Neoteric Photography aims to explore photography in an age where the image is everywhere. The image has become prolific yet easily forgotten. Hoping to find something to hold onto, something that will survive longer that it takes for pixels to appear upon a screen.
To begin the rendering of my project I will investigate Movie Maker and make a short practice film to explore the possibilities of this software.
Movie Maker is a simple tool for film making and if you are not looking for stunning effects this method really is quite simple - I really do want quiet and simple for this so this is a good way to try this out.
I began by adding my initial photographs to the Movie Maker by just clicking on the Home - add photos or videos. As you can see below this the home menu. On this menu, I always added titles and captions to each image as I have made the decision to subtitle this film with the narrative
In the next image you can see the titles and also you can see I am on 'animations' in the menu this is where I changed the transitions from shot to shot. I wanted again a slow and gentle transition - I do not want any hard jumps throughout thsi - I want this to flow like a stream of consciousness or a dream. Therefore I also changed here the pan and zoom so each shot slowly zooms in closer and then the transition comes in.
Here you can see the effect withe transuition, the caption added and the duration. I have applied the same pan and zoom to all shots.
Next I added very minor effects to one of the images just to make it sit slightly better with teh other images - just making it less sharp. I added a very minor blur to this and applied the same transitions to this.
Lastly I added music and some temporary end credit just for this piece. I used a free music archive bensound.com which it states you must credit. I chose Ofelia's Dream as I thought this was sad and dark and matched the mood of the film. In my next post I will show the final experiment.
To continue with my website I have now added the contact page. I chose a form for this and then changed the colours to match the rest of the website and the text so that this also matched the design.
I then went back to my Portfolio main page to add the writing section and to add the writing links. These are links to my work online where I have written about photography and photographers
I then worked on the home page and changed the title to reflect the rest of the site and I moved the text to align on all the pages and added a background colour. I also added a photography piece however this gallery will still need more work when I add further pieces - this is what it looks like when you click into the image.
The galleries are the areas that really need work so I will keep working on these to ensure that these are ready for my project work that I need to add at the end of this term.
I chose a template from Wix to create my site. I began just by changing the background strip to a generic photography picture from Pixabay just so I could decide how I wanted it to look. I like the one image on the home page. Not sure about the title at present but I will consider this further later.
I clicked on the left-hand menu to choose menu and pages and when I had looked at images I chose my own front image which I had taken, This has a sepia look to it and therefore I considered that those beige/cream colours might work well throughout.
After doing this I looked at the text, I kept the Cinzel font and have used this throughout. I also changed the copyright to my own so that this is at the bottom of each page throughout. I then went to the About page and changed the image and began to wite my Bio and changed the font.
This is the image I changed this to in keeping with the sepia colours I also ghanged the coloured background by right-clicking on the right-side column and find a colour that would work with the image and my home page.
I think the font looks better like this and is larger and easier to read. The navigation bar probably will also be changed however at the moment I am leaving this until I have decided on how all the pages should work.
I have also started to play with the portfolio - I have added one film and will add photography and writing.. This is the progress so far!
Here, an appropriate image where time has speeded up and the character, played by David Bowie, rapidly ages. Time does march on...' At its core, though, the film is really about fear of aging and loss of youth. The aging effects on Bowie (done masterfully by Dick Smith) are great and through his condition, there’s real sadness and loss being communicated here.' (Gordon B. 11/09/2012). Perhaps in my own work this sense of loss will also be present, often wish I could feel the energy I felt when young, now I feel (like in this film) that time is speeding up and the end is much closer.
I actually really love this film as it has Susan Sraradon, Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Bauhaus, violence and sex - a perfect combination! Empire magazine disagreed with this: 'The Hunger remains a baffling, obscure effort – too arty to work as a horror film, too pretty-pretty to be a character drama. Tony Scott’s first mainstream directorial credit, it’s the tonyscottiest vampire movie ever made' (Newman K. 01/06/2006) which is a pity they couldn't see the joy in the film! I love the arty horror and I feel now that there is less beauty being communicated in film as technology stands in the forefront.
I will update this each week as I go along to ensure that I keep a record of work completed. As it is the end of Week Four now my next posts will show you the website I have been working on.
