TRACESSIMON HUGHES

C o n t e n t s

P r o P o s a l“ W h e n w e d e f i n e t h e P h o t o g r a p h a s a m o t i o n l e s s i m a g e , t h i s d o e s n o t m e a n o n l y t h a t t h e f i g u r e s i t r e p r e s e n t s d o n o t m o v e ; i t m e a n s t h a t t h e y d o n o t e m e r g e , d o n o t l e a v e : t h e y a r e a n e s t h e t i z e d a n d f a s t e n e d d o w n , l i k e b u t t e r f l i e s . ”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. p57

For this project I would like to explore the identity of the music venue as a space and its part in music culture. My concept is to explore the cultural wealth of the venue

and the impact it has on the music scene and the society around it. It will be a time-based piece in a documentary style incorporating moving and still images, sound clips and a suiting soundtrack. I will look at the absence of people in the venue before and after a gig capturing the essence of the venue.

Based on photographic influences, such as Rut Blees Luxemburg, Joel Sternfeld and Richard Page, and Directors/videographers such as David Lynch, Edward Burtynsky, or Philip Bloom, I would like to explore a ‘sense of place’ using various photographic techniques and visual language to develop ideas that will lead into my final project.

I would like to explore using different methods of shooting to get the desired shots suitable for the type of film I am creating. These include dol-ly’s, monopods some handheld movements and if accessible, a steady cam. I will be editing in Final Cut Pro as I have a competent knowledge of it cur-rently and wish to further expand my skills, I will be incorporating colour grading in my work, which I will use to enhance my visual language to suit the scenes.

Initially I will take my inspiration from commer-cial photographer and videographer Chase Jarvis, his work encompasses the whole notion of turn-ing a still into moving image. I have been learning

from the tutorials of Phillip Bloom over the course of the summer to improve my filmmaking. I have also been reading DSLR Cinema and websites such as 5DCinema.com

I have identified in my summer research my desire to shoot video which tells the story of peo-ple, initially I wanted to explore video portraits in a literal sense, instead I am doing it through the means of the music venue as a place.

My strengths would be my knowledge of shoot-ing video with a DSLR, I have been doing this for over a year. This will allow me to think fast in the venue when it comes to setting up my camera and start recording quickly. One of my weakness-es would be time keeping and motivation; I would continue to pursue new artists and filmmakers to keep my creativity up.

As a musician in a band I am immensely in-spired by the music venue, it is a place of energy and performance and the essence of place and its history feed in to the performance. Being part of the music scene allows me to get into venues before the public arrive; this will allow me to take a view into what’s hidden to the general public. I will shoot the venues that my band plays at be-fore and after each show to convey the rise and fall of energy in the venue throughout the night.

l e n s t e C H n I Q U e sF R E E - L E N S I N G / L E N S ‘ W H A C K I N G ’

Manfrotto 561BHDV Monopod‘Whacking’ a Canon 50mm f/1.4 + Canon 5DMarkII

To create a ‘tilt-shift’ effect without a tilt-shift lens, I have experimented with free lensing, also known as lens ‘whacking’.

This is a very effective technique and creates a distinct look on objects and people, it is largely used in landscape photography and certain por-traits. Interesting light leaks and flares can add to the footage straight out of camera, this is some-thing which can also be done in post-production using layers of stock footage film burns available online.

Creating this look also comes with a number of difficulties;

Removing the lens from the camera will remove any weather sealing features that the camera may have when a lens is attached (note, not all DSLR’s with HDVideo have weather sealing). Dust may

also enter the camera when the lens is detached and land on the sensor.

Without a tripod or a monopod it is difficult to hold both camera and lens together. In my tests I have used my Manfrotto 561BHDV Monopod to steady the camera with its 4 stabilising feet while I shift the lens away from the camera body. I also found this technique effective when using my Man-frotto 055PROXB tripod.

Another difficulty is the inability to manually change the aperture of the lens once it is detached from the camera. This is possible on older lens-es which require a conversion mount, eg.- using NON-AI, AI or AIS Nikon lenses.

Free lensing still w/ 50mm f/1.4 lens

Free lensing video w/ 50mm f/1.4 Ungraded SOOC

P o s t - P r o D U C t I o nt r a n s I t I o n s

Using a transition is a traditional technique of moving from one scene to the next, common transitions include cross disolves, blurs and swipes. Many of these techniques are used in George Lucas’ series Star Wars.

