Finished film link.

Tearing Pages.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U6Y4jwFXF4

Personal Project Presentation.

For my personal project i had the idea of doing a 5 minute film on the subject of the uncanny again, as i found the subject interesting and i wanted to have a go at putting together my own take on the genre. I had the idea for a woman who's life is taken over by an exact double of herself, which fits exactly into the uncanny genre. 

Below is a copy of the powerpoint that i used to present my idea, backed up by the notes that i used to present with.

Doppelganger

Notes for Presentation.

The idea, i propose to make a short film, the film will be based on the idea of somebody having a doppelganger that takes over their life, slowly pushing them out. During this film i will  be using for one of the sequences a small purpose built set, and i will be using a visual effect and a special effect.

There will be a plot twist at the end of the film that makes the viewer question who was in fact the original, or indeed whether the character the audience has been following was a figment of the supposed characters imagination. 

The ending will be bittersweet, as the character in the beginning seems to have lost interest in life, this is juxtaposed by the doppelganger, who is a more attractive version of the character, this character is more confident and better presented.

The inspiration for my work comes from a little known psychological disorder called depersonalisation, the sufferer becomes disconnected from their sense of self, creating the feeling of watching themselves going through the motions of life.

Character Breif, on slide.

Scene 1. The character is in an art gallery, the camera is on a track, from one end of the art gallery to the other, the camera glides by as the character walks through the installations, and exits the door on the other side.

Mise en scene: The paintings in the gallery appear to be all of doubles or twins, the character is dressed in plain clothes and carrying a grey overcoat. She is the only one in the gallery

Lighting: The lighting is bright and clinical, creating a sense of unease in the room

Sound: Diegetic sound only of the woman walking through the gallery, this coupled with the lighting and mise en scene should create a feeling of suspense and mystery.

The acting: The character walks through the gallery in an almost ghost like way, not really looking as though she is taking anything in, this scene lasts 2 minutes so the audience can really grasp the body language of the character and get a feel for her personality.

Scene 2. The character walks into a laundrette goes in and has a short conversation with the man who works behind the counter, the man is adamant that she has already picked up her clothes earlier in the day, this causes confusion within the character and she becomes distressed and leaves.

Camera: The camera watches from outside at first while she goes into the shop, until this point we have not heard the character speak. The camera then cuts to a mid shot of character A and follows the conversation in shot reverse shot.

Lighting: The lighting again is clinical and bright, furthers the sense of unease within the film.

Mise en scene: I want to convey the theme of doubles within this scene, i will have two plants on either side of the set using two cashier tills on either side of the counter, between this is the main character. The shot seems eerily organised with zip up clothing bags on a rail behind visible.

Acting: The character gets disgruntled and leaves the shop.

Scene 3. Dream sequence:
The character is now at home in bed, this is where my installation will come in, the following sequence will be a dream sequence, it will show the character late at night in bed, flashing shots of a white room, then the character enters the dream state.

The concept for this dream sequence will be the main character in a white room looking into a mirror, within the mirror is character B, the doppelganger, looking blankly at character A. Character B starts to smile and to climb out of the mirror trying to grab at character A. Character A blinks hard an looks back at the mirror which now holds no reflection, starts to turn and walk to the end of the room, but character B has climbed out of the mirror, character A sits in a corner, the scene ends with her breaking out into a cold sweat.

How i will create this sequence.
Camera:  Shot 1. The camera will sit on an angle capturing both the characters, the one in the mirror and the one in the white installation.

Cuts to a CU of the mirror, character b creepily looks back at character a's face, and begins to look around the mirror for a way to climb out, the camera then reverses back to its original point, with both characters in the shot the character begins to climb out.

Cuts to a MS of the character a against a white background seemingly frozen with terror, she then moves back and tries to find a way out of the white room, she then eventually consoles to huddle in the corner.

The scene ends.

Mise en scene: White walls, white mirror, above a white bathroom sink, the character is wearing a white dressing gown.


Special effects and visual effects.

For the mirror i will use green screen on a wall behind so i can composite the footage i have already shot of character B climbing out of the mirror
For the first shot i will pin up the green screen to the actual mirror so there is no gap behind, this will help the mirror to look more realistic, when the camera goes from the close up of the character A to the second shot, there will be a gap between the green screen and the mirror, so the mirror  will become a hole in the wall with green screen behind for the character to come through, i will be editing on after effects for full control of chroma keying.

