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, 

Shot List

Shot 1

The first shot is of Kyle pacing around next to the blank wall that he will be breaking through, this is for the green screen so he needs to pace quite fast and then he will bend down and look through to where the hole is going to be.This shot needs to be done before we rip off the wallpaper the lighting for that needs to be a little brighter than when we are filming the whole set just so it is easier to see.  

Shot 1

Shot 2 

This shot is actually be the opening scene, its a long shot, inclusive of the whole set you can see a figure sat at the desk. Lighting is dark, but a few areas on the wall will be accentuated. We are using a large cardboard piece with a window shape cut out in conjunction with one of the small lights and we will be holding it in place and creating a shadow effect of a window on the wall that will illuminate the figure.

Shot 3

The lights have been brought up slightly with accentuated points on the wall around the shelf and where the hole is going to be on the wall. Shot 3 is a medium shot from behind the figure at the desk, with some of the photo frames just in the shot, the character looks up at the photo frames.

Cut to a medium close up of the photographs, which we will be com-positing on later so they need to be moderately lit.

Shot 3 and CU

Shot 4.

It cuts back out to a medium shot of the character getting up from the desk, and leaning towards the wall where the hole is going to be, he starts to listen to the wall, we can put a close up in at this point if we feel we have time. he starts to claw away at the wallpaper. Any shots while he is getting through the wall can be either close ups or medium close ups depending on how much of this hole you can see as obviously we have wallpapered over so we don’t know what will look best.

Shot 4

Shot 5.

Close up of the hole after it has been broken through, looking through onto the green screen that will 

be behind on the back board. its a point of view shot so the shot before will have to end on Kyle looking through the hole.

Shot 5

Shot 6

Shot 6 is a long shot of the set again showing the character looking through the hole, ideally i would like to end the scene with the lights going down and the character being left in total darkness.

Shot 6

Materials Bought

Above are the materials we will be using for the shadow element, we had the idea to put the wings of the raven on with paper fasteners so that we can move them, as we feel this will be more realistic. 

Inspiration

The Raven

The inspiration for our piece comes from literature, after reading Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven' i would consider this to be an uncanny poem, because a Raven comes to a mans chamber door, and starts to speak, the man perceives the raven as having human like or even demonic qualities. Although the Raven in the poem i'm sure is metaphorical, it still resonates with our theme. I like that in the poem the man is haunted by his own troubles which he picks out without the raven having to say few more words than "Nevermore". For our creative project we would like to depict our main character being haunted by himself, as he peels away the wallpaper to look in on himself, the room depicts his own state of mind, which is why i feel this poem is relevant as i feel Edgar Allen Poe's characters encounter with the Raven also depicts this.

Metamorphosis
The work of Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis, is also of inspiration as the main character has been transformed into a creature of disgust, usually interpreted as an insect, The concept for the novel is Uncanny in the way that the creature is not human, but was a human, it cannot communicate to others, but it can hear conversations and feel and think still. Metamorphosis is an inspiration to our work because again the main character is in considerable emotional pain, he is struggling with his identity, and i want to show this in our character for the creative project. I wanted to reference metamorphosis in one of our visual effects, i want to use shadows on the wall to turn our main character into the insect from metamorphosis. I will also reference 'The Raven' this way. 


Other Reading:

Possum

Other works i have researched and read for this module include, 'Possum' by Matthew Holness, I enjoyed reading this as i thought it was a good example of Uncanny literature, the main character seemed to manifest some of his childhood traumas in a dead possum that he has engineered mechanically so that it moves, the main character believes that it is alive, and it is unclear to the reader whether this is so. The main character has brought the possum to his old home town to dispose of it for good, suggesting that he is ready to let go of some of his hurtful memories, but he struggles to get rid of the Possum, he meets an old friend, i wasn't sure whether the old friend was a figment of his imagination. The story was useful in outlining some of the trademark uncanny motifs, such as ambiguity in whether and object is alive or dead.

The Yellow Wallpaper
The 'Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is not strictly of the Uncanny genre, but i feel like the isolation and the fact that the character deteriorates into psychosis confined in one room, is relevant to our creative project, the book is now thought to represent a stand to typical mental health treatments available to women at the time, 'the rest cure' was popular at this time, which condemned women to only two hours of mental stimulation a day, these were common treatments for anything from mild depression or bouts of 'hysteria' that women were commonly diagnosed with at the time.
The book serves as inspiration for the installation, we want the wallpaper in our installation to reflect the wallpaper described in the book, as wallpaper you could get lost looking at.

