Final Piece

https://vimeo.com/114542550

Here is the link to our finished piece of work that we made a group for presentation. I feel like it really delivers a sense of uncanny and we are very proud of our piece. 

Production Report

Our idea for the workshop group project was something that Louis largely came up with. Inspired by ‘The Mirror’ [1] and also in part ‘Eraserhead’ [2] due to the brief that specified that we should work to give our piece an ‘uncanny’ feel, we decided to incorporate various aspects of the set design that those two films had included in their own sets.

Our base idea was that of two parents and a child. We wanted the child to be something horrific- this is where we drew the inspiration from Eraserhead. As there is no sound in our film, we decided to hopefully incorporate the visual effect of lights dimming as one of the parents gets closer to the child. This would set the tone to the piece, also incorporating in the uncanny. I did a lot of research into painting and designing the set more like those two films as a main inspiration, finding out alternate ways to painting that would also help achieve the effect that we were after.

For me, one of my inspirations for our piece came from the words of Mashiro Mori, a roboticist that tried to explain where our feeling of uncanny when faced with almost human like objects or things. He forwarded the 'Uncanny Valley' hypothesis, in which that being 'almost' like a human being causes feelings of repulsion [3], which is something that we wanted to create in our film. Of course, all of these findings of the uncanny had been built upon from when Sigmund Freud published 'Das Unheimlich' where he speaks of the reanimation of people or characters and the animation of characters or people that it should never be possible to be animated at all. When put into a mundane setting, outside of fairytales, the uncanny becomes a betrayal to the watcher- "he deceives us by promising to give us the sober truth, and then after all overstepping it" [4]

['Das Unheimliche' by Knut Larsson]

Louis and I had previously cut out a window in one of our flats, which then Bronte and I affixed. This window was created for green screen purposes, as what we planned to do was to put streetlights outside the window to create the idea of a bigger world- and to have the lights turn off with every step of the male actor towards the ‘baby’ to further the sense of uncanny and also to give us the experience with the VFX.

For our set, we wallpapered our four flats, to give them a textured appearance once we painted them a brown colour. We then stippled brown and red over the brown paint, and once dried it gave a grimy appearance. Once everything was dried, we then went over with a different, textured and patterned wallpaper in white. I then went over the wallpaper with a tea solution and a stippled brush, to give it a more dated feel- and as that was drying I started to peel the wallpaper back so that it dried and gave a crisp old feel on the parts that were exposed of the brown underneath. This was to give an appearance of the set like the bedroom in ‘The Mirror’ which is what we were basing our wall décor of, even though the colour scheme of ours was slightly different as we did not use light colours to increase the appearance of the ‘Uncanny’. Browns and other dark colours formed the basis of our set, to give it a feel of being abandoned and something to beware of.

I wasn’t sure during the set building process whether the end product would be what had been envisioned, but as we started to get towards the end of building and wallpapering the set I saw that it was beginning to come together better than I had imagined. I feel like just the set itself helped to create a sense of the uncanny. Freud had said that the uncanny was a ‘feeling or sensation’ [4] above anything else and I agree, and I think that looking at the set it gives off the sensation of strangeness and a general oddness that I think embodies uncanny.

It could possibly be improved further (and with more time) by the use of different flooring. We had planned to use a full linoleum tiled floor that Jessica had set aside for us, but the means of transportation just weren’t possible and therefore we weren’t able to get it to Sheffield in time for filming. Also, I would have painted the flats rather than have wallpapered them before painting them, as this wasted some time and I don’t think the results warranted the use of the wallpaper which was a costly expense and also seemed like a bit of a waste of time we could have been working on other things such as making our window more realistic, and less like a hole in the wooden flat.

Working in the group I feel like I did my fair share of work, both during pre and post production. I had a major hand in set building and gathering methods that we could use in the process. Both Louis and I came in on various days to put up the set and I also went to buy various supplies and give input in these decisions. Unfortunately I wasn’t there for the filming, but I supplied Louis with a potential shot list and I had storyboarded a potential scene that could have been filmed so that I did not have zero contribution to filming. In post-production, as I have my own copy of Final Cut Pro I was able to have quite a large input into the finished scene. For green screen however, we had to all be present for workshops that were amazingly informative and it wasn't too hard to learn how to layer the green screen so that you could put a video in the background of the film. 

We didn't use much green screen in our scene as we had a short video to put into the backdrop, rather than the complicated green screen that other groups had. Louis provided the CGI that we then put onto our footage in After Effects, which worked better than I had thought but not to the realism we had hoped. We also experimented with other people’s footage to gain the skills of motion tracking that we couldn’t really achieve with our own footage, as it was not needed. We used Tyler's group’s footage for this, as they had a woman that could be motion tracked across the screen and this practise then helped us with the motion tracking in our own. The raining blood Visual Effect that we wanted to use was unrealistic but we had no other options available to us in After Effects- and we simply assembled in Final Cut Pro rather than edited so we were unable to use those effects as Final Cut Pro had been deleted off the university iMacs.

