Category: Communications Lab

I.  Project Title (tentative)

My sorrow is not spurting out like Pompeii’s fire

II. Crew Members

Skyler Liu, Joy Zhu

III.  Concept | Storyline

We are going to use the English version of a poem written by Skyler as the script for the voice-over (the whole poem can be found below). The poem is about the oppressive thoughts and feelings of a person with depression. The original poem has five paragraphs but we will only choose two or three of them for this project considering the time length. 

In our conception, the video wouldn’t be telling a story with a clear beginning, middle, and ending which is common to see. It will be an abstract art film to convey emotions. Instead of shooting a video with every scene that directly corresponds to every imagery appearing in the poem, we would make a video parallel with the voice-over in their superficial content, but from another perspective, they would work together to convey similar emotions. Therefore, we would focus on shooting several scenes that reveal the daily state of a person with depression: sometimes she’s in a fugue state, sometimes she’s staring out of the window, sometimes she’s curling up at the corner, sometimes she’s lying on the floor…etc. In this way, the whole video will be a visual metaphor for the poem. 

We will mainly experiment with color choice (in both production and post-production periods), spot setting, sound, and lighting, to create an oppressive atmosphere. The color choice includes two parts. In production, the color of the actor’s clothes and spot setting will matter to us. As the video’s tone is cold and oppressive, the main color would be cold and dark. This color choice will also be presented in the post-production. A piece of background music with a heavy tone will also help our visual metaphor to be more powerful. (There are more details about lighting in the execution plan.)

The poem:

我的悲伤不是喷薄而出如同庞贝的火，       
它用风和雨和梦的姿态将我融化。
我融化，如同蜡烛，
灯芯把挣扎的心系在躯干上。
My sorrow is not spurting out like Pompeii’s fire,
It melts me with the gesture of wind and rain and dream.
I melt, like a candle,
The struggling heart is tied to the body by a wick.

我的声音滴落，缄默在风里。
阵雨向寂静里堆满回声，把所有回应的通道占领。
而梦缠绵总也不离去，
冰凉的手像雾气覆盖我的眼睛。
My voice dripped, fading away with the wind.
The rain filled silence with echoes, occupying all the channels for a response.
And dreams would not leave,
Cold hands are like fog covering my eyes.

我遂滴落了我的骨骼与血肉，自由与魂灵。
Then I dripped my flesh and bones, freedom and soul.

七月的房间里不只住着流火的幽灵，
它挤满了压抑的尖叫，和蜷缩的影。
没有门和窗，
悲伤以一位老者的形象蹒跚徘徊在黑暗里。
There are not only ghosts of Antares living in the room of July,
It’s packed with the repressed scream, and huddled shadow.
No doors nor window,
Sorrow lingers in the dark as the figure of an old man.

他说，死去的人生活在灰烬里，
光阴踏在他们的眼睑上。
而你，
你是那颗，被判处了极刑的烧焦的星星。
He says, the dead are living in the ashes,
Time steps on their eyelids.
And you,
You are the one, burnt star, which was sentenced to Death.

Written by 刘秩靖 (Skyler Liu), 2016

IV. Execution Plan

We will rent a Sony FS5 as the main shooting equipment, a tripod to help with shooting, a Tascam for sound recording, and lighting equipment will be crucial since the location we choose is mainly inside. We will book a house with suitable settings in both colors and the style of interior design from Airbnb to be our shooting spot, and we will make it a kind of empty space in some scenes to help the despairing atmosphere more powerful. Also, we may make the inside not clearly recognizable by day or night. In this way, the video can indicate that there is no difference between the outside day and night for the protagonist who’s mostly living in her inner world.

Our main challenge comes from lighting because it will mostly shoot inside. To make the lighting more successful at conveying emotion, we will go beforehand to examine the shooting site and rehearse how the natural light may work and how to use the lighting equipment.

Our work is divided as below:

• Director: Skyler 
• Actor: Skyler
• Rehearsal position actor: Joy
• Voice actor: Undecided (we are going to record both of us and another male reading the poem and choose the one with better effect)
• Camera operator:  Joy
• Lighting technician: Joy
• Editor: Skyler
• Assistant editor: Joy

V. Storyboard Draft

VI. Gantt Chart

Task	Owner	Start Date	Due Date	Duration	PCT of Task Complete
Proposal and storyboards draft	Skyler, Joy	11.22	11.25	4 days	10%
Voice-over	Skyler, Joy, another male actor	11.28	11.28	1 day	20%
Completed storyboards	Skyler	11.30	12.4	5 days	35%
Spot Choice	Skyler, Joy	12.2	12.4	3 days	40%
Shooting	Skyler, Joy	12.5	12.5	1 day	70%
First Editing	Skyler	12.5	12.7	2 days	90%
Final Editing	Skyler, Joy	12.8	12.10	2 days	100%

 

Him and Her, 1968-2008 (2008), Video Installation, Candice Breitz

This work is divided into two parts. The “Her” is played by Meryl Streep, and the “Him” is played by Jack Nicholson. Each part is divided into 7 small screens, playing the scenes of different characters played by the two veteran actors in different movies, and there are dialogues between them.

