Having the whole of Christmas to come up with an idea for this experimental project meant that I came up with quite a few ideas which were all reassuringly odd. I have for a long time now wanted to experiment with light art photography having done it before. I wanted to have a single shot of woods at night that were physically lit up by me in different colours and then have things like fairies and creatures that bought the woods to life, whilst no one was watching. This gives the photographer ultimate control as they get to choose exactly what was in shot and how you want it lit. I then wandered whether this could fit within the experimental film and whether I could animate this into a film form, conducting a little research found that there are two main ways to do this; one was to do it digitally through after effects which whilst looks good isn't quite what I wanted as I wanted physical manipulation of the image. The other more favoured approach was through stop motion animation, which whilst I have done several stop motion films in the past had never comprehended turning light art photography into this form, so I thought this would be good experimentation for the project.
Another idea that I came up with was to have a room completely wrapped in paper with hanging origami and objects wrapped up in paper, this was an original idea to me, that wasn't knowingly informed by anything, at first it was a joke idea that was a bit of fun but the idea grew on me, it's a great way of creating a completely different world that you don't come across in real life. Also having not done very much in set design it was something I wanted to experiment with.
My third idea which was inspired whilst I was doing some of my photography in the peaks, walking through the woods I was taking photos of the bare stripped back canopies, and then there were some great reflections of these canopies in a little pond and a wide river and I thought the visual aesthetics of this were great and started thinking about it from a cinematographic perspective, not only the reflections which could be reflective of a character, but also reminded me of a new style of photography that has recently emerged which layers the trees branches over a human image creating vein like structures across a face or even landscape using opacity. I then made the obvious connection to how I could recreate this in moving image form, creating a reflective visually stunning peace that deals with the emotions of humanity. It also reminded me of a photographer that I saw on the culture show about a year back, again who I cannot remember, who used a similar technique instead using the lines of buildings to create an abstract image.
This is the footage collected when experimenting with reflections in water.
Canon 550d 100mm ef usm
Progressing from these initial ideas, I began to think about moulding all three ideas and create a dream sequence, I started by writing down all the scenes. My initial treatment involved someone going to the woods for a walk, returning to the car she finds a paper bird, drives home goes to bed, (dream state) goes to woods in car which has light art and trails of light acting as a pulling force, the woods light up around her, goes home room covered in paper. I then thought this was over thought as with previous projects so I ditched the complicated repetitive narrative that was over described which may lead to loss of interest from the viewer and went for a more economical story telling style of approach. Skipping out unnecessary traveling between scenes and the real life version of events, leading to a more compact, though still full of different elements, and therefore more interesting version of events.
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