All in all I think that we worked together to make a piece well, although we had some setbacks such as other peoples sets being viewable in our footage. However I personally feel like I learnt a lot, from making the effects myself straight onto the set to using green screen and re-learning how to do motion tracking on After Effects. There's now a lot more things that I can do after this module than before, and it's sparked a further interest into visual effects and SFX. I think more workshops would have been beneficial in the long run, but the ones that we did get were good in quality and helped with the specific effects that we were looking for.

I think our weaknesses are definitely the footage itself which we shot, which is a shame as the angle of the cameras were obviously not checked on the day but something that we had to move forward and work with regardless. The set itself was a success in terms of how we wanted to achieve it, and using tools and joinery to achieve it was a skill I did not know prior to the module, which I consider a success. However, I would have positioned our set differently, as we did not realise that other sets would be in the background of our shots at a certain angle until it was too late to rectify this. I also like our effects on our final piece, which although may seem a little unrealistic, do give a sense of uncanny and we did do our best with the resources and knowledge that we had. However, it does give it an otherworldly feel which in itself is a sense of uncanny, as the lack of realism makes you wonder whether you are looking at a film shot in this world, or not. With as the window being a 'hole to another dimension' and the blood rain, it makes the audience question whether they are looking at a true film or not.

Word Count: 1505

References.

1.    The Mirror, 1975. Film. Dir. Andrei Tarskovsky. Mosfilm, Soviet Union.

2.    Eraserhead, 1977. Film. Dir. David Lynch. American Film Institute, USA.

3.    Kawaguchi, J (10 March 2011). "Robocon founder Dr. Masahiro Mori". Words To Live By. Japan Times. p. 11. Archived from the original on 13/03/2013. Retrieved 02/12/2014.

4.     Frued, S (1919). 'Das "Unheimlich" [online].  http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html Retrieved 04/12/2014

Editing

Over the past few days we have been coming in to edit our work from what we learnt in workshops. It has been difficult editing as we have had some problems with the RAM on the PC's at university and accessing the Q drive to get our work and edit other work. We managed to make the best with the footage that we had and I think that the result is rather uncanny and although the effects aren't the most realistic they do work.

 

 

I learnt a lot from editing and the workshops that we took part in during the course. I didn't have much experience with motion tracking and green screen and yet I managed to eventually be able to do both of these things and I think that it really helped with our final piece that we had these workshops. We all learnt a great deal from them.

Our blood rain effect isn't as great as I thought it would be, but that is largely due to the fact that After Effects simply didn't have the facilities to make a realistic blood rain effect. Therefore, our blood rain is a mostly white colour due to the opacity as we tried to make it as realistic as we possibly could. That meant compromising the thickness of the rain also, as there was a limit to what could achieved in After Effects- as most of the tutorials on YouTube required a third party plug-in to After Effects that we couldn't put onto the PC's at the university.

We managed to get around the RAM situation by making sure that the linear editing was done on Final Cut and then editing the CGI and effects on After Effects instead. This was very time consuming however and set back our editing quite a bit. Also, Jessica had some problems with her accommodation which meant that she wasn't able to join us in editing very often as she wasn't allowed to go back to get any of her work that would help us, although that was obviously out of her control.  

 

 We also added a title sequence that I think splits up the beginning of the footage and makes it more uncanny and strange, which was a good idea on Louis part. In the end I think that we did the best we could with the footage we had, as we couldn't do individual edits due to the problem with the Q drive.

We also had some problems with rendering the work as it took a long time to do so on the PC's. In the end however we managed to render everything and then put it back together in Final Cut. Finally then, when everything was rendered we were able to put it on Vimeo.

Uncanny Valley and Hyper-realism

An art exhibition called 'Lifelike' showcased a lot of uncanny art work internationally and from many different cultures. It shows paintings and works of art that are so frightening hyper-realistic that it gives off the sense of 'not right' and this is something we have tried to recreate in our film.

Hyper realism stems also into digital art, not just the tangible. For example, CGI has now become so hyper-realistic (such as 'Ed' by Chris Jones) that it is almost impossible to tell that it is no longer a real person. Which then makes us perceive it as a possible threat, as human likeness is no where near being the same as human, which causes something to be unpredictable.

This all stems from Jean Baudrillard, who I have also done some work on in the past at college. He called hyper-realism 'the simulation of something which never really existed.'[1] and therefore this is a new type of reality as the things never existed in ours- which makes us very wary. This then means that when it does cross into ours, we are instantly hostile the moment that we notice that this uncanny thing is among us.