Throughout my tests I found that these types of transitions didn’t suit the style of my film as I am aiming for a gritty/scratchy style to my scenes. I feel that traditional disolves and blurs would be too clean and polished and would also not suit the tempo of my edit.

Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 which is my chosen suite for editing includes a number of stock presets for creating these transitions.

Example film disolve in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, completed by layering 2 video tracks over eacho-ther and then adding the disolve to the end of the top track which then lowers the opacity over a key-frame timed period to create the disolve into the scene below.

Instead of using these transitions, I have cho-sen to use ones which simulate traditional 35, 16 and 8mm film burns. I downloaded a pack of free-ware low-res filmburns from YouTube and also a smaller pack of royalty free 720p film burns.

In order to use as a transition, the clip must be placed on a track above the clips you wish to transition between then set a blend mode similar to the layers palette in Adobe Photoshop. I have found that blend modes such as Screen and Soft Light work the best to achieve the film look I am creating.

One disadvantage of using these film burns is that they are of a lower resolution than the film I am creating. I will have to scale the film burns up to match the 1080p sequence settings, this in turn will also create a problem of losing quality. To counter this I have added a layer of blur to the clip to remove any pixelation that occurs in the up-scalling.

An advantage however, is the flexibility in colour grading the film burns to create a different look to the stock colouring they originally had, this can be seen opposite in a still from the film’s introduction.

F o C a l l e n G t HC o M P a r I s o n F o r V I D e o

Focal length is just as important in video as it is within stills photography, it can be used to empha-sise the scene or show the full picture.

The difficulty at shooting with longer lenses to-wards the telephoto end of the focal range is im-age stabalisation, the greater the focal length the more stabalising required.

For this project I have used a maximum focal length of 50mm and the widest at 17mm. The wide angle focal length of 17mm allows me to make ob-jects and people look larger in the scene and use the lens distortion to its strengths emphasising the shots.

Another benefit of using a wide angle lens is that focus is more consistent. I use the Canon 17-40mm L f/4 lens, shooting at 17mm at f/5.6 > f/8 depending on lighting conditions allows me to have a lot more in focus at these apertures than say using my 50mm lens at f/1.4 > f/4.

A disadvantage of shooting at a wide angle is be-ing aware of what is in shot. 17mm gives approxi-mately a 93 degree viewing angle on a full frame sensor such as the Canon 5D Mark 2.

Shooting at 50mm allows me to view approximate-ly what the eye see’s on full frame at a 40 degree viewing angle creating a more focused tighter cropped frame.

Still from ‘TRACES’ @ 50mm f/1.4 due to low light at the venue. 1/50 Shutter speed ISO 1250.

Focal length examples of the lenses I own.

Canon 17-40mm f/4 L Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM

E D I T I N G S O F T W A R EF I n a l C U t P r o o r P r e M I e r e P r o ? I N C L u D I N G W O R K F L O W

My main experience with video editing has come from Apple’s Final Cut Pro 7, I have watched numerous instructional videos on how to use it correctly in my time as a videographer. It also comes with drawbacks, it is extremely slow to render and while you can preview effects and colour correction in real time (providing you are editing with Apple’s ProRes422 codec) it is relatively old software now.

This has lead me to move along from using Final Cut Pro into the Adobe suite Premiere Pro CS6, it can work natively with DSLR footage which with the rise of popularity in these cameras is excellent and makes editing more accessible to anyone who owns a DSLR with video function. However, Can-on DSLR’s shoot using the H.264 codec which is unsuitable for editing but excellent for playback and web publishing immediately after shooting/editing. This leads on to my decision to work using a Pro-Res422(LT) codec and then output for H.264 once my edit is complete.

Once the footage has been imported onto my computer from the compact-flash card, it must be con-verted using a free piece of software known as MPEG StreamClip available at http://www.squared5.com/ .

Files are imported into a named folder and my workflow looks like this;

DESKTOP/FOLDER_NAME/RAWVIDEO

Converted footage is them put into a new folder after its been run into MPEG StreamClip

DESKTOP/FOLDER_NAME/PRORES

The main folder is then transfered to an external scratch disk, keeping a backup on 2 drives as secu-rity for the footage. The workflow then looks like this;

SCRATCH DISK/FOLDER_NAME/RAWVIDEO (KEPT ONLY FOR BACKUP)

SCRATCH DISK/FOLDER_NAME/PRORES (REFERENCED IN NON-DESTRUCTIVE EDITOR

SUCH AS FINAL CUT OR PREMIERE PRO)

o r

Conversion process;

SOOC H.264.mov’s converted to ProRes422(LT).mov’s. Frame rate is left untouched, any changes to frame rate is done in post-production.

