BIOGRAPHIES - CONTINUED

The result of my research on Michel Gondry will be a video where I am trying to incorporate some of the most common subjects on his work - Dream vs Reality, Time vs Space - by the use of basic editing, camera movements and acting tricks

I wanted to play with reverse mode, so that the notion of time and space would be affected, since the video starts with its end and develops towards its beginning. But then something happens and when the spectator is feeling comfortable with the reverse mode it is then confronted with a 'reality' situation bringing up the question of what is reality, what is dream. Was she dreaming or is she dreaming right now? Where is the point when dream becomes reality or vice-versa?

Well, the answer is still to come! :)

But to see how it would all work I shot a test and this is the result:

reverie from Mariana Lopes on Vimeo.

There are some improvements that need to take place, and I looked for some references that could help me to improve.

On the reverse mode there's this Pharcyde's music video by Spike Jonze:

and also this one for Cibo Mato by Michel Gondry that I mentioned before.

and for the real vs surreal aspect of the video, Pete suggested "A Matter of Life and Death" by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which uses Black and White vs Colour and Freezing vs Moving to show the differences between the two worlds and between the characters that belong to different dimensions. I selected a passage that shows both aspects being used:

To sum up, the choice of working with video is a challenge for me because since college (1997-2000) I didn't produce, or edit or direct any kind of moving image piece. Since then my focus was on printed graphic design and now that my aim is to introduce movement into my work, I thought that revisiting the basics elements of moving image would be a good starting point.

Reverie ii from Mariana Lopes on Vimeo.

DESIGN FOR THE SMALL SCREEN

The Brief:

Propose, design and make either an animated ringtone or a clock for the Apple iPhone.

Colors have a very important meaning in people's life. They can effect or represent their feelings and behavior.

As day goes by the light changes and consequently the colours. You look through the window and can tell if it's early morning or late afternoon without looking at the clock.

In 1983, Peter Saville, created a colour coded alphabet for the cover of New Order's Power Corruption And Lies, which he combined to a 19th century Fantin-Latour flower painting he had spotted as a postcard in the National Gallery shop.

Apparently the code translation means: FACT 75 which is the number of that release on the Factory's label

My proposal for this project is to create a colour coding to represent the time.

The basic color wheel made out of the 3 basic process colours (yellow, cyan and magenta) has 12 different colours (primary, secondary/complementary, tertiary) and I will use those colours to represent each hour, starting from yellow being noon - because noon is the brightest hour of the day as well as yellow in the colour wheel.

This is the first sketch and thoughts

It will consist of 3 wheels: the center one representing the hours, one level out is the minute's area and the outer wheel, the seconds. This one will have just one colour that will follow the minute's one. It will take one minute to complete each circle and after 5 rotations it changes colour - so as the minute.

The idea is to have two different 'clocks'. The standard version will allow you to get familiarized with the concept of having the colours meaning the time. 

Once you are used to identify the colours and the time you can then go for the advanced mode, where the circle does not exist anymore and all you have are bars of colours. 

The bigger one representing the hour - this one will have just one colour - which is the same one that represents that certain time on the standard mode.

The middle bar is the minutes and follows the same colour coding as on the standard version, changing colour every 5 minutes.

The smallest one shows the seconds and it has the same colour as the minute's bar and changes colour as the minute's bar does.

The fun part is that on the advanced mode you can interact and play with the bars. By touching the screen you can arrange then as you like and make your own design.

Let's see how it works! 

(For presentation purposes the clock is speeded up)

the time wheel from Mariana Lopes on Vimeo.

by the way...

during my research for the next project I came across this lovely music video. a very simple idea with a good narrative. enjoy!

BIOGRAPHIES - Research in Practice

MICHEL GONDRY

Very simply: He's an artist that expresses himself mostly through moving image combining video and film with arts and crafts.

I am going to start with a quick overview of his life and work and then I want to focus on his movie making aspects, which, I think is where he puts a lot of himself, including his life experiences, emotions, way of seeing the world and most important, his way of creating narratives. 