Lighting: For the lighting of the scene i want the room to be very bright and clean, following the theme from the previous scenes which are clinical and sterile. The room will be lit so there is no shadow cast from the character, this will be one of my special effects, i will use multiple lights including a lit floor to achieve this.

Evaluation

Evaluation                             

Throughout the major project for this module I feel I have learnt a lot of new skills, I have never composited green screen on after effects before, or built a set, so I feel the skills I have learnt on this module will be very helpful to me in my final year.The initial realisation and idea for the project was all based around the theme of the ‘uncanny’, I was working in a group with Kyle an Sian, initially we decided that we would all go away and do our own research and have a group meeting to discuss ideas. I researched into various authors who had written work under the theme of the uncanny, which immediately gave me the idea to use literature as a theme for our piece, I didn’t really want to overcomplicate the idea too much as I knew we only had two minutes of running time, so we decided to create a mood map of ideas relating to this. We came up with a few special effects that we wanted to use within the piece, one of them was using shadows to represent Kafka’s metamorphosis, we wanted our actors shadow to start growing legs and wings like an insect, and it would appear on the wall, we didn’t end up using this effect in the final piece but it’s a good example of the stages that our final piece went through before becoming a finished product.

Our other main idea was one that we ended up following through to the final project that would incorporate a visual effect and a special effect, this wasn’t necessarily linked to our literature idea, but we wanted to have the main character going through a wall, to discover himself on the other side looking back through the hole at himself. The way that we actually did this was to use a piece of installation wall that already had a pre-cut window in it, we bought a separate piece of mount board that was big enough to cover the window, and we nailed it to the back of the installation wall so that it wasn’t visible from the front. The idea with this is that the hole from the front of the installation would be completely covered in wallpaper and it would be unnoticeable that there was anything behind. We then planned to put a separate piece of installation wall that was covered in green fabric, about two metres behind the back of the first wall parallel to it. When the first wall had been broken through the camera would be able to position itself at an angle where you could only see the green screen, allowing us to composite any image we liked, creating a through the keyhole effect.

I feel this method worked well but something that would have made it more effective would have been if we had managed to execute our original idea for the hole, which was to create a tunnel just behind the hole to create the illusion of the wall being thicker and thus being more realistic. Our second part of this special effect came later and was very true to our original theme, we decided we needed a filler between the wallpaper and the hole as when the character tore through it would be very obvious on camera that it was just a piece of wood not the breeze blocks or insulation you might expect. We used non fibre glass insulation spray for around the hole to create something thicker to tear at, then before it was dry we filled the hole full of torn pages from books. So when the character tore at the wallpaper he would have to tear out pages and pages to see through to the other wall. This I feel looked really effective on camera, and was one of our strongest points within the piece. It was supposed to be a metaphor for books transporting you to another world, I feel that possibly this didn’t come across as the piece was only two minutes long but I really enjoyed this initial phase of building the set, I really feel like we pushed ourselves to get this done in time and attempted something quite difficult to do without over-facing ourselves.

Once we had built this initial effect into the set we could start dressing it, we bought an embossed wallpaper as we thought this would lend to the old rustic feel of the set, this set was supposed to be that of an older males drawing room/ living room, where he might read or write novels. For the wallpaper we decided it was too white so we brainstormed ways to make it a little bit more dingy, we came up with the idea of using coffee granules and water and using a sponge or brush to spread it around, this had such an amazing effect on the walls, it looked like the walls were wet with mould and damp, we even soaked tissue in the coffee mixture and just threw them at the wall for them to stick, which was also very effective. A personal inspiration of mine when dressing the set was from a ‘Coen brothers’ film, ‘Barton Fink’ during the film the hotel room in which the character stays in is quite dingy, he is also a writer so he sits at his desk with a picture above, the room felt quite oppressive and isolated which is what we wanted to convey with this set. We decorated the set with antique pictures and built our own table using some of the storage boxes and a piece of fabric, we created a wilting bunch of flowers in a vase by taking some old faux flowers and bending them downwards and then gaffa taping them to an ornate candle stick holder that we found. I really enjoyed being this creative and solving problems that arose in this way, I feel that creating an aesthetic is something that I am quite competent at and this module gave me an excuse to use my creative side more.