ProRes422 is a faster format to edit although the file sizes are larger.

Once editing is complete the file is then outputted from Premiere;

1080p - 25fps - H.264 / 5000kbps Data Rate.

FinaL CUt PRo 7 aDoBE PREMiERE PRo CS6I initially started out editing this project inside Final Cut Pro, as the program is several years old and was missing some of the plug-ins that were needed for this project I switched to Premiere Pro CS6.

As well as having advantages of switching to Premiere Pro, I have also faced the disadvantage of not knowing the quick keyboard shortcuts like I did with Final Cut Pro.

P H I l l I P B l o o MPORTRAIT OF A BOXER

One of the main videos I have come across which references place and it’s essence is Phillip Blooms ‘Portrait of a Boxer’ which comes from his ongoing series ‘Portrait of a…’. Phillip Bloom’s videos have been instrumental in my development as a videographer and almost everything I have learned so far has been through his DSLR educational videos.

Bloom’s video, available on Vimeo (see below for link) was shot as a commison entry for Sony’s Extra.Ordinary using their Super 35mm format FS100 camera and Carl Zeiss optics.

Phillip Bloom is prolific for his use of tripods and uses them to a large extent in the establishing shots of the gym, afterwards he moves on to a shoulder rig to create movement which isn’t too streamlined or steady but neither is it rigid like handheld video.

The video tells the story of boxer Festim, narrating what his sport of boxing means to him. Bloom does an excellent job of establishing the boxing gym as a place of immense speed and its history, the walls are clad with photos of the gym’s boxing champions and the shots of solitary objects magnify the wealth of the venue. This is a large part of what my project is about so I will try and emulate Bloom’s shooting style as well as the ethos of this video.

Behind the scenes videos detail the technical aspect of the shoot. Shots without any fight action are shot at 1/50 shutter speed which is the traditional filmic speed to use, action sequences are shot at 1/100 or 1/125 speed. Like Bloom’s video I will also shoot at 1080p 25fps and use a standard shutter speed of 1/50.

https://vimeo.com/39453069

D a V I D l y n C H e r a s e r H e a D

David Lynch’s 1977 black and white movie is set in an industrialised world centralised around the life of Henry Spencer coming to terms with the birth of his mutant alien child, his relationship with his girlfriend and his own mind.

The movie features a dark tone of aesthetics, deep blacks often contrasted with blown out highlights. Lynch uses his directing as a strength in this, one of his earlier movies. Long drawn out scenes with little to no dialog leave the viewer as bamboozled about Henry’s life as he is about it himself.

As with many of Lynch’s movies, there is a surrealist element to the storyline; the lack of dialog and the sometimes whacky lines of Mary’s family. This could be a reference to artists such

as surrealist cultural icon Salvador Dali and Max Ernst.

An industrial soundtrack accompanies the movie and is used to create tension and drama amongst the scenes. This, as well as the aesthetic monochrome and grain elements of Lynch’s craft for this film is what I intend to take into my own project. The creation of long scenes void of human interaction will be magnified by a fitting soundtrack to complete the composition of each scene.

The movie uses an 1.37:1 aspect ratio which I feel may be too wide open for my short film. I intend the scenes to be more focused with a tighter cropped composition using the widescreen to my advantage to keep the viewers eyes where I intend them to be looking.

V I n C e n t l a F o r e tN O C T U R N E

Vincent Laforet’s ‘NOCTURNE’ is one of the original cinematic movies made using the Canon 5D MaRK ii, which is also the camera I use to shoot my work.

Laforet worked as Director and Director of Pho-tography (DOP) on this film commenting on the films use of only ambient natural light available at the time of shooting, at night.

This is another similarity to my own project as I too will only be shooting at night in venues, using the venues house lights as my only source of light-ing. Different lighting affects the scene and Laforet uses the street lamps along with careful colour grading to emphasise the narrative.

The film demonstrates many technical aspects which were unknown to me before seeing it. I was unaware that iSo6400 would look useable as it does in Laforets film.

