this activity where we cut out squares of different sections of images that caught our eye helped when thinking of possible ideas since I saw a pattern of things I was interested in like nature or the structures of buildings
from looking at the different images I collected I found that I was interested in different textures, buildings, people and scenery/nature. this helped when considering what I wanted to focus on when exploring the monochrome project and what I wanted to test and experiment on.
test 9 – adding ink to the previous test to add more texture, i liked how the ink turned out and want to incorporate it more later on in my other tests, i wanted to add the eye since I thought if I tied it to the subject blinking it would add an extra layer of meaning
test 10 – one of the objectives was to make something ugly/lazy and I made this fit within the lazy aspect as the crumpled-up paper was meant to show that this was made quickly and it was like a bunch of mistakes complied to make a test animation
test 11 – looking back at when I folded the paper to create ridges I wanted to adapt that since I wanted it to look smoother as the shadows aren’t as harsh to fit with what I had in mind for my film
test 12 – going back to test 11 and wanting the shadows to be smoother, I found that the previous test was a bit too rough and the moment was more bumpy than I anticipated. I went back and tried it again but this time took more frames to make the moment go smoother and I also fixed the timing to make it go a bit slower. this outcome resembled waves more which I was pleased about as that was what I was trying to achieve with my film and how I wanted to portray different moments of silence and what they look like to me.
test 13 – from the feedback received, I did get rid of the hair-flowing sequence and replaced it with more of these tests and i did another one to resemble water and the idea for this one was to go between the folded paper and the ink to relate the two sequences.
For my film, at first, when we started I didn’t really have any clear ideas on what I wanted but throughout the different workshops, I saw that I was drawn to a lot of imagery depicting everyday life. The more tests I did the more I had a better idea of the concept I wanted, which was every day, more specifically to me the different moments of silence. What came up a lot was working with the materiality of the paper and seeing what different textures could be achieved by filing or scrunching it and applying ink on top for the extra scrunch from the liquid being absorbed into the paper. looking back at the process of making this film, I saw that I took the workshops and didn’t fully try out each objective, for example when we had to create a limitation for ourselves I chose to focus on that and I didn’t fully look into the other ways I could’ve pushed the film. However, I mostly adapted from each test I made and kept going from there which in the end I’m still happy about. When working with the sound I was unsure of what to do but I wanted to initially have something that would resemble water in music form, I was unsure of how to make that so I used Ichiko Aoba’s song “Ohayashi” which had the sound I was looking for and then combined that with rain sounds that I collected myself. The feedback given was mostly to do with the sequence of the hair moving which was noted didn’t really fit in with the rest of the film as well as the sound which sounded too “nice” since the film is more gritty and could use sounds instead of music. when looking back i do agree with the hair sequence not match with the other parts of the film as well as maybe extending the other parts of the film that was already successful. Overall I enjoyed monochrome as it was definitely something new but similar to what I’ve done in the past, the hardest part was not focusing on the film being about a character even though there’s not a narrative behind it which was the end goal. I’m still happy with how this turned out, however, some tweaks needed to be revised after receiving the feedback. I really enjoyed the start with the paper wave as well as the eye, that was probably my favourite part of the film.