Shopping List

• Paint
• Wallpaper
• Curtains
• Carpet
• Small desk or table
• Shelving unit
• Bin Bags
• Paper/ Books
• Card 
• Wire
• Paper Mulsh
• Vaseline
• Large piece of thin wood, approx 50 mm thick

500 words.

On a dark street, inside a dark house there is a man sitting at his desk, a car goes past on the road outside, the light outside startles the man, he looks around and up to his wall, he is a man of meagre proportions, dressed in black he is trying to camouflage himself into the night, the very thought of others outside makes him shudder. He studies the paintings on his wall, he is a delusional man, he looks hard into the frame and when he see's a man and a woman looking back at him, he thinks to himself that they have never seemed so lifelike, he could almost see them moving with gentle inhalation. Which explains his lack of surprise when they begin to survey the room, he wonders what they are looking for and he gets up to search. The lights flicker an burn like as if by candlelight, but the only light is from the warm glow of the street lamp outside, The ornaments on the shelf glisten golden, artifacts from what seems like lifetimes ago, gathering dust that has become heavy and dark, the clocks are stopped, and have been for several hours, He goes to the wall, the walls are damp, but he has never noticed the stains upon them due to his penchant for the darkness, the walls have grown dark with mold.  He starts to listen to it feeling it with his worn and unkempt hands, He listens again and stands back, observes the wall and looks around to check nobody is watching him. He starts to peel the wallpaper from the wall, slowly at first but then he becomes erratic tearing at the wallpaper with fervor. He begins to pull pages from within the walls throwing them to the ground not stopping for a second to question, is he asleep? has he finally lost his mind like he has so often thought to himself on nights such as these? He breaks through the wall, he stoops his whole body to glimpse what is on the other side. He see's himself looking through the hole, gazing into his own eyes he seems to be untouched, transfixed by the image of himself, he stays quiet and still.

Second Meeting

By our second meeting we had done our mood boards in lesson time and already thrown some scene ideas around, i liked the idea of having a man going through the wall, we had the idea of having the main character scraping away at the wallpaper, and having words behind it to reflect our literature theme.


 We then built on this idea by figuring out what would be the wallpaper, we wanted to have the man looking through the hole at himself, to reflect our characters deteriorating mind. I had an idea in mind for the opening shot, i wanted to show that there was a window in the room, but that he doesn't seem to see it, i wanted to have the shadow of the window illuminating him looking at the wallpaper, as if a car is going past and the shadow moves across the wall, also showing that there is life and movement outside. 


We played around with the idea of using a prosthetic heart for the end scene just because we wanted to use prosthetics, but we decided against this as we thought it would be too much to take on with all of the shadow work as well and we had to concentrate on figuring out how to use green screen in our piece.


For the green screen initially we were going to use green screen inside the hole in the wall, but we decided that it would be better to create this as a special effect, we are still unsure of how to use green screen, we may create an entire wall with green screen as a background. 

Mood Boards

This is my first mood board, Our theme is the Uncanny, our aim is to create a two minute piece that experiments with a visual effect, a special effect and use of green screen. Our idea takes inspiration from the uncanny in literature, we chose Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Raven' and Franz Kafka's 'Metamorphosis' . Both pieces feature animals that take on human characteristics. We wanted to represent the animals in shadow form on the wall, this will be our special effect. 

My mood board reflects some of my ideas, for the shadows, I feel like this is going to be a challenge creating the shapes and having the right lighting, but i feel that learning this technique will benefit me in future projects as it can be quite effective.

 On my mood board also is some samples of old fashioned wallpaper, we wanted to go with a gothic decaying feel for our installation, we thought that it might be a bit generic for the theme of uncanny, but we just thought more than anything that it would be fun to do as so much of the work we do is extremely concerned with being perfect and polished and its nice to experiment.

This is my second mood board, i created this using pictures from my first mood board to see how some of the wallpaper textures would look on the installation wall, i also put a few of the ravens in to see how they would look. Because the main focus of our film is the main character pulling the wallpaper off and clawing through a hole to see his alter ego i also displayed this using the photoshop skills i learnt in lesson time. I think this works quite effectively and it has really helped me gain a clearer picture of how i want the installation to look, i have never used this technique before but i am very pleased with the results.