Shooting with lenses wide open is often tricky in maintaining focus so cranking up the ISO will allow stepped down apertures such as f/4 and up-wards to be used - creating a larger field of focus.

As well as visuals the film has a considered soundtrack, this is something I had difficulty with originally when starting the edit of my film. Timing is critical to the mood of the film and without the right soundtrack, that is lost.

https://vimeo.com/7152063

r U t B l e e s l U X e M B U r G

Rut Blees Luxemburg - Towering Inferno (1995)

The work of Rut Blees Luxemburg has become the heaviest source of inspiration and research for this project as well as my extended essay. I de-cided to look into how artists and photographers pursue a world void of obvious human signifiers through art; creating a portrait of society without featuring an actual phyiscal human.

Luxemburg is one of a number of artists and photographers I chose to comment on due to the depth and the shear wealth of the subject her ex-ploration has covered. The series that Luxemburg has been creating on her 5x4” format camera over the last 15-20 years is rich in social commentary which describes the places she photographs with-out us, the viewer needing to be there with her.

In terms of technique, Rut Blees has confirmed that its not the process behind her photography which drives her. She does not know a terrible amount about the photographs nor does she re-quire to, she uses photography as a tool to convey her analysis of the scene, as if we were seeing it through her eyes.

As my project will be shot digially as a moving image I cannot mimick her 5x4 format photogra-phy, instead I will be taking the scale and focus for commentary into my own work. Although this is a body of stills work I am able to see a lot of move-ment in the images I have chosen of Luxemburgs, I aim to make my short film appear as a still with sudden moments of movement and emotion from the scenes.

There is a blatant human presence behind the

curtains in Luxemburgs image opposite entitled ‘Towering Inferno’ (1995). This image is possibly one of Rut Blees’ most popular images, appearing in popular culture as the sleeve for debut album ‘Original Pirate Material’ by The Streets.

My short movie will be shot indoors largely with a Canon 5D Mark II DSLR, despite the smaller for-mat I am able to shoot a lot of this project privately without any obviousness to what I am doing. The venue lighting will help me to emulate the aesthet-ic quality that Luxemburg gains in her imagery, often over saturated due to the colour tempera-ture of the lights at night. This is something I could choose to do straight in camera or during post pro-duction in a non-linear editing software suite such as Adobe Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro.

I n s P I r e D e D I t s

This original image taken at Undertone in Cardiff is a still from the video piece.

I wish to explore the things that people leave behind or in this case bring along to the venue before it begins. Here is the bands equipment while setting up, this includes amplifiers, clothing and merchan-dise which the bands use to make a living.

The original image is shot using the Technicolour Cinestyle picture style which allows maximum dy-namic range in the shadows, this is helpful for me as the videographer to show what lies underneath and what is often overlooked.

The main inspiration on the edit I intend to do to this image is to replicate David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. This image tells a lot about the people who are in attendance at the venue, their presence is obvious. The moving image will be cropped to a 2.55:1 ratio widescreen image to thoroughly focus the attention on the belongings. There is a noticeable flickering flourescent bulb in the background, this gives the moving image a glimpse of presence.

e r a s e r H e a D e D I t

The first of the inspired edits is for David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’. Although the film is completely mono-chrome in aesthetic, it has a depth of narrative through the colour and the story is saturated despite the black and white.

My edit appears to be too blown out in the level of the highlights compared to the look of Eraserhead, this is something I will fix before the final edit of the short film as well as adding the 2.55:1 widescreen bars.

l U X e M B U r G e D I tAnalysing one of Luxemburg’s images, the viewer will be overcome with the saturation and hues that

she has managed to achieve in her large negatives.

To recreate this digitally in stills or moving image I will need to do one of a few things. Firstly I will need to change the white balance of the image/video correcting the whites to the same colour temperature to that of fluorescent tube lighting or street lamps. Secondly a tint needs to be applied to accent tones in the image, balancing the image to be yellow primarily and then adding a green tint to the shadows.

The shot opposite is a stairway I encountered in Cardiff at a venue named Bogiez (formally known as Cardiff Barfly). This is the back entrance to the venue for bands only, immediately as I walked down the stairs I could feel the history of the venue soaked into the decaying concrete steps I was walking down from the many bands who had headlined previously. I felt that this image needed to be edited in the Rut Blees Luxemburg style as there is an obviousness in the presence of the people who have been there although we cannot see their essence, only motifs they have left behind with the graffiti and stickers.