the idea of breathing as it would represent growing in a way. will the audience get the meaning of our video?.. This is a list of possible ideas that could be in the final video...

• Breathing - Vincent breathing fastforwarded and slow version- start with this?
• The projection of breathing onto the body
• Stop motion sample-growing and decaying? Dissolvable fabric piece? Fit this to the beat of our music
• We could show samples dissolving in different angles
• Projection work, beccie or vincent piece?
• Flashing samples-emphasis on music so fits to the beat
• Dance film piece of beccie
• samples of emma- on the beat flashing
• Dissolvable pieces- arm or bowl?
• Drawing video fast forwarded- maybe flashing photoshop images
• elements of manchester

Once we came up with these ideas, we had to try and figure out whether the audience would make sense of the video, as we knew what our idea was it was easier for us to understand, so we had to make it understandable for everyone else. We want the video to be simple but effective!

Beccie Filming

Grace and I had a film session with my friend Beccie to see what it would look like projecting the films Josie, Emma, Lamia and Sophie had done in Manchester and the dissolvable films everyone had done on her moving figure and whether it would be successful or not. These our a few tester short films looking at combining footage of Manchester with the moving body. 

Beccie is luckily very flexible and was able to do a back flip which looked really intriguing in fast forward. It linked really nicely to our whole theme hidden (inside the body) projecting elements on the outside. 

Group drawing day video

Here is a clip of us drawing the other day, i fast-forwarded them to show how the images were growing and developing.

http://vimeo.com/user11738357/drawing

Projecting with layers

We used previous footage from our other film days, combined film and images to project onto a female and male model. came up with some really intriguing shots which look really successful. Also projected our drawing we had done the previous day.

A lot of these images look as though we have projects parts of the inside of the body on the outside. revealing the models inner layer by projecting it on their outter. These images were very successful and will be used in our final film.

Drawing and Filming

As Emma and I missed the first group drawing day we decided to produce our own drawing, film it and fast forward it to create the feel of growth and progression. We experimented with lots of different materials making sure we took inspiration from our original work, taking elements from our samples and using mark making to portray them. The film looks great fast forwarded and we will be using it in our final film. The drawing was also very successful with a lot of texture and different marks to it, having two people draw together gives diversity to a drawing and you can play off each others strengths. 

Projections

These are some projections from the shoot that Lara and I did on Friday afternoon. I think they have worked really well and hopefully some of these can be part of our final images to put towards our film. 

Development of film Vincent and emma

We filmed Vincent and Emma again with projects of our old and new samples on them. Then editing this to the music that we are thinking of using for our final film 'Beat For' by Jamie xx. We used the music to our advantge to emphasis certain samples of each person in the group. Also try to successful combine the footage of vincent and emma and see where it flows. Everyone is the group really liked this footage.

Helen Storey

Her work is a bit like our work in the way that she uses dissolvable fabric on this dress.....

 

It is simuliar to the work we did with dissolvable fabric on the skin. She also concentrates on the body a lot, reminds me of our projections of our samples onto Emma's body....

Drawing flat

Grace, Lamia, Sophie and I had a massive drawing day using the brick work of Manchester and our samples to work from creating different marks and an interesting colour palette and filming the whole thing. We did 3 drawing two on the wall and one flat on a table to get different perspective. This was really successful as we had our own individual style but we all seems to complement one another's work. We changed position half way through each drawing so that we could put our own marks on some one else's area.

Layering of Images

 I have taken some of our images and played around with layering them on top of each other and changing the opacity. I think some of these images could be really good to continue to draw from and layer. The images are really starting to look like the textures you see in bricks.