In terms of the form of installation art, Him and Her is played in two connected rooms. Videos in both rooms are edited very smoothly. The characters do not only correspond with their dialogues, but also with plot connections, even with their eye expressions and moving directions. For example, when Nicholson on the above screen says something, the lunatic he played in The Shining below would laugh, and the other Nicholson would applaud. The artist Breitz searched for the materials she needed in many films that these two old veteran actors participated in, and then conducted re-creation and re-editing. In her re-creation, the audience can piece together the information from these crossover screens to a new plot, a new story, and a new theme.

At the same time, the clips of the male and female protagonists are removed from their original movie plots. The artist removes all the background behind them and turns them into a unified black, so the audience can only focus on their looks and talks, postures and dressing, and then give a reasonable explanation based on this information.

In addition, the special perspective on the two actors and visual effects make people feel that Streep and Nicholson in the scenes are not themselves, but many ordinary people, some of them look like teachers, lawyers, underworlds, or madmen, some of them are laughing, some are crying; they look like people with mental illness who come to the counselor for help, and every audience is a psychiatrist who listens to their stories. Therefore, through this form, Breitz’s installation can be regarded as a humanity observation room magnified by screens. The materials are selected from the film material library, allowing the audience to see different types of emotions including anxiety, happiness, and disappointment, grievance, anger, confusion, etc. As a result, the content of such a work gradually deviates from the superficial meaning of Hollywood stars, and gradually touches the content of the emotional expression of ordinary people.

This method of drawing materials based on big data, looking for new creative materials in the ready-made products of culture and art, and secondly assembling and creating art also implies our current era and the time we live in. Now, when we watch movies on the Internet, we can pause, take screenshots, play backwards, repeat, and fast forward without following the movie screening rules. This is the change in watching movies brought to us by our modern lifestyle. So, what is time, what is content, and what is narrative is no longer fixed in the lifestyle of modern people, nor is it completely determined by the film director, but depends on the audience in front of the computer screen. Him and Her embodies a kind of challenge and rebellion from the audience against the status of the sole creator, as well as the subjective manipulation of the traditional narrative approach.

A. Concept

Work Title: Mom’s Cooking

I chose the first memory that occupies my mind when it comes to the word “sonic memory”, which I think is the deepest impression of sound in my memory. It is the sounds I heard when my mom cooked in the kitchen when I was a kid. It includes the sound of gas, oil boiling, ingredients entering the pot and food getting stirred in the pot, etc. It’s a noisy mix of sounds, but it’s about life, and my expectation for lunch as a kid, so it is a kind of warm and pleasant sounds.

In the beginning, I just planned to remake the actual sounds of my memory but later I realized, another important aspect of the memory might not stand out to the audience in this way, which is the feeling when I listened to the sounds in my childhood. I remembered the way I felt the sounds. I often imagined them to be a song when all the different sounds during cooking came together, but somehow it was harmonious and pleasant. Therefore, I decided to make this memory soundscape combine the actual sounds of cooking and the pleasant feeling when I listened to them by editing them to be a piece of music related to my memory.

B. Process

I have recorded almost every sound during cooking lunch, but I didn’t use all of them because the length of this soundscape is only one minute, and including all the details of the actual sounds wouldn’t help the audience catch the feeling of my memory. In the end, I chose the sound of the gas stove, the sound of the kitchen ventilator, the sound of oil boiling, the sound of ingredients entering the pot, and the sound of food getting stirred in the pot, as I think they are the most impressive sounds that stand out in my memory during my mother’s cooking. 

While recording, I held the TASCAM to be as close as possible to the stove (but definitely from a safe distance) because I wanted my audience to feel that the sounds are close, as you are hearing them right in front of you, and they are so close to your life as well. I encountered the problem of having too much noise like wind sound in my recording. The solution was just paying more awareness of things in the environment that might make noise then recording several times to have the best quality of needed sounds as I could. 

The beginning section of my project is imitating the actual sounds of cooking. After selecting specific recordings that are mentioned above, I combined them together to make them sound like the real cooking process even though the length was reduced a lot compared to reality. The main method was emphasizing the “key sound” – the sound of ingredients entering the pot, by repeating and manipulating this part. Because the sound is the most vivid and impressive part of my memory.

The other section of my project is creating music from the actual cooking sounds. During editing, the most challenging part was selecting the proper effects for making the piece of music. I tried plenty of different effects and finally decided on the notch filter. It has multiple pre-settings including “A and E minor”, “C major”, and so on, which can transform the corresponding pitch in your recording to the exact note-like sound in music. To make the “music” sounds more pleasant and less monotonous, I created multiple tracks in Audition and set each of them in different minor or major – because the average pitch of the cooking sounds was kind of high, I mainly chose A and E minor and E minor chords work together to make the music sounds harmonious, fitting the music I felt in my memory. Also, there were reversing effects and pans shifting in the middle section of the music to create a more abundant auditory experience.

