Virgin Media Shorts

Some superb short films in the Virgin Media Shorts competition. I particularly liked this one as it builds intrigue and has a lovely punchline:

Assignment 1: The Poster

The sequence

The Poster from Helen Rosemier on Vimeo.

Planning

The brief for this assignment was to produce a short sequence of no more than five shots, which tells a simple story using images alone.

I ran through several ideas and eventually settled on one which utilised my immediate resources: a good friend, a grumpy husband and three black cats.

The basic story is that a woman has lost her cat and, as part of the search, is putting up ‘Missing’ posters in the neighbourhood. We see a busybody looking at the poster and then removing it. Later we see him with several cats and finally watch him add the poster to his collection – the implication being that he is stealing the cats.

I scouted out suitable locations nearby to film the first three shots and then spent a huge amount of time trying to get the cats to all be around at the same time for the fourth frame.  It also became obvious that on top of the frustrations of working with animals, it is not always a good idea to enlist an opinionated husband!

I introduced key props (such as Sara wearing a hoodie and Matt wearing a shirt and tie, spectacles and smoking a pipe) to add atmosphere and to assist in conveying their characters.  We prepared the posters and then tried various options for showing all three posters at the end as this was the critical chilling moment: the reveal.

The storyboards

Evaluation of finished sequence

With hindsight this was quite an ambitious project for my first assignment. It relied heavily on two people and three cats which certainly created stressful challenges.

My aim was to tell a dramatic story in just five frames. I wanted it to be intriguing and slightly creepy at the end.

Frame one was shot from the top of our building, revealing a woman walking around erratically holding a piece of paper. The high angle was chosen to show her as small and isolated (lost?) but with the added dimension of it almost seeming like CCTV footage. This person in a hoodie is acting quite suspiciously. I hoped this would hook the viewer right from the beginning.

The second frame shows the woman walking towards the camera. We still don’t know what the small poster is about and the actor looks mean and moody.  This static camera angle with the actor approaching quickly and directly was designed to increase the mystery and tension.

Next a fussy looking man in a wheelchair (possibly a war veteran?) rolls up to look at the poster and then removes it from the telephone pole and takes it away. The framing and angle were slightly to the side of the poster this time to create more empathy with the man, whom we assume, at this point, is an overly-enthusiastic Neighbourhood Watch type of guy.

The fourth frame shows the man in his home, lovingly feeding and stroking his black cats. This begins with the camera moving in from the hallway as I wanted to convey some sense of voyeurism here to maintain the tension and intrigue a little. This is a neutral camera angle to allow us to watch the apparently harmless man with his pets.  For continuity he then looks at the poster again and smiles.

The final frame shows the man adding the poster to his collection of missing black cat posters, including one drawn by a bereft child, and admiring them as he smokes his pipe. This was positioned to show his (slightly crazy) satisfaction and to give the audience time to look at the posters and fully realise that he is a cat thief.

I think the framing worked quite well to convey all the information that I need to show and to maintain interest throughout. Hopefully the viewers will follow the story and be entertained by it. The last two frames were the most challenging. I would have preferred to have been able to focus in on the cats more, without showing the man so blatantly, which I think would have been more interesting and dramatic. It was not possible to make that work with just five frames so I hope that this final version is an acceptable solution.

The key area that I need to develop is in planning everything more thoroughly before the actors get involved. I need to give myself time to try different angles, all lens options and a variety of approaches to get exactly the right shot. This will help me to be a better director and to stay true to my vision even when other people are making suggestions about how things should be done.

Vivian Maier

Wow - this is just amazing....

http://www.messynessychic.com/2013/02/18/found-at-auction-the-unseen-photographs-of-a-legend-that-never-was/

The woman in the red dress - Istanbul

Interesting thoughts on visual culture and the protests in Turkey: here

Karl Blossfeldt Whitechapel Gallery Study Tour

I was surprised to find myself looking at photos of plants in an art gallery yesterday morning. I am more of a people person really. But I do love the OCA study tours, especially when they are ten minutes away from home, so this was irresistible.

The Karl Blossfeldt exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is actually delightful.  It features over 80 silver gelatin prints of plants, which Blossfeldt used in his role as a sculptor tutor in Berlin, until his death in 1932.  The plants have been dramatically magnified with his home-made camera equipment and the result is surreal.  One of the wall texts describes the work as having “an unsuspected horde of analogies” as the result of “bracing enlargement”. These are not just botanical specimens but portrayed as almost tactile, sculptural objects, which forces us to see the plants in completely new ways. This is definitely art and not science.

In the words of Walter Benjamin, from his Little History of Photography:

“Blossfeldt reveals the forms of ancient columns in horse willow, a bishop’s crosier in the ostrich fern, totem poles in tenfold enlargements of chestnut and maple shoots, and gothic tracery in the fuller’s thistle…”

“When photography takes itself out of context, severing the connections illustrated by Sander, Blossfeldt, or Germaine Krull, when it frees itself from physiognomic, political, and scientific interest, it becomes creative.” 

The treatment is minimalist: neutral backgrounds to show the full, magnificent details of the structures with few shadows; diffuse lighting (possible from a window?) from the side to enhance the form; a mix of heavy contrast and low-key images, all printed at the same size.

The mystery is really what exactly were the photographer’s motivations?

There is a clear obsession here. Blossfeldt himself said:  "My botanical documents should contribute to restoring the link with nature. They should reawaken a sense of nature, point to its teeming richness of form, and prompt the viewer to observe for himself the surrounding plant world." 

We have a strong sense of the scientist in the way the plants are methodically documented. And we can see the influences of the photographer’s experience as a modeller in a metal foundry in his early years. Several of the images look like wrought iron or art nouveau jewellery. We also see evidence of heraldry, the German Cross and some examples of abstract patterning.  Some of the seed heads could be templates for alien animations.

The images are displayed in thought-provoking groups, allowing the juxtapositions to create new meanings – three twig stems become a pattern of their own.  Repetition draws the viewer in to consider the uniqueness of every strand and spike and saddle. The horsetail pictures are architectural and monolithic (Tower of Pisa-like) while the irises are soft and feminine. I could imagine these being sold to my wealthier contemporaries in a shop on Columbia Road – aesthetically gorgeous and unchallenging. Perfect for the stairwell wall.

The more I look at the images, the more pleasing they become – a really wonderful set and an inspiration to experiment more with macro and perhaps to detach/isolate objects from their contexts.  In the final room there were a few larger prints (maybe a metre high compared with most of the images being about a third of that size) and I would love to see more of these images at that scale or bigger.

Blossfeldt’s work also looks fantastic viewed en masse:

Some discussion points from the tour:

• Comparisons with Weston’s black and white pepper images (more curvy and sensual) and Georgia O’Keefe’s work (“she wouldn’t have those spikes though!”), as well as Darwin’s bird studies
• Rob (Bloomfield) suggested some of the prints may have been bleached to bring the highlights out
• Observations that some images were very “Paris Metro”; also described as “verging on ugly” and “spare”
• Why the particular image which was used to promote the show was chosen – it looks much more dated than some of the others.  It also has more contrast and a white background on the printed gallery pamphlet; we observed that the images reproduced in Amano’s book had been altered (sharpened and levels changed)
• Glorification of nature/idealism and if there was any religious aspect (eg like Goethe’s connections between observation of nature and the creator/God)?
• Tutor Robert (Enoch) asked us to consider how Blossfeldt achieved what he has and what makes a Blossfeldt so distinctive.   We felt that his skills and experiences (the combination of him being a botanist, sculptor, metal-worker with some Germanic sensibilities and a cultural shift towards Modernism thrown in) created a unique approach at the point of intersection (the ultimate in micro-nicheing!)
• Robert talked about a “cool objectivity” and a “deflective motive” making these images so unique and powerful
• We considered why natural forms interest and inspire us – Robert mentioned Bruce Chatwin being told by his physician “you need to view some distant horizons” in order to correct his eyesight problems
• Appropriation and modernism having “personality attached”
• Was there a sub-conscious sexual element with the curves and textures, phalluses and hollows?  Symbols of fertility and the emergence from dark to light
• We were encouraged to try making some of our own “back garden Blossfeldts” - Robert and Amano had already tried this and suggested it is a lot harder than it looks...

Portraiture at its absolute best.....

http://www.briandavidstevens.com/project/they-that-are-left/

A ten year project

War Veterans

All pictures taken on armistice day 2002 - 2012

"...They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them..."
September 1914)

from Laurence Binyon's 'The Fallen' (first published in The Times, 21st 

"They that are left..." : 'Remembrance' portraits

© Brian David Stevens 2002-2012

Waits/Corbijn '77-'11 - Schirmer/Mosel

We have, today, taken delivery of a cardboard box containing the most expensive book I have ever purchased. It is the result of a long term collaboration between my favourite photographer and my favourite singer/songwriter/musician.  I am afraid to open the box.

Here though is a wonderful article in Interview magazine by Alexandria Symonds:

http://goo.gl/zTGNC

Tom says of Corbijn: 

"We are very different men. He's, like, 6'5", Dutch, quiet, studious, controlled—almost like a doctor—and I'm jerky, impatient, corny, curious, spraying in all directions. But we are both trying to discover something we have not seen before. Anton pulls hats out of rabbits. He will draw all the color from your face, put you against a gray sky, and presto: you look like a gravedigger. We are no longer in Miami. We are in Siberia."

ON THE MOOD OF THE PHOTOGRAPHS: When I'm out making pictures with Anton, we look for places that look mythic, filmic, tragic, operatic, and places that, if you frame out that new car dealership, could feel like a place from an old-fashioned book or a battlefield, a dying town . . . or an alley that could be hiding the Boston Strangler. Or we look for long shadows and dead trees, so you feel like you are in Odd Man Out or The Ox-Bow Incident.

ON OIL STAINS: The thing about oil stains is that if you go back in the next few days and try to find them, they will be gone. So the photos, for me, are profound because they have such short lives. They are more like fingerprints, dead leaves, rain puddles, or the corpses of flies.

I will open the box but not just yet.