Ellen tutorial 7.3.2014

During my tutorial with Ellen I was still struggling with my printed publication. She said to still do the book about text messages but not to have the train time lapse images in the book. I'm worried its not going to look interesting enough to grab peoples attention. She suggested I take my phone in to the studio and photograph the texts on my phone. I thought it was a bit odd at first still thinking it wont be good enough. I gave it ago it took a really long time, I actually used Facebook messages for when I first spoke to Danny but I also took photos of Whatsapp messages as they are images with text. I am also going to experiment with using Snapchat, this app also uses images and text but had a completely different meaning behind it.. Snapchat was designed to take a photo and put some text over the top or you can draw on the image as well, you then send the image to a friend for a certain amount of time. The timings go from 1 second to 10 seconds and then it disappears. The idea was to never see the image again but technology has made this not happen as now on iphones and some other phones you can print screen your images. Kind of defends the point but this has helped me to capture the images me and my friend Danny have sent to each other for this project, so I can't really say its a bad thing. Hopefully it will all work out in the end and become a successful photographic book.

 I have some editing to do as the image is far to bright. It was really difficult to get the studio lighting correct. But here is my first image of when me and Danny first spoke after 8 years. This was via Facebook.

  This is a different conversation using Whatsapp. Even though on Facebook you can send images for some reason I sent this image to him on Whatsapp. Whatsapp is free to send messages to and from like Facebook. I didn't send the image by text because it costs money.






It already sounds a little confusing but that's the point, its about how we communicate through technology and how in today's society millions of people hardly speak face to face. By texting we lose a lot of emotion and true meaning with words because by text you sometimes cannot tell if that person is angry at you or just having a laugh.

My thoughts...

Since my last experiment I've been struggling on how to improve my digital piece and how to also go about making the printed publication. Just over a week ago I was experimenting in  the software Audition which deals with sound. I spoke to a technician who suggested making the music sound like its coming from my phone instead of just playing whilst the journey goes on. We experimented with this idea.. unfortunately it didn't save properly so I'm going to have to do it again. He suggested I bring a couple of different other sounds within the video to improve it.. have more of a narrative. I'm not very confident with video and all that goes along with it I wanted to make it simple and not get in over my head with bigger ideas. But I am going to push myself and continue to experiment within different medias. My plan is to record different train noises such as, people talking, the movement of the train etc.. And to also record myself having a phone conversation with an old friend of mine and also record him as well. I was thinking about recording our thoughts after the conversation mine in an English language and his in Vietnamese.

Need to get started on this, hope it goes well.

Hollie xD

Adobe Premiere London train timelapse experiment

This is a new experiment of a different journey on my way to London. When I got on the train I realised there were no tables for me to put my camera on and I panicked a little.. I remembered first class had them so I tried to see if I could sneakily do it without anyone telling me off.. luckily I found a lady in first class who said she would watch my camera for me and the ticket guy said it was okay so.. win win! I took in total 850 photos.. seems like a lot but I think I should of taken more. I set my camera to take an image every 1 second 850 times. I wanted to do something different from the last train time lapse so I had to break up the images in to different sequences and make 5 different videos in My Movie on my PC. I changed the FPS (frames per second) which can determine how slow or fast my time lapse will be moving. The more FPS the slower the less the faster. I also wanted to experiment with the video fading in at the start and fading at the end, I also learnt how to fade the music as well at the end. This was really annoying to do and its all really small on premiere pro. This will hopefully be close to what the final video will look like.. just need more feed back.

Hollie xD 

Tutorial with Ellen Nolan

Before going  in to today's tutorial I didn't really know how to start my printed publication side of this project. I knew I wanted to keep in the theme of journeys and perhaps carrying on using train journeys or maybe buses or travelling by car. I know I enjoy long exposure photography and wanted to add that to my narrative as well. During the tutorial Ellen helped me improve my thoughts in to solid ideas that I can now start getting on with. I had already started looking in to photographers who used train journeys within their work, I came across this artist who's work is on Flickr, Céline Ramoni. Its quite weird I came across her work because I just got a new laptop and I changed my screen saver to a image that was already on my laptop and it happened to be the work of Céline Ramoni. I also came across another artist Michael Zhang who is the editor on the website PetaPixel.  (I'll write separate posts with their images on)

I am still keeping within my theme of journeys and using trains. My time lapse video on the train with just the phone on the table was proved to be effective, I left it there because I just thought it looked good within the frame but other people have expanded their opinions on it, which is what I always like about photography people can create their on interpretations of what you've created. I am planning on having the time lapse images on their own on each page of a hard or soft back book. I am going down the route of incorporating my phone and looking in to the miscommunication of modern technology when using our phones. I will play around with different types of text that is used on mobile phones. At the beginning of my book I when writing my introduction I will use ordinary text you find in books.

Whilst discussing this idea I mentioned that I had recently got in contact with a friend from school who I haven't spoke to in 8 years. Obviously I found him over Facebook. He was a lovely friend whilst I was at school and I remember he was really quite when I spoke to him face to face but on MSN he would always be chatting away and always had a lot more to say. I want to base this story within the publication narrative and now that I am back in contact with him I want to use our text conversations to go with the still images on the train journey. I'm not going to tell him that he's apart of my project that will ruin the fun. When writing my preface for the start of my book I want to write something about him and the relationship we have via our phones.

Hollie xD

After the review

After my review on Friday I was told that the beginning of my experimental video with the train going passed was successful and that I should carry on with that but make it longer and cut the other video of me and Sammi out of it. To be honest I am totally fine with that I can use my experiments I've used on adobe premiere to slow parts of the train journey down and capture more of what happens when then train stops and use the fading techniques with my audio as well, just some tweaking and hopefully it will be a successful final piece. For me time lapse is something I do for fun that's why I wanted to add more to my video but perhaps the first and simple video is more effective then adding more and over complicating it. I was also told I need to do more research in to artists and photographers which I did with a project last year I just didn't want to add the same research in... but its will show where I got my ideas from as I did want to carry on from last year as I enjoyed it so much... Maybe its something I can develop in more depth when I reach my 3rd year, who knows!

Kindly someone was taking notes for me whilst I was getting my feed back -

My notes

• Tacita Dean
• John Smith (already in sketch book)
• Eadweard Muybridge
• Paul Fusco -JFK train
• Rene Magritte - Painter who does frames within frames
• Play more with transitions, more subtly would be good.

'The narrative structure in the first part of your test works well, its the strongest part' - Ellen Nolan 

Audio practice with Adobe Premiere

I did this time lapse on my iPhone using iMotion. Its annoying because its got the black side bits which I don't know how to remove but also its wobbly because I'm holding my phone. I did like the positioning of phone but it proves I should really use my camera. I'm going to create another time lapse like this one so it fits with the rest of my videos. I was practicing using the audio settings in Premiere it was really fiddly when I started to create the music fade near the end of the video. Its not perfect but its a huge step in the right direction!

Hollie xD

Experiment 2 with Adobe Premiere Pro - Split screen

Just another little experiment with Adobe Premiere, I learn how to use the split screen technique just researching on YouTube it was pretty easy to do and now that I've learnt how I can continue experimenting for my final video piece!!

(There is no audio in the piece)

Hollie xD