As the project I am trying to conceive is about memory and photography I am going to write a little here about Chris Marker, as an introduction, I will quote the introduction here from Encyclopedia Britannica;
'Chris Marker (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve), French filmmaker and multimedia artist (born July 29, 1921, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France?—died July 29, 2012, Paris, France), pioneered the essay film, an avant-garde cinematic form that brings a personal approach to documentary and nonnarrative footage. His best-known work, La Jetée (1962), is a short subject composed almost entirely of still photographs, with the exception of a brief film shot; the “plot” later served as the inspiration for the cryptic time-traveling drama Twelve Monkeys (1995).' (Encyclopedia Britannica 2019)
Marker is known to be quite elusive however one of his great passions was on the subject of memory or what he termed 'immemory' he considered that memory was unreliable and that memory was more a kind of geography. In his film Remembrance of things to come (2001) the film is about a photographer Denise Bellon going over two decades from 1935-1955 however it is essentially a play on memory, biography, and history. It is non-linear and plays with words and images. This montage has great beauty in its layers of history, it's feeling for the moment. This piece jumps from African masks to Picasso, artists with cats and Nazi death camps it causes a feeling of moving through memory. The narrative speaks over the images and offers insight but no feeling, the feeling comes through the images from sad, melancholic to tremendous, overwhelming. This film has a sense of what I would like to show in my own film. A sense of moving through time but through memory where memories come in disorder at the whim of something that jars memory like Proust's Madeline memory will be provoked. Sometimes we wish the memory had not come but the smell, taste, or feeling brings the memory to the fore without warning.
Mitchell states in his article from The New York Times: 'Mr. Marker's own intrigue with impatience -- his fleet films dance by in an instant, while using the music of pauses and silence to convey an almost inscrutable density -- is a marvel when married to an admiring biography. His singular talent is in melting one image into another in a manner that serves as on-the-fly narrative; it's as if he has the power to anticipate dreams.' (Mitchell 28/05/2003)
If only I could anticipate dreams, I often try to write down my dreams as they are often disturbing and it is with this thought of dreams I will consider that the film itself, like a dream, will have that surreal element where time and place jump and fade into each. In my dreams a room can change to a rocky landscape, the voice of my sister will become the sound of a scream. Dreams are perhaps how I begin to storyboard this piece.
'Marker, 81, has always preferred to allow his filmed images, rather than his image as a filmmaker, to speak for him. Less than a dozen photographs of Marker exist, and his interviews are even more rare.' (Film Comment May/June 2003)
I like it that little is known and few pictures exist - his work is him, through this we, the viewer, get a sense of the artist.
References
Encyclopedia Brittanica (2019) Chris Marker [Online] Available from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Chris-Marker (Accessed 19/10/19)
I started to play around with Photostory just to get a really basic feel of what I wanted to do - here a really simple story that uses motion and text - Photostory is quite an old photo editor that really is just used for putting albums together. It can be downloaded and installed on the computer and then you can very basically edit the motion, text, sound and transitions. Normally I would not use Wikipedia however the best explanation can be found here of how Photostory started and what it was used for - the links on the Wikipedia page do not work properly to the original sources so this is the best information I have here: Photostory (this is why you shouldn't use Wikipedia!)
The video here is like an initial sketch here, I shot these pictures and the rain was pouring down it was new years eve. - I will begin to start researching and practicing using Photoshop motion.
To begin where there is no beginning is how this project shall proceed - Sebald writes in memories, in streams of consciousness, in layers of beauty that are like waves of feeling that wash over the reader. What is most appealing to me is the use of photographs with the text as shown above. Preuschoff writes:
'Sebald’s literary work is exceptionally visual, and his writing from and with images demonstrates an approach to literature not in competition with (or afraid of) the visual, but in dialogue with it, knowing that for both description and photo or drawing there first needs to be careful observation and study.' (Preuschoff N: 2019)
This dialogue is what interests me and the same could be said of Chris Marker's work. There is a layering of meaning that means that you may never actually know what the whole answer, as is true in life, Preuschoff goes on to state:
'What makes Sebald’s prose unique and sets it apart from both his 19th and early 20th century patron saints and other contemporary German writers is a technique of montage, of which the included images are only the most visible expression: the extensive use of quotations and references taken from all kinds of sources, sometimes marked and exposed in the text, sometimes hidden and included like little academic riddles for intertextual research' (Preuschoff N: 2019)
I enjoy the riddles, the strange references. It reminds me a little also of Beckett's 'Dream of Fair to Middling Women' in that strangeness of language and surreality. I want to incorporate many of these elements into my photofilm, I want it to reflect the inconsistency, the chaos and the beauty of memory.
Sebald W.G. (2001) Austerlitz, Penguin Books Ltd, London
Publishers Weekly (05/03/1993) Dream of Fair to Middling Women by Samuel Beckett, Author, Eoin O'Brien, Editor, Edith Fournier, Editor Arcade Publishing [Online] Available from: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-55970-217-1 (Accessed 13/10/19)