While filming the piece I feel this is where the cracks started to form for the project, we were all so happy with the set and it had become so overcomplicated that we almost neglected the fact that we were going to have to film in it. I had drawn up a story board for the piece and it was too long so I kept cutting things out and trying to make sure we still had time to light our set which brings me to our second visual effect. We still had a visual effect that involved shadow’s to go on, we intended to have a moving shadow on the wall of a window frame, this was supposed to mimic what happens when a car goes past a window, this was intended to give the illusion that the set was bigger than it was. I feel that this effect was quite experimental as none of us had worked with shadows before, and we hadn’t seen any other films with this kind of effect in. We used a cardboard piece with a small cut out of a window and then used a spotlight behind. I feel that this attempt was unsuccessful, but had the potential to have worked nicely if we had of practised the technique beforehand but we didn’t have a chance to get into the studio to do so.

Our final special effect was the green screen, in the story board I planned for the camera to be in a position to maximise the effect of the green screen, due to time restraints I think these shots suffered, but during the edit after quite a lot of tweaking it started to work, on of our downfalls was that because we had used slightly off green insulation spray inside the wall, it was interfering with the green screen when we got round to edit. I put the clips into a sequence in final cut and we extracted the clips that needed to be put into after effects.

Here are some photo’s I took in the initial stages of the edit.

Using after effects to chroma key the green screen.

Learning to use after effects in a seminar.

Putting the images into a sequence in final cut.

When we got into after effects with the green screen we started by opening up the chroma key option, and turning the green to red so that we could see where our problem areas were going to be, we started by using the on screen ‘dropper’ to try and match the green areas that had not been included, we then used the spill suppressor to correct any more areas that we had missed, we were at an advantage as we were using a static shot, and as you can see in the photo above we practiced on another groups project, whose image was not static. This proved very difficult to do as we had thought it would be, in retrospect it might have been quite an interesting challenge to use a moving shot but for this module I’m glad that we didn’t. We pulled in a static image from google of a library, we then put this into the green screen, but this didn’t seem like enough so Kyle filmed himself in a green morph suit and threw some pages from a book around for us to overlay on top. The result of this method was quite uncanny in itself, as it looked as though the pages had a life force of their own, it was a bit of a interesting end to our piece, not one that we had planned to the failure of using the shot with the character looking back at himself. We had toyed around with the idea of compositing on top of the picture frames, we weren’t sure if we were going to have time to do this but as the green screen part of our piece didn’t take as long as we had expected we decided to use this method. Kyle and Sian filmed themselves as portraits, and composited this onto the picture frames, I feel this added a little more depth to the project. I think we really pushed our abilities with this piece and I am more confident in my artistic abilities, I feel we worked really well as a team it was a nice change to work with two students that I hadn’t worked with before.

Academic resources I used were Freud’s essay on the uncanny, I feel this was useful to me as it outlined some of the key concepts of the genre, and helped us build our story around these concepts and kept us inline while we were coming up with our intial idea, while I was building the set I was also reading the sandman, this text was suggested to us during lesson time but I found reading through some of the chapters really helped me engage with the module as it was helpful to get a feel for the uncanny genre and some of the plot developments that could occur, and how the use of metaphor affected the plot.

I really enjoyed this project I found it a challenge but I found that the texts given were interesting and captivating, it was different but I feel I found my strength lied in the initial concept for the idea and the set building rather than the after effects part of the module.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTBrOePe0dc This is a youtube tutorial that I used to brush up on my green screen knowledge after the seminar.

Bibliography.

Freud, S. (1919). The ‘Uncanny’. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 

E.T.A Hoffman (1816). The sandman. Germany: N/A. N/A.

Personal Project Inspiration and Research.

The Shining, directed by Stanley Kubrick influenced my quite a lot during the project, the theme of doubles, and symetry that runs through his film is not overly obvious but when read as a filmic text become apparent, i like the use of diegetic sound within the piece, and i feel the film has some uncanny qualities too, such as the character becoming like Mr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, the theme of doubles becomes apparent in the image i have below that takes place at the beginning of the film. Another thing that i liked about this film is the use of diegetic sound and movement used in conjunction to create suspense and tension. This is something i would think about using in my own film.

