Poetic

INTRO

Raasay island offers many beautiful sights for filming and photography. It might sounds positive, but on the other side creating something special is more difficult. Everybody there can turn on the camera and film nice view creating nice video, but that was not the purpose of our project. The project is about experimenting and finding something different in otherwise ordinary things like sea, forest, cost etc.

First day I did not film too much; instead of that I was observing and absorbing the atmosphere of the place to help me find the way how to film my poetic piece. During the first day we were walking through strong wind and heavy rain, which for me created very chaotic but strong atmosphere. In the same time we were told that man on the island got missing and he is nowhere to be find for few days. We came across several searching teams, who always shook had as a negative response on finding the man. I have a lot of empathy and could not stop thinking what that man needs to be going through if he is still alive. Next days of the trip were much nicer, but the feeling of the first experience was stacked in my head for the rest of the trip.

This both strong experiences had an impact on my work; on it's theme, tone of voice, effects etc.

MAKING OF

Firstly I needed to separate the footage from the camera and my phone; phone turned up to be very useful filming tool during rain, when I did not want to expose the camera and lenses to bad weather conditions.

I went through the footage many times and chose pieces which I considered to be best for my idea. I wanted to express the dark side of this beautiful island. Now I had clips and next step was distort the image, and play with the colors to create the feeling I want to express.

ORIGINAL RAW FOOTAGE, PICTURE EXAMPLES

Not just the missing man but the the weather itself had impact on my project. Strong wind, rising water level, heavy rain, brings death to animals, trees, plants etc. This deathly side of the nature powers I saw the next day when the weather changed. Death sheep, seal, several fish, fallen trees has remained me that there is always the other, darker side even of this beautiful and on the first sight peaceful place.

I wanted to try something new so I learned new editing tools as masking and secondary colors change, both new features in Premiere pro. Both are pretty easy to learned and can be used for many different purposes. By separating different areas of the image and masking them I could apply various color effects on the same place without effecting the whole picture.

To show the dark side of that beautiful place I used black and white colors with high contrast, lowered black color and shadows. To add into the feeling of death which I felt when I was thinking about the lost man I added red color representing blood. For every picture I chose different areas which were turned into red color.

Sound was a big question for me; I was not sure what should be the audio side of my project.

I wanted to use the sound from the original clips but strong wind destroyed most of the audio; sometimes the sound of the wind creates nice effect, but wind on my videos was too much. I remember that I have palette of sounds from my previous projects so I used the sounds from this palette : crunching twig, breathing etc. Not all of the sound from the footage was corrupted so I was able to cut short pieces and put them together as some of the wind noise, sound of the see waves or birds.

It was clear that sound also needs to be confusing and spooky to reflect my goal. Different echo types, lowering the pitch and using various reverb options turned out to fulfill my expectation.

For the sound of death and rotting corpses I was lucky to record bee trapped between curtain and window frame at my home which should represent the insect feeding on death animals. I used similar effect and multiple times duplicated the bee sound to create a feeling of many flies flying around.

SECOND VIDEO

This video is more experimental.The footage used for this clip is my favorite one. I recorded water trapped in the small area on the beach getting whipped by strong wind creating many small waves on on the sandy background creating nice contrast. I wanted to use this footage in my first final piece, but it did not go very well with the rest of the clips. After feedback and recommendation from the people during lecture i decided to make 2 minute version of the footage.

ORIGINAL PICTURE OF THE FOOTAGE

This footage is for me special, because even in the raw form it creates weird feeling. When I was looking on this video I started imagine different things; you can almost see different pictures and scenes coming out from this picture.

I decided to use same editing process as I have used in my first version. Lowering saturation, black color, shades and add the red secondary colors effect. For audio I used the sound of the see from the first clip and the distorted bee (Insect) effect. My was not just to express the blood and deathly side of the Island, but also open people imagination while looking at sort of disturbing clip and listening distorted sounds.

The aim of this version of the project turned out to be right when more people said that they could see different images and think about various things while watching my work.

SUBMISSION

VERSION 1:

VERSION 2: