Development : Arrival of Microphone and prints and change of plan for assessment

After a while was starting to get concerned about my order of prints and contact microphone. It seemed that they weren't going to arrive in time with it being Christmas time and also worry because of stress.

My prints did eventually arrive and I'm happy with how they turned out and can't wait to make them into a little flip book. I've checked the binding part with the library staff and their happy to help me when I get the images laid out and ready in the right order. Been planning out each image and it's position and the book will have a curl binding so that it can be flipped all the way around and be able to hopefully stand. I just hope pairing three piles of images to be bind will work al right with the machine.

This idea was originally started by the previous photo manipulations created in Photoshop a while back they have been turning out really successfully. So I wanted to expand on this idea and create a physical object for the viewer to interact with. The inspiration also comes from this as being a sort of playfulness from childhood and problem solving as from the original memories and playing in the forest being important to the start of this project.

My contact microphone did also eventually arrive in a round about way, it accidently got sent to my parents house. In my stress and forgetfulness I had forgotten to change the shipping address to my studying address. Thankfully my parents called me to ask about the package and gave it to me just in time. I was so worried that ordering another one wouldn't arrive in time that I nearly went to all the trouble of making one from scratch.

In the meantime been busy editing and putting the contrasting footage of the forest and my body from the Photoshoots with projections. Been using Final cut pro for editing and it's been good practice since not used it for a while.

After spending a good amount of time working on this short film piece visually I did not feel that positive about it as I had with the contrasting Photo manipulations. Plus film isn't my strong point as I'm usually in front of the camera or helping out with equipment with others. But I did pursue the film till the end without any sound since the delay of the microphone. But after discussing the process for assessment for this semester with Pernille and viewing the footage. It seemed that using my photography would be a more fruitful option that I felt more comfortable with to show as a final piece.

But I will keep the film to show as part of my development experiments for comparison of why I ended up using my images instead. So instead I created more images to be used in for a film that will eventually go with sound. Some of them are previous ones that have been altered.

Been working with these now instead to submit for the show reel we have been informed about. Been also planning out my work space for assessment as gathered more information about what is expected and how we can present our work. Sketchbooks have also been getting done on the side but the main pieces and sound is now my focus. I'll record my process of recording sound as well as the final days before assessment.

Development : Collecting photography images and source material

To gather more source materials and some resources spent an evening in Victoria park to take some photographs and see what I could find. Found some interesting bark textures in trees and thought they would be useful as a type of catalogue of what I could work with for further photographs. Started to see shapes and patterns in some of the barks and our perception of faces.

I also took notice of a lot of the different ways the environment had effected the textures of the trees like rot and mold with also animals using the trees to their advantages. Such as homes and places to nest and hide such as insects and spiders. I collected some of the bark from the trees which I'll be experimenting with further in the studio.

Also explored and started to photograph different trees I found had interesting shapes and forms as well as different sizes and from different perspectives. Each tree seemed to have its own different personality and colours which portrayed different moods. Some of them even seemed to form different limbs and parts of the human body and some interesting abstract imagery.

Felt I got a good few different examples of shapes and forms of trees I can edit and play around with later in Photoshop/collages. I also collected a few things such as pine cones and conkers which come from trees and felt their relation with them would be good to use as materials.

With help from Alastair we found a spot that didn't have many people walking by and started to take photographs of my arms. Since this was my starting point of ideas and images of my arms as tree branches or tree like pictures. We also played around with photographs of my legs and also parts of my skin such as my back. We tried out quite abstract shots of my arms and perspective shots making my limbs look part of the environment and different scales.

Felt it made quite strong images for a first try of photographing my limbs and a bold contrast with my skin and the bark of the trees. I would like to take these images further and edit them in Photoshop as well expanding my ideas with them. I will be going into the woods again after planning out some more ideas and being more prepared for another shoot as well experimenting with composition of my limbs/body.

Trying to ease back into filming and documenting my progress for this project so been playing around with simple editing and shots.