Vertigo a film by Alfred Hitchcock features the main protagonist Madeline, who then fakes her death and comes back as her actual self Judy. During one memorable scene the bedroom is bathed in green light, Madeline is supposed to be dead but Scotty is still obsessed by her, he aims to turn Judy into Madeline, and as she steps out of the bathroom lit up by green, it looks like a ghost has returned from the dead, this really fits in with the theme of the doppelganger, and is largely uncanny for the viewer and the male protagonist. I was inspired by this film because of the way it is so cleverly constructed, the narrative has such interesting plot developments and cliff hangers. One of the key things again with this film is Hitchcock's masterful use of suspense, letting the audience know that Madeline isn't dead, while the main protagonist remains in the dark about it, builds so much suspense within the second half of the film.

Meshes of the Afternoon, a film by Maya Deryn. The film follows a disjointed narrative, Maya Deryn stars in the film and throughout the narrative it becomes unclear which character is real, as the character keeps going around in circles in the house but ending up next to herself sleeping on the sofa. The film is again t extremely uncanny, the shots take you out onto a beach and into a banquet dinner table with no warning, the character seems to have no soul at one point during the house montage, as Maya Deryn holds up a knife to herself presumably trying to kill herself, or another that looks like her.

Fight Club, during this film it becomes apparent that the main characters best friend and fight club partner, is just a figment of his imagination, its a projection of his ego, that wanted to be cooler. This is revealed as a twist at the end, this is definitely an inspiration as i think this made me address some of the more philosophical questions within my own film.

The filming. 

During the filming of our piece we had a few problems, we had difficulty with the lighting of the project, as we had not been able to practice the lighting it proved more difficult to properly light the set in the small space we had, as the group next to us had extended their set much larger than we could have anticipated while building our own set. 

We had briefed our cinematographers of the lighting requirements and the shot list, but unfortunately the time frame that we were allocated us did not give us enough time to organise a shooting rota between them. We started filming our close up's early as possible while the other group was filming to get ahead, so we could practice our shadow sequence, but unfortunately we didn't get all of our allocated time and we were left with only 10 minutes to get the shot with the character going through the wall. I switched onto camera as i wasn't sure if we were going to be able to finish the sequence. 

Our cinematographers were very helpful as they lit the set to my specifications and had a good input with the positioning of the camera, as one of the shots on my story board became impossible to realise so they were able to help me change the angle and in this instance it really lent to the overall aesthetic. While filming we got some really good shots, but we also had difficulty with some of them as we had to film so quickly we had a few continuity errors. But i'm not worrying too much as we aren't being assessed on this, our shadow shot fell pray to our lack of time, we managed to successfully do the shot in practice, but when we got round to actually filming one of the lights had been moved and we were unable to re position.

 We resolved to give this a go in post and we will be filming on green screen at a later date. For our main shot and our main special effect we were breaking through the wall to reveal green screen on the other side. We ended up doing this in two different ways, we shot the whole thing with just the green screen, and one from point of view with Kyle physically on the other side of the wall so we have a bit of variation when we come to edit and we can see what works best. On the whole i think the filming went quite well given the fact that we were cut short, but i would have liked to have had more time as after building the set we were extremely proud and would have liked to put it on our portfolio.

Kyle striking a pose, an example of the lighting.

Mike Dalton positioning the lights.

Cinematographer's doing a great job with the lighting and camera.

Mike Dalton overseeing the lights, Kyle Piercy getting into position. 

More photographs.

These are some photographs of our finished set, as you can see the coffee stained wall effect worked really well for us, and we acquired some really good props from a local second hand store that really help finish the rooms aesthetic. After wallpapering over the hole in the wall you can barely tell it is there which is exactly what we hoped we could achieve, we hope that when viewing the piece for the first time the audience won't expect the character to go through the wall at all. The flowers on the table were salvaged from the university stores and are shoved into a candle holder to give the appearance of a wilted bouquet of flowers. The table is made from two boxes on top of each other, covered in a piece of material we found in the university stores also. Using the university props that were made available in this way helped us cut the cost of our piece significantly. Our total cost of materials works out at about £60.00 which is way above budget but split between three of us works out at £20 pound each. 

Photographs of our practical project

This is the technique we used to stain the wallpaper to achieve the decayed effect, we used coffee granules mixed with water and chocolate powder, we mixed this into a paste and used a sponge to create an overall colour and then added detail with the brushes.

This is a photograph of our group getting ready to wallpaper the third wall

During the lesson i drilled a hole in the piece of wood we bought for the installation, we nailed it onto the back of the wall with the window in, and taped bin bags around it ready for,