Another man who explored the feeling of uncanny in relation to hyper-realism is Masahiro Mori, who was a roboticist who studied the feeling of uncanny people got when they recognised that something so lifelike was not human. He published this in the form of a hypothesis called 'the Uncanny Valley' [2] and even proposed a graph (this is a graph derived from the original content by Masahiro);

 

This is a very visual way of seeing how we perceive human likeness with 'the uncanny' which also effects the way that you would intentionally create this feeling in a film like we have tried to. By having something so human like, it is almost a betrayal to the water to then have it revealed as something so inhuman, despite the way others react around it.

 

Robots come heavily under the umbrella of the uncanny valley and that is easily seen by the amount of robot films that are made where they are humanoid and 'attempt to take over the world' or have similar desires. This uncanny distrust of humanoid beings stems back to the likeness they have with us yet being completely and inherently different right down to the core.

 

Hyper-realism ties into this, as the more realistic things become than the more we perceive them as a threat. For example from the graph above, we know industrial robots are just that- robots and therefore with their limited human likeness they do not fall into the uncanny valley. But the more human like you make something the more they can 'pass' as human, and when it is revealed they are not it is a hostile shock.

 

1. Jean Baudrillard, "Simulacra and Simulation", Ann Arbor Mich. University of Michigan Press, 1981
2. Kawaguchi, Judit (10 March 2011). "Robocon founder Dr. Masahiro Mori". Words To Live By. Japan Times. p. 11. Archived from the original on 13/03/2013. Retrieved 02/12/2014.

Filming

From what I heard about filming, Louis was responsible for the cinematography of the filming of the piece as he had the most vision about the piece and Bronte worked on the lighting of the set to make sure that the characters were properly illuminated. However, there was some problems with the lighting that meant we could not do the 'step by step' flickering of the lights that we had originally planned to do. This was a major set back as this was one of our main visual effects that we had been hoping to do, and therefore we had to think of something else quickly that would be just as effective.

 

Although I was not able to be there, I got regular updates on the filming of the piece. The green screen backdrop was something that we hadn't taken into account when moving characters in front of it, so we had to be really careful on the day although some parts of the green screen might still be compromised by the colour of the hat that Susannah was wearing but we won't know until we get the footage back.

 

The position of the camera was also a really hard thing to get right on the filming set Louis said, as it was nearly impossible from where we had positioned our set to not get Tyler's groups set in the background of our shots- this will have to be something that we will correct in the editing process as there was nothing that we could do about this.

 

 

Shot List for Filming

Here is the proposed shot list for the filming of our uncanny set-

Shots	Angle	Action
Shot 1	Mid Shot	Bess and Peter are both staring across each other’s eye line
Shot 2	Establishing Shot	An establishing shot of the room, and the two sitting there
Shot 3	Mid Shot	Cut back to Bess’s face, as she stares out the window scared
Shot 4	Long shot	A shot of the window at Bess’s eye line, the camera slowly moving forwards
Shot 5	Mid shot	Cut back to Pete’s face staring at the cot
Shot 6	Long shot	A shot of the Cot at Pete’s eye line, the camera slowly moving forwards
Shot 7	Mid shot	Cut back to Pete’s face staring at the cot
Shot 8	Long shot	A shot of the Cot at Pete’s eye line, the camera slowly moving forwards
Shot 9	Mid shot	Cut back to Pete’s face staring at the cot
Shot 10	Long- Mid shot	Pete stands up and starts to walk
Shot 11	Mid shot	A shot of the slider, as Pete slowly walks across to the cot
Shot 12	Close up	Bess becomes more agitated with each step Pete takes- The slider slowly moving on Bess’s face
Shot 12	Wide shot	Pete takes another step closer- slider
Shot 13	Close up	Bess comes more and more agitated, she wants to look over but is to scared, her eyes quickly glance
Shot 14	Mid Shot	Peter takes another step closer. He is within 3 yards now. Again on the slider
Shot 15	Mid Close up	Bess is on the verge of breaking
Shot 16	Close up	Pete’s feet take another step
Shot 17	Mid Close up	Bess, scared breaks into three different versions of herself. Film her being scared three times. Then overlay in editing.
Shot 18	Mid shot	Pete takes a quick glance back and then looks back at the cot
Shot 19	Mid close up	The camera slowly moves towards the cot
Shot 20	Mid shot	Peter takes another step. Darkness.
Shot 20	Low Angle	Peter is stood staring down at the cot. The light flickers allowing him to be seen.
Shot 21	High angle shot	Inside the cot, the ‘baby’ is covered by a white blood stained blanket. Peter pulls off the blanket
Shot 22	Close up	Camera on slider, slowly moves down the baby.
Shot 23	Medium shot	Peter picks out the baby and starts cradling it. Camera on the slider slowly moves away from them
Shot 24	Long shot	Bess is sat rocking in her chair with her head in her hands. Camera slowly moves away
Shot 25	Close up	Blood splatters onto the carpet
Shot 26	Close up	Peter takes one hand of the baby and holds it out. Blood starts splattering on his hand.
Shot 27	Long shot	Peter cradles the baby as it rains blood. The Camera slowly moves away from them.