DaDa

This project is so far one of my favorites since I have started to study media. I knew about DaDa for a long time, but I never considered this art to be part of my portfolio. Just after the class we had about DaDa and the project itself I started looking forwards to creating this kind of work. For an influencer of my work, I chose Eadweard Muybridges and his photographs.

I set my first step to be finding an interesting person who would offer an interesting look for the picture and would be willing to pose naked in front of the camera. This turned out to be an easier task than I expected. I tried to contact several naturist societies on Facebook where I found more then one model interested in my project. As a final model I picked an older man named Brian Johnson with a long beard and plenty of tattoos all over his body which I thought would be a great contrast to compare to his age and makes him great for photography.

Brian told me that he lives three and half hours drive from Coventry, but he was willing to come and help me with my project. Immediately I started thinking about different movements which would make my work reminiscent of Muybridges's work and show how the naked body looks during usual everyday activities. Visiting Herbert's Gallery in Coventry was very inspirational and helped me with my dilemma. I came across miniature sculptures which were similar to the topic of my interest because it showed naked bodies in different positions. I took this piece of art as a pattern for my own project.

I came up with two movements : 1. walking with an umbrella

2. striding

I knew that filming would take about 1 hour and considering Brian's long journey I came up with idea of cooperating with one more student. Brian is definitely interesting for portraits so I offered an opportunity for one photographer to come and enlarge their portfolio. I contacted Brian to asked him for his approval and he was open to any idea and had no problem with it.

On the same day I found Linda, a student of media at Coventry University with an interest in photography. www.lindagorska.com

I set up a meeting with her where we discussed all details and planned the filming day. Linda has experience with cameras and lighting, which for me was most important as I am not very experienced.

The filming itself was a very interesting experience. Everything went smooth without any problems. After I was done with filming we had a long talk about Brian's life and values which I recorded and decided to include in my blog so people can get to know about the subject of my work.

(Video works after click)

EDITING

I recorded footage of both movements using Blackmagic Ursa Mini and my Panasonic g80 to have enough material to work with and to compare pictures from different cameras (just for me to practice). I also took many photographs of the movements because I wanted to try to make a stop motion video so I can play more with programs and learn more about the origins of DaDa movement.

For my two video experiments I have chosen the best of both movements.

Example 1: This is how the footage looked like without any edits; you can also hear the sound of picture taking for the stop motion.

Example 2: I used raw pictures which I simply put together in premiere pro and adjusted the speed to reach the required 10 sec limit for one movement.

Result of the raw stop motion :

Studio artist

Firstly I was not very satisfied with the usage of Studio Artist software for our project. It was maybe because I could not imagine the combination of the idea I had in my mind and artistic layers I needed to use for it. After some time when I saw the potential of the program and its results I changed my mind and started working on my own Studio Artist versions.

I started working on the "Striding" movement. The first was just pure experimenting; I wanted to see what the different colors would do to the picture. My plan was to make it look like a hallucination or unreal. I did not like that and did not export this version because it took too long and did not want to waste my time with it.

While thinking about different styles I remembered the mould like sculptures from Herbert's gallery and tried to make my work in that style. I liked the result, but it did not show the contrast between the skin and tattoos. I applied other effects which were pointing out this factor. Most of them have a blur layer or the layers which did not fit into my idea so I deleted them to create the effect I wanted to achieve.

I could not decide which I should use so I put them all together and exported as one video to see and compare them more.

From all of them I have chosen the one with the greatest contrast between the white color of the layer, Brian himself, and his tattoos. I have applied this 10 sec movement 3 times to make the required 30 second work, applied a layer on all of them and decided that this would be the final version of this "striding" movement. This version is also represented just as a video, because I did not like how the stop motion attempt of this movement looked like.

I have also tried to make it look like he is leaving on the right of the picture and in the same time appears at the start of the same image on the left (so half of his body would be in the end and half at the start). I used the masking tool in Adobe Premier but I had difficulties so after some time I left it be and stuck with the previous version.

“Walking with an umbrella" - I decided to keep this movement just as stop motion, because I wanted to get closer to my influence. The video just simply did not represent that idea. For this version I have tried just a couple attempts in Studio Artist where I was aiming to create moving art. It was supposed to look like a painting which came to life, but I would not say that it really worked and in my opinion it was just destroying the meaning of this work. Here is one example :

After all I took the raw footage and started editing it in Premiere pro with the goal to make it look older and point out the Dada origins. My skills are not enough to remake photographs so they would look like they were taken 100 years ago, but I tried to add the sense of age into it. I played with temperature, exposure etc. and added 8mm film leader overlay into my footage to add some "patina", dust and scratches. This overlay included many different film versions so I chose the one I thought works the best for my purpose. Finally I got what I wanted and considered this to be my final version of this movement and also the final version of Dada project.

DADA SUBMISSION

Appendix

Even though I was done with my work I experimented more with the footage and made another few versions of the final piece. I wanted to make a three screen piece where it would look like Brian is walking through all of them. I found out that it is a problem to fit three wide angle pictures next to each other without cutting important parts so I came up with another solution.

I made a two screen piece where I captured the movement of opening an umbrella repeated several times. This was easy to make: overlay one image up on the bottom one and then just change the position on both of them.

First version:

The same technique as above, I applied on the three screen piece where I kept the same concept but with a different result. I resized the videos and then moved them around the screen. One of the videos is in the original size with two shrunken versions of itself next to it. I wanted to create more chaos in the picture so I turned one upside down. Then I set a different delay for two of them which helped to fill the image and also helped into my "chaos idea".

Second and last version of Dada project :