Visual asthetics

Clay Chinese Dragon

The item i have chosen to visualy analyse for this piece of work is an ornamental Chinese Dragon made from clay.
the piece is ahighly detailed dragon sat upon a mound of rocks. in the dragons right claw there is a large crystal designed to make the dragon look more expensive.
for the main part the dragon is various shades of yellows and oranges, which shows the fact that acording to legends, dragons were meant to be able to breathe fire. the ridges on the back of the dragon, and the wings of the dragon, are gold, when coupled together with the crystal, show that dragons are made out to be majestic and rich creatures. the gold and crystal also help to represent the tale that dragons were suposedly guardians of ancient treasures.
in contrast to the majesty of the dragon, the rock it sits upon are very bland, simple and dark. these rocks alos represent that dragons were suposed to live in mountains.
the attention that has been paid to the detail of the dragon makes this item look expensive and as though it has been based on a real creature.

One shot narrative

So here it is, the one shot narrative:

one shot film preparation

For our one shot film we decided to go to Newark, where three of our four memebers went to college, and use the old Polish war graves, due to the fact that we wanted to make use 0f the way the graves were set out. Due to luck more than anything else we arrived at the war graves at sunset which meant we were able to get the sun in the background, this made the effect of the graves more obvious and it made a more beautiful shot than it would have been before.

the narrative for this one shot was meant to be very simple, a realative of a dead war vetaran paying his respects to his dead realtive. this seemed very apropriate when we made the film as it was close to rememberance day and poppies were all about in memory of the war veterans. i'm not sure that the narrative was very well shown however once it is known what the narrative is it is alot easier to see it.

in preperation for this project we went to the polish war graves ad took pictures of the intended set, i have included these below.

pixilation references.

For this project we had two main influences, the first was "Austin Powers Goldmember" the section we took the influence from is this one:

The section we used was from where they go behind the screen and the sailor is watching the shadows cast and it looks as though Austin is giving birth to Mini Me, we used this section to influence the part where it looks as though it is an operating table and the doctor is removin far too large objects from the patient.
The second film we used as an influence was "The Lord Of The Rings, The Fellowship Of The Ring" we used the scene in which Gandalf dies, this section is easy to see in our pixilation as we have directly take the staff slam from the film.

week 16

As i have yet to do many posts on this i have decided to start doing more with it to keep a sort of mini update on how i feel the course is going. so far we have created 2 pixilation animations and done on picture with a pinhole camera. this week we are making a serious go at our next asignment which is creating a 30second film using one singular shot. in order to try and discover what makes a good one shot film i went on to single-shot.co.uk and watched a few of the videos that other people had created, the main aspects that most of the videos i saw had in common were:
Little or not narative.
no talking
followed the characters through a continuous pan

we have taken this into account when trying to decide what to create for our own one shot film, our initial idea is to travel to Newark and film a piece in the graveyard where all the war graves an memorials are taking advantage of the poppies that are linked in with this time of year and rememberance. we are hoping to edit this piece so that it is in the style of Sin City and Shindlers list in the way that they have are mainly black and white but show certain colours to emphasise aspects of the film, we are going to use this to bring out that red of the poppy against the white of the grave.

lev manovich

Lev Manovich

For this review I have chosen to review a section of “the language of New Media” by Lev Manovich, I have chosen to look more closely at the first main section “What is new media?”. I have chosen to look at this due to the fact that I have entered a higher education course in multi-media, new media therefore is a highly important factor in learning everything I can about multi-media.
In this section of the book Manovich looks in detail at the history of new media, this include the transformation from making films using stills shots and linking them together, to the modern day technology we enjoy today. The section also shows how new media is not only about film but about all forms of media, there is a large section on how computer programming links into new media and also how games and music can be sold as part of a film package, with the film as the “base” to the set.
In general I found that this section was useful as it taught me some of the stuff about the history of film and also showed how other sections of new media link in to the whole cycle. However I found that a lot of the language in the book was confusing and hard to comprehend.
I found that the most useful section of this chapter was “the language of new media” taught me a lot about what different things in new media meant, I found that this was useful as it helped to understand new media in general as well as in the book. However it did not teach me anywhere as much as I would have liked to have found out.

first uni prog

my first project, take a look see what you think
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mRDNIPcBXY

reflecting in action

"Schon found that when effective practitioners were faced with a probelm in their practice they worked through it instictively drawing on previous similar experiences, they tried and tested out various possibilites until they resolved the issue."

in general i have found that this in the best way for me to work, for example we have recently been asked to read and review a book for our tutorial seesions, though out my college life we did alot of work that require reading and summarising and altough in most cases it was on a smaller scale i found that it was easy to use the same methods for this task as i used in college. i feel that if a method has worked well in the past in should work just as well in each case, however this is not to say that changing the method is a bad idea, there are always new and better ways of doing things depending on the situation and how you work.

me

As i dont really know what im doing with this site yet i have decided to make a simple bloggto let people know a little bit about me, so here goes!
name: Ricahrd Norman
age: 19
current favourite film: Ace Ventura (not sure if prefer one or 2 though)
music: almost anything (and yes that does include classical!)
studying at: Nottingham Trent university
course: Multimedia
most looking for from the course: learning to animate and more advanced editing