Born in Versailles, France, he was good at drawing from a very young age. His interest for animation also comes from this time. At the age of 12, he and his cousin built a prototype cartoon machine, something similar to a zoetrope. And they also made lots of flipbooks.

"When people know you can draw they ask you to draw different things (...). If you're good at drawing you have a social role, however young you are." 

At the same age he was also interested in photography "I was hiding from reality, I took pictures of one girl over and over. I was not even dating her, although I wish I was. She ended up dating my older brother"

And later on this becomes the subject of his first short movie:

His grandfather was an inventor and created one of the first keyboards, called Clavioline. His father owned a musical instruments shop and his mother was a pianist. His father gave him a drum kit and to his brother a guitar. They formed a couple of bands that used to play Punk Rock and when Michel Gondry left Versailles to go to an Art School in Paris, he formed the band Oui Oui with friends from the college. This is how he got into music, but also how he got into video.

He had experienced playing with his father's Super 8 camera and had made some animations with his flipbooks, but it was during college when sharing an apartment with a guy who owned a 16mm camera that he started making some animations for his band's music videos.

This is his very first music video

and another lovely piece of stop-motion animation, also for Oui Oui

And making videos for his band was how Bjork got to know him, and this was the beginning of an amazing music-video's director career.

Michel Gondry has a repertory of work that goes from drawings to comercial videos, from music videos to featured movies and short films. He is known to have a child- like creativity and out-of-control imagination and considered by many as a genius.

On this Chemical Brother's one, the way he translates the music into images is, for me, genial!

Dreaminess, surrealism, humor are achieved by the use of low-tech or non-digital means like stop-motion animation, camera movements and editing tricks. 

Gondry plays very well with the notion of time and space and with quotidian facts which brings the characters on his videos and specially on his movies to a very friendly level, putting them very close to the spectator.

CGI are often not obviously noticeable and when used it's mixed with real images. And it's clear that even though his work is visually very rich it will never weight more than the narrative or the content of his work.

He was the first one to use the 'bullet time' effect on this video for Bjork in 1995:

And was after shooting another video for Bjork that Gondry felt he wanted to move on to work with film and the big screen.

His movies are still marked with most of the characteristics of his videos. But working with movies he can explore the characters deeply, bringing the spectator into their minds, their dreams... he tells real stories, very often linked to his own experiences, but always questioning what's real what's fantasy.

Since then he directed 4 featured movies 

Human Nature (2001)

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

The Science of Sleep (2005)

Be Kind Rewind (2008)

and 1 documentary

Dave Chappelle's Block Party

source

Director-file

The Guardian

IMDb

The NY Times

The Work of Director Michel Gondry - DVD

+ hours and hours of fun on youtube

DIGITAL DIALOGUES

TYPE IN MOTION

Here I'm going to keep things simple because in the real world it wasn't very simple to achieve the final outcome, which I don't consider totally concluded yet and will definitely improve it in the very near future.

First challenge was to choose one piece of dialogue. After watching hundreds of interviews and showing them to the group I chose one that, in my point of view was funny and clever. (A bit too neutral though which I realised during the process).

The first idea was to have a head on screen where I would represent him as the brain and her as the mouth because it's clear that she's not quite understanding what's going on and doesn't really get the joke until the end of the interview.

After some feedback the idea changed  a bit and then I would just play with the interviewer's talking and thoughts, which changed again, when I realised that the silent bits were as important as the dialogue itself. And if I used the silent moments to try and express what she was thinking, it could distract and overload the spectator with inexistent information. I should then have nothing on screen to reinforce that she has nothing to say.

I used chalk on blackboard because it's quite childish and innocent and also reminded me of jokes we used to do in school when I was teenager. Also producing my own type-faces was good fun.

The blackboard itself didn't really work well unless I had used stop-motion animation, but one of the aims was to get to know After Effects and use it for this project. I adapted the style so I could digitalise the images, create photoshop files and animate it using the software.

