FMP: Research & Development

Om is a interesting film by John Smith that talks about stereotyping by presenting us with an image of a monk dressed in a yellow or golden wrap. As the film progresses you realise he is having a haircut and it is finally revealed that he is a 1980’s skinhead. This shows a level of bias through what we see and how it can mislead us from the truth.

My initial research looked into common stereotypes, which I then tried to develop

into an outcome using very basic methods.

––Similar to the telephone remix I edited together clips that capture snow to try and create a new context. The outcome did not work completely but introduced the concept of MacGuffins to my development and learning how to edit, picking clips that work well together.

Christian Carclays Telephone is also a suitable example of how perspective can be twisted. The piece brings together different clips from many different movies to create a new story line using a telephone as a MacGuffin, connecting each piece of footage together. The same can also be said for the 118 commercials.

The proposal for my final major project was originally based around the idea of understanding and analysing what stereotypes are and creating an outcome that challenges this, however this has been expanded to exploring bias, perspective and the understanding of what knowledge is.

FMP: Research & Development

As I was exploring cognitive bias I tried to produce my own test using a standard model and adding to it, to allow for a conversation about gender, sexuality and race, which are some of the most highly ranked things that have been subjected to stereotyping.

As I explored more about the subjects of perspective bias and stenotypes I discovered what is known as

Jasper Goodall’s, Post Girls also play around with the idea of cognitive bias by aligning a poster to the model behind. This shows a process and also points out facts about how we think compared to what is the truth.

I returned to filming and editing after a break as I had some notable failed attempts of creating a remix. I tried to see how little is needed to change the context of a film, inspired by a channel 5 TV blunder. The end result worked well however it was more a happy accident than anything else.

Following on from my first collage I began to explore the meaning of what our physical form is. I took this concept and created a developmental collage, where I use cognitive bias to make a lump of meat look like a person.

cognitive bias. This type of bias allows us to see things, which are not there like John Stezaker and Raghava KK

FMP: Research & Development

Blow Up is an remarkably brilliant film, it is based around a photographer that reveals that what he originally took as a romance scene was in fact a murder however I see this as being the top of an iceberg as I found the fact that the director made his team paint the grass green very interesting. The final scene grabbed my attention the most as it depicts two Mimi’s playing tennis with no racket or ball but as the scene slowly progresses you begin to hear the noises in which they would make.

Double take is a film that takes a true fact that Hitchcock appears in his own films and takes it further

by developing a storyline, intercutting the real Hitchcock with lookalikes and voice mimics,

Another piece sparked by my discovery of blow up was about scale and how zooming in on a image will reveal more information, I did this as well as applying the same colorization technique, the same as my last development to see if I can build on already successful tests, the outcome did have potential and it was a landmark in the development of my project.

As I found myself interested in the fact that in the film Blow Up they added colour, making a scene un-natural I tried to apply the same skill set to a black and white clip of an interview with Alfred Hitchcock. I was very pleased with the end result but the context of the clip over powered what I was trying to do to the piece.

FMP: Development & Final Outcome

Still exploring what you can and can not see I used white balance to reveal more or less of an image, this is set to sound to increase the relationship between a static photograph and film leading the view to believe there is more to the piece than there is.

Still experimenting with colorization I choose to apply the same effects to a different image. This was easier to do, as there was less in the image however I wasn’t very happy with the result.

over a period of time an element of the photograph disappears however as it disappears,

My final outcome is very similar to my pervious developments I use white balance to slowly reveal more of the images and sound to add the idea that it is a film and not a still image. In conclusion I did really enjoy the process of this project and I think my final piece is interesting and compelling but was also very simple to produce after all the experimentation I did.

Similar to what I was doing before by adding sound to a photograph to make it seem like a film, this piece tries to portray this by using camera shake and sound, which worked well but seems out of place with the rest of my experiments.

so slowly you don’t notice