Taking a look at some films I wanted to watch and picking them apart and taking a look at, characters, effects, writing and other things. I give each a rating at the end based on the aspects I have looked at.
Despite the results that I acquired I still think that there are elements I should have included in the film that were possibly overlooked for whatever reason. Elements such as hydrophobic sand, a bigger tank, more variety of colours and models and other things.
There might also be a place for re designing the process to a certain extent. If I had (a lot) of olive oil/any oil really. I could make a third layer to mess with. Salt water on the bottom, then fresh and oil on top. I would have to make all the layers fairly even to get some good shots. The yellow of the the oil could be an issue but I can change that with colour correction and/or trying to mx oil based paint with the oil to create some different colours.
It would also be really interesting to see how the materials I shot into the tank would react when shot into oil, and when they finally penetrated through to the water layer what will they bring with it. I could also use motor oil instead of cooking oil as the rainbow colours you see on the pavement after an oil leak. This could potentially look amazing as long as it was lit correctly.
Some of the shots are a bit wobbly so I need to invest or borrow a new tripod next time as it is really noticeable, especially with the macro shots.
After completing both videos I decided to take some screen shots to illustrate this. I would upload the videos but they're very large so I'll wait and put them on youtube after the deadline. However here are some screen grabs.
I think the final results were really good and better than expected from my point of view. However looking back I would have liked to have made/used some hydrophobic sand and manipulated it to create much larger and more detailed landscapes.
I would also have liked to used a greater variety of lens to get more shots. Such as the tiltshift, but god knows where I'd find one. I would also have liked to use the High-Speed camera to film some more destructive shots. like throwing stones into the hydrophobic sand and filming the explosions of sand and colour.
In terms of music I think my choices were good but next time I would like to use some songs from Primal Scream's 'Screamadelica'. A lot of their tracks are instrumental for large portions of them so it would be ideal as backing music.
Another, better, choice, would be to find a composer to write music for it or to do it myself. This would add an air of originality and would be tailored perfectly to the video.
When I came to start editing the footage I first started by going through it all meticulously to weed out the rubbish clips before I took them into final cut. I noticed that a lot of the macro clips had bad shuddering at the beginning and ends, in places. This was because of lens being so sensitive when you are looking at something that small in that much detail.
The clips from the side tank shoots needed to be colour graded as the clips looked really washed out and desaturated. I started messing with the (very basic) colour correction tool on Final Cut X. Changing the exposure had the best effect as it made the models more into silhouettes which I thought worked really well on the psychedelic background. I also started layering some of the clips to create more depth in the video.
I should also mention that when I was going through the vast amount of clips, I decided that there was too much footage here for just one video. The clips I had taken of the surface of the tank I edited together separately. This was definitely the right decision as otherwise all of the footage I had taken would have been wasted.
For the music I had been toying with a few 'Massive Attack' songs but when it came to edit the singing in parts of the songs didn't agree with the video. So what I decided to do was combine a couple of their songs, to create a soundtrack better suited to the video.
///Heat Miser. I used about 1:30 of this song to come in after the singing came in for better things
///Better Things. I only used the first 50 seconds or so of this but this was because the singing started and it didn't go with the video.
The above image is from the editing of the surface shots. The surface shots probably wouldn't have integrated well with the side shots anyway, so it was best to do two videos. For the song I decided to go with Three Seed by the Silversun Pickups. A really beautiful song with some intricate melodies and a really mellow build up. Despite the fact there is singing in the song I think it works well with the video and I have tried to time the cutting to certain points in the song where the rhythm changes.
As well as the smooth riffs of Massive Attack I also looked at a couple of other sounds which could fit the bill as well. Again these are not necessarily all of the songs but parts of them which I think sound particularly alien or awesome.
First I looked at 'Tame Impala's' - 'Be Above It'
First time I heard this band i thought 'Psychedelic Beatles' and to this day I still think this. Due to this I thought the amazing and innovative sound design in this song could work really well with some of the
events which occur in the tank.
BE ABOVE IT///
Next I looked at one of my favourite bands at the moment. Silversun Pickups. Very reminiscent of the Smashing Pumpkins but with more about them. The songs 'Three Seed' and 'Sci-Fi Lullaby' were particularly fitting. Three seed because it has an awesome intro and amazing guitar riff at two or three intervals. Sci-Fi lullaby's intro is really eerie and alien-esque so i thought that could be manipulated to fit the videos.
Obviously because all of the sound that I recorded mainly consisted of me whining about how something wasn't working and the music we had in the background, and because thats not very good sound design I decided to do some research into some music that would sound good.
The first band I looked at was 'Massive Attack'. They have a multitude of weird and funky sounds backed with some great singers and a depth and innovation that is lost in a lot of todays music. Massive Attack's strong melodies and interesting beats made them perfect choice of the sound track,
I was mainly interested in their album, Protection (1994). A lot of the songs are very atmosphere punctuated with smooth melodies and guitar riffs. The weird sounds they employ will be perfect for the weird things going on in the fish tank i'm filming.