Storyboarding was essential to keep me on track and organised, and with a wide overview of the project and it really helped when I had to cut some parts. Though it's a very simple one, in there I had all the information I needed: times, sound and what's on screen and where and when.

This is the final (to be revisited) outcome:

As promised, I revisited this project using a more apropriate and seductive technique: Stop Motion animation. It's only 7 seconds long, but it works so much better than the last version! It's now more tangible, we can feel the textures and the type interacting with the background.

Leonard Cohen from Mariana Lopes on Vimeo.

SCRATCH FILM ANIMATION

Develop a sequence exploring the possibilities of working directly onto 16mm film - scratching, drawing, experimenting...

I got the number 6 and my sequence then should be something related to this number.

I started my sequence drawing on a clear film, showing how 'six' is spelt in different languages then a geometrical shape with six sides and then a quick story: 

the world was created in six days (according to the bible) and then it was dominated and destroyed by the devil (666). A bit dark I suppose, but the idea of 666 -  the number of the beast - was the first thing to come up to my mind, then I thought about this little story. For this last part I scratched onto a black film, removing the black layer and colouring the cleared areas.

This project really tested my patience and coordination because it's not easy to work on an area of approximately 11mm x 7mm !

We all know that one second has 25 frames, but how long is one frame? Is it long enough? This process made me realise the duration of one single frame and the importance of it in a whole. Apart from this, timing and rhythm were once again important and definitely these are some of the key concepts when producing any piece of moving image.

The sound track was accidentally created and fits well. ;)

6 days from Mariana Lopes on Vimeo.

WORDPLAY PT.2

For this part of the project we (because now we're working in groups) should animate one or more of the words we have worked on before.

Collapse (me)

Inject (Gitana)

Crash (Gavin)

Once again we need to reinforce the meaning by its behaviour, but now using a traditional animation method - stop frame animation - by taking pictures and editing them or by using the Rostrum Camera plus the software Istopmotion (that kind of do the editing for you plus some other helpful features).

Once again we could only use Helvetica as a type face but we could use it in any format.

We decided to use the three words and tell a story that would be the interaction between them. After a few sketches we agreed on the sequence and prepared the storyboard.

After a few attempts with different styles and with Pete's advice we decided on a: 'cutting out-drawing-filling in-rubbing out-paper-scissors-rubber and bluetac' style.

I am glad we opted for this style as well as for the use of the Rostrum camera. It took us time and patience but was a good fun and really satisfying.

This project made me realise the importance of storyboarding and planning as well as the notion of time and rhythm.

The only evidence of the storyboard is this pre-story board sketch we've done. The actual one I think was thrown away in the middle of the other pieces of paper and rubbish :(

And this is the result:

Untitled from Mariana Lopes on Vimeo.

WORDPLAY PT 1

Reinforce the meaning of one word by just using type, layout and composition.


Collapse. (noun) an instance or structure falling down or in.
a sudden failure of an institution or undertaking.
a physical or mental breakdown.


For me I could visualize something steady, stable, well-built (or believed to be) that suddenly breaks, losses its stability, falls. An ideal, a project, a building, a relationship. Something that unexpectedly loses control, slips through your fingers and becomes nothing but a pile of unrecognizable pieces.


When I first tried to represent those 'qualities' by just using the word, after some attempts I realize that visually my sketches were falling into a different meaning, basically those drawings would fit more to the word "Fall" then to "Collapse". I had to try harder.
I ended up with a layout that according to my own definition was 'about to collapse' and still it wasn't representing or reinforcing the meaning accurately because a collapse isn't something that is going to happen, it is either happening or had already happened. So to reinforce its meaning the Collapse should be collapsing, falling into pieces. - Yeah, now I thing I got it!





With the sequence poster this representation would be easier. 30 different images and the whole action would be there. From a stable object to a pile of unrecognizable pieces.


Well, it wasn't on the briefing but after having all those images and the whole sequence in front of me, the temptation of editing it and giving it some life was stronger than me.

here I am

sharing thoughts, inspiration, art, design and movement...

welcome to the digital side of me :)