I also learned a lot of other techniques while doing the editing, such as how to make noise reduction and the transition of audios. Besides the techniques, I think the most important thing is how to consider my work from the audience’s perspectives and make all the complex audios sound harmonious together as a whole soundscape work in the end. 

C. Conclusion

As mentioned by Jingtian, if I had more time, I would record more cooking sounds that including thin rubbing sounds, for making a string type of melody in the music section. Because now my project mainly has the percussion type of melody, which might sound a little monotonous. 

D.  Image of Audition

Here‘s the link for this memory soundscape.

A. Artist’s Name, Name of Project

Skyler Liu, Call of Cthulhu 

B. Concept

I want to present the attraction of something evil through this diptych. The first image is a mask lying on the platform; it seems to wait for someone to pick it up, then, in the second picture, we see a hand holding the mask, with tears of blood falling from the corner of the mask’s right eye, and there’s is a kind of reality distortion and illusions occurring, which seems to rise a call to another world. My inspiration was from the mask I have which is in relation to the Cthulhu mythos written by Lovecraft. In the mythos, Cthulhu is one of the “great old ones”, which is waiting to arrive on the earth and dominate the world by attracting enough followers. 

C. Process

1). Describe your process in staging and photographing part I.

I want to have a dark atmosphere and give the audience an oppressing sensation, so I used a high shutter speed of 1/800, however, I didn’t notice the exposure was improper, which made me have to manipulate the image’s luminance after when I saw the actual effect was too dark on my laptop.  I used my dark grey curtain as the background, putting the mask on the platform of the bay window. To express the attraction’s evilness, I designed the element of the tears of blood from the mask, which was made with watercolor paint (I mixed multiple kinds of red colors to make it more like blood). Because I needed to spare one hand to complete the scene of one hand reaching to the mask, I had to operate the camera with a single hand. It made the work much harder for me. For several steps, I had to shoot several times to reach a satisfying effect.

2). Describe your digital process in creating part II image.

I selected the hand holding the mask from picture one, then pasted it to fill picture two’s background to create a sense of illusion. In the beginning, I didn’t know how to select the part I want accurately, thanks to Iris’ and Leon’s help, I did it in the end. I also added a half-transparent blue square with the liquified effect on the corresponding part of the background to create a sense of reality distorted by another world.

D. Conclusion

If I had more time I would absolutely add more details to the collaged image. It was a regret for me because I didn’t have time to optimize the background to look more like an illusion. Also, next time I’ll start with the proper ISO to make the original images have enough luminance.

E. Image of Diptych

The picture with original quality can be found here.

I think, when it comes to “sonic memory”, the first sound that occupies my mind is probably the deepest sound in my memory. That is about the sound of my childhood, about the first house I lived in, about the kitchen and my mother. When I was in elementary school, I would ride home alone after school at noon every day, and when I arrived at my unit, I had to walk up the stairs on the fifth floor. Because of a lack of physical strength, I always walked slower and slower, I remember my more and more procrastinating footsteps. When I reached the door of my house, I would rustle out the key from my schoolbag. With the creak of the door opening, I could hear the familiar sound of cooking from the kitchen.

I liked to go into the kitchen and watch my mother cook. First, there was the sound of flames from the gas stove, and then the sound of oil being poured into the pot and being heated. When the ingredients entered the pot, there would be a crackling sound that instantly burst apart, then there would be a sound of shaking the spatula; the spatula rubbing against the bottom of the pot. As the friction of the spatula became slower and slower, and the cry of the flames became smaller and smaller, I knew that lunch was about to be prepared. With the sound of food entering the plate, I would trot with the prepared food and tablewares to put them on the table, turn on the TV, and adjust the channel to CCTV1. With the background sound of the news or the program Law Today, lunchtime was going to start.

The most important feeling that surrounds this sonic memory is warmth, which is one of the few most relaxing and warm moments in my childhood. So I decided the image of going into the kitchen to be the starting point for my piece. In this piece, all the sounds are very lifelike, and their precise spatial positions are deeply imprinted in my memory, so I think the sense of distance of each sound will become an important means in my expression. The sound of cooking is very close, because when I was a child, I always stood as close as possible, staring at the food coming out of the oven with my full attention. I want to make my audience feel the warmth—even a little hot; there is also a kind of expectation in those sounds. The distance of the footsteps is moderate, just like the height of a kid. And the sound of the TV is the farthest because when I was a child, my mother always told me to watch TV from far enough, for protecting my eyesight. My piece will end with the sound of just turning on the TV and sitting at the dining table, because the sound of TV and taking a seat brings a kind of new expectation: the expectation of the upcoming lunch accompanying the TV show. Warmth and expectations, are the essence of the piece of memory.