WEATHER STORM///
HEAT MISER///
BETTER THINGS///
PROTECTION///
The songs above are my favourites for the soundtrack so far. However its not always the entire song that I want. There are plenty of parts of these songs which wouldn't work with the tank, if the beats too fast or the track is too complicated then it wouldn't fit with the smooth tranquil flow of the water in the tank.
My decision to use the macro lens had come before I had even had the idea for the responsive brief. When I was doing the cloud tank the first couple of times I realised how much more you could see if you made all the patterns and shapes the liquids made in the water bigger with this kind of lens.
I had used a macro lens previously to this so I picked up how to use it quite quickly even though there were things to remember. The lens was extremely heavy so it needed a metal support. It was so heavy that the metal support need to be attached directly to the tripod otherwise the weight of the lens would have broken the camera. This meant I had to be very careful whenever I used the lens. The fact it costs about £1,800 was unsettling as well.
The macro lens does the exact opposite of a microscope, essentially. It makes very small things look much bigger (micro/macro) and this was a massive help in the cloud tank. The lens allowed me to observe my experiments at a much smaller, yet bigger, scale.
I got some really good shots of the tank with the lens and there is a noticeable difference in lens type which is exactly what I wanted.
These are some of the stills from the final shoot. I would have put up clips but seeing as they're pretty uninteresting on their own so I thought stills would be more appropriate.
The way the oil looks here looks almost like lilypads
This lilypad effect could be used to show the surface of an alien lake/sea
this almost looks like a plant cell. Which makes me think that the cloud tanks could be very useful in filming things at a 'cellular' level.
I love the way the greens and reds mix and flow and react to the oil
This could easily be used for blood splattering but on a very small scale
The individual beads of oil caught the light well and as a result have a really nice and defined shadow on their lower side which really makes the stand out.
Some sort of pink ocean ? I dunno,
A bigger tank would obviously be better as the oil would have more room to move
The video footage I got was as good if not better than these stills and im looking forward to editing it all together. What I need to do now is find an appropriate soundtrack for the film and i'm going to be doing research into that in my next post.
These are some stills from the second tank shoot. This time I used a different background to add some variety to the alien worlds. The models used here are completely different to the ones used before. I thought a fresh batch of models would be better than reusing some old ones.
I also decided to create a 'landmass' for the models to stand in. The landmass wasn't a massive success because you couldn't see most of it. But it provided a stable base and a island like silhouette.
Even though this is about the models I did get some cloud footage which I will be using in the film anyway. I thought i needed some cloud footage to splice up the film, rather than just have model shots.
The colour and patterns you can create with the cloud tank is visually stunning. I did these cloud shots so I can use the mirror tool 2 ways, or 4 ways to create some intermitting visuals to cut to. This will add more variety in shots to the final video.
These are some initial sketches I did for the tank. These mainly involve drawing alien plants that I can then make into plasticine models. The sketches were very helpful for reference when I mas modelling later, even if they weren't always stuck too. But these sketches were never supposed to dictate exactly what they would look like just give an idea which i can work with instead of modelling with no reference at all.
A dragon egg with spaghetti
A lampost and its eggs
The rearview tree
The models aren't very complicated but they're only supposed to give the illusion that this is the surface of an alien world, and as such the details on the plants started to become less and less significant. What was significant was the shapes of the bows and arms of the 'trees' and thus I decided to focus on this. A
I also realised that I needed a background. So I asked one of my friends who is on fine art to create me a background for the tank. She used marbling ink to create a really unique and trippy effect onto a piece of white paper.
Now after all the preparation it was time to start filling up the tank. The cloud tank process is very simple if somewhat time consuming, however the results are pretty incredible so in my opinion its well worth the wait.
MAKING A CLOUD TANK
you will need.
1x rectangular fish tank.
LOTS of rock salt/dishwasher salt works fine.
Water (obviously)
A sauce pan
Things to squirt things (pipets, anything with a spray nozzle)
Food colouring, paint, anything colourful which you can shoot into the tank
1..First, you need to put your salt into a pan, fill and spread out till bottom is no longer visible. Then fill with water, and boil for 20 minutes.
2..When all you can see is clear (salt) water, with no excess salt, let it cool down, because it could melt the polyfiller used in fish tanks to keep them water tight. If you can still see salt, top it up with fresh water and stir until gone. Repeat this step till desired concentration is reached. If making the salt water is taking a long time to cool/make add some fresh cold water to the salt mixture to speed the process along. This doesn't affect results in my experience as well.
3..Once added to the tank leave the salt water to settle for 4-5 hours. The longer left the more chance you have of getting a very defined salt and fresh layer.
4..Now this is the tricky part (or at least the trickiest). You now need to go find yourself a bin bag and put it into the tank over the salt water. Push the bag down into the water so it pushes evenly against all four sides. This isnt vital but it helps.
You then need to slowly fill the bag in the salt water, with fresh water. So essentially you have a bag of fresh water in a tank of saltwater. After you are happy with your water levels you need carefully remove the bag from the tank. Pick a side and start to pull the bag from oneside so the otherwside is eventually submerged.