Freud on 'The Uncanny'

Freud's essay on the 'Uncanny', is an elaboration of the work of Ernst Jentsch, who describes the uncanny as a feeling that creates unfamiliarity in a situation, it is the product of "intellectual uncertainty" his examples include the use of life like objects, like a doll where the human mind attributes character to the object because it looks similar to a human but because the mind is used to seeing a human and the doll lacks many of the qualities that a human possess's such as animation and a brain, it creates an uncanny feeling. He explains the use of the 'uncanny'  focusing predominantly in literature, "In telling a story one of the most successful devices for easily creating uncanny effects is to leave the reader in uncertainty whether a particular figure in the story is a human being or an automaton and to do it in such a way that his attention is not focused directly upon his uncertainty, so that he may not be led to go into the matter and clear it up immediately" He uses E.T.A Hoffman's story, 'The Sandman' and primarily talks about the main character Nathaniel's love interest Olympia, as the character turns out to be a doll created by Coppelius. Nathaniel so bewildered by the incident succumbs to another mental breakdown that he struggles to recover from. It was this uncertainty of whether Olympia was real that shook his rational mind, and created his intellectual uncertainty which gave him the feeling of 'the uncanny' that is so often attributed to a negative response i.e terror.

Freud refers to Hoffman as the unrivaled master of the uncanny, but in his essay argues that Olympia is not the only element of the uncanny in the story, he expands the theory of the uncanny and applies his own psychological theories to it, he interconnects his oedipal theory and his theory of the ego, to create a stronger basis for the uncanny theory. He disagree's with Jentsch, he argues that Olympia is not the only example of the uncanny in 'The Sandman', he argues this using information from his own research. In his own research he has done studies on the meaning of imagery in dreams, in a common anxiety dream about losing ones eyesight he has noted that the loss of eyesight is akin to his castration complex that is within his oedipal theory. He argues that Hoffman has brought Nathaniel's fear of losing his eyes at the crucial scene with Nathaniel and his father due to it representing the symbolic fear of castration. He argues also that the sandman always appears as a "disturber of love" which in turn represents the fear of castration again, as Nathaniel feels he is unworthy of love.
Outlining the Uncanny in this way gives birth to a whole new reading of the theory, as its boundaries are pushed by fear,or anything that creates "cognitive dissonance". This theory has transcended to film, because film is a visual medium, it can create the Uncanny in a person viewing the screen, rather than the characters in literature experiencing the Uncanny, a consumer can feel the Uncanny. Techniques have been exercised especially in the horror genre, such as using footage backwards, or images of dolls moving such as 'Chucky'.

The Uncanny

We have been set a task to create a 2 minute experimental piece on the subject of the uncanny, we are allowed to use one visual effect and one special effect, we also have to include green screen into this and use fabric paint and wallpaper. 

We are working in groups of three, our group consists of Kyle, Sian and myself. The project will challenge our time management skills as we only have two weeks to build the set and roughly 45 minutes to film the entire piece. 

This piece will be different to us all as we have not used green screen or special effects before, and as we only have one module to learn all of these skills it will require us to keep on top of our blogs and other modules while learning all of these new skills.  this module requires us to do our own research into the uncanny and also read texts that have been set to us in class. 

I have experience with wallpapering and power tools, i feel this is a useful skill that i can bring to my group. 

First Meeting 

We had our first meeting a few days after we were set the project brief, i went away after the brief wondering what approach we could take for the subject of the uncanny, i was struggling to think of things so i started by first thinking of things i would like to see myself do.

I wanted to work with shadows and had the idea that we could have the character on set with his shadow behind him being something entirely different, this made me think of Franz Kafka's metamorphosis, the character turns into a 'monstrous vermin' in the book, but it is unclear the the protagonist at first what is happening to him, this then gave me the idea of working with anthropomorphism, i had read 'Possum' which was set to us in lesson and i liked the idea of having animals from uncanny literature featured in our project. 

We met up and chatted about our ideas, after speaking to Kyle about his idea of genius and insanity, we were firmly set on the uncanny in literature as this tied in perfectly with Kyle's idea as many writers are considered geniuses for their work. We discussed what kind of style we were looking for and we decided that we all wanted to go for a more gothic theme because none of us had done anything like that before but we liked the idea of decaying wallpaper and broken bookshelves and using lighting and different textures to convey the gothic theme of the room and thought it would be artistically challenging.