5.. hey presto. You can see very clearly here the difference in the transparency between the two layers. What you do next is entirely up to you but I would start by squirting various different colour liquids into the tank. REMEMBER, that stuff that sinks in fresh water may not in salt water which can provide some very interesting results.
A previous video of mine showing results of this technique. filmed and edited by myself.
After completing this process you can do whatever you want in the tank. These are my results in picture form from the first tank shoot.
I think the first tank shoot went really well and some of the footage I got was great. Using the light behind the background really made the models pop and using them as silhouettes was a much better idea than using their full colour forms.
I love how the light encapsulates the models, colours and background.
Because the colours were made with fresh water they reacted well with the saltwater when introduced
The initial plan for this project was too create some sort of apocalypse with black ink, to signify an infection or disease. Along the way I started to realised that this was not going to work. To create an actual story with the cloud tank was going to be very difficult due to the random nature of the liquids once in the tank. It would also be a lot more time consuming and as this project isnt very long I decided to focus on getting the shots I wanted. At this point the nature of the project had changed but not massively. I realised by cutting out the 'apocalypse' scene I had more freedom in the shots I could use.
Also by using the black ink would just flood the macro lens and it wouldn't be able to focus on anything resulting in a blurry shot.
For this project I am going to be repeating a process I have used before in the COP module. A friend showed this video too me about cloud tanks by 'Joey Shanks'. He explained the use and fun you can have with this process.
This video inspired me too do it for the previous module and I thought i would expand upon this. I thought that if you used models to add to the tanks atmosphere you could create even eerier alien landscapes.
Cloud tanks have been used in many different films over the years which suggests the outcomes can be awesome if done correctly. I have done this before and got amazing results but I do not think that this is something that I have explored completely.
I also looked at The Tree of Life and how Douglas Turnbull insisted on using cloud tanks instead of computer graphics to create some of the visuals in the tree of life. The results were pretty astounding and greatly inspirational in perfecting my own techniques.
I havent posted on here in a while but I thought i would post it onto the 'film' blog as thats what this module entails. I will post more fim reviews/not actually proper reviews, after this project finishes.
For the responsive brief I thought I would continue with what I had started with context of practice and the cloud tank. The cloud tank worked really well I thought and I wanted to further explore the idea of creating other worlds in a water tank. So I had this idea of building a alien worlds surface with plasticine. So I thought about all these different plants i could model out of plasticine and submerge into the water tank. But i realised that it didn't have a story, which was fine, as it could work well like that but what I realised is that because I created this world, I could destroy it and film the destruction.
However destruction doesn't mean smash models necessarily, it could mean shootings black paint/ink into the tank to cause what appears to be some sort of apocalypse. I also thought about using black/white coloured plasticine to simulate some sort of evil alien species. If filmed properly I could make it really exciting. I'll need someone to design the sound for it and make sure special attention is paid to the change in the music from the normality to the judgement day scenario.
I need to use a large variety of shots to make it look as real as I can. I need to make good use of the macro lens' capabilities to make the small models seem very big. I need to splice the macro shots with the 18-55mm lens, as well as potentially getting some fish eye shots. I still need to use the cloud effects of the paint and food colouring in the water just use it less to make them seem like clouds.
If I use smaller saltwater and freshwater layers I can create an underwater island. First I create an island out of plasticine which pokes just above the salt layer. Then I squirt the cloudy liquid into the layer and it will appear that the salt layer is the sea and the fresh layer is the air.
There are many things I am going to have to consider for this project to me a success.
1. Lots of plasticine (ordered yesterday)
2. 150mm macro lens.
3. Tripod
4. Fish Eye lens? (might look really awesome and trippy using a fish eye underwater, well not literally)
5. Rock Salt (for the tank)
6. Modelling tools
7. Wire (for plant skeletons)
8. Lights/A light
9. Different colours of paper. For backgrounds
10. Light filters
I searched for 'Alien Environments' and planets, worlds, but very little came up in terms of landscapes and scenery. I made a mood board of my favourites and It has given me other ideas of what I can do with this. With the plasticine I can create other biomes of scenery, not just jungle/forrest. With the darker colours I can make cliffs, canyons, mountains and potentially waterfalls.
Because there weren't many fictional locations I could take inspiration from i thought I would take it from some places on planet earth, which can look a a little alien sometimes. This is Bryce Canyon in Utah, USA, once upon a time a mighty river would have carved out this canyon and its abrasive force eroded the rocks into some interesting and tall formations. Things like this would be ideal for what im trying to do. Vast desolate alien worlds, bone dry from the 3 suns and (Pitch Black is a really good film) completely void of proper vegetation. This sort of extreme in environment would be interesting to replicate as somewhere like this isn't usually submerged in a fish tank.
The composite volcano, Krakatoa, is another landmark I would like to use as inspiration. Using a lot of plasticine I could create a volcano and then with some editing make it look as if it was erupting by layering clips on top of each other. This would take a lof of work but would look amazing especially as the plumes of smoke you see above look exactly like the clouds of powder in the cloud tank.
