I wanted to develop the paper lens caps I made, so that I could create a stronger/clearer image. I created black circles on a word document at 3.6cm and then put white symbols or words in the middle. They looked liked this....
I then printed the circles onto acetate....
Whereas the images inside the circle on the lens cap weren't clear, now the image was much clear and this created a better image and visual for the audience. I was also able to create a new effect whereby I shot through the lens cap. This was possible because the acetate was more transparent than the card.
Below are screenshots from films that have inspired us when planning the style of our cinematography.
Our main inspiration was experimental film project, 'The Words of Bokeh'. This film inspired me to learn the technique and have this as the main theme. The Words of Bokeh spells out a phrase throughout the film to the audience. This was the inspiration of our narrative, and we decided to spell out Harry Potter quote, "Not All Those That Wander Are Lost". As you can see above, this film also inspired me to use brighter lights within my cinematography. The brighter the light, the clearer the image. Because the audience need to be able to read the words, a clear image is needed to maintain the focus of the audience. Brighter colours are also more visually captivating to the audience.
The reason why The Words of Bokeh is original compared to other films that use the technique, is because it blurs natural sunlight into words. This was difficult because the sun needs to be a certain brightness in order to blur a symbol. Ultimately, I was able to blur a symbol from sunlight reflecting on the waves crashing against the shore. I wanted to show a broad visual for our audience. I didn't want all of the lights to be in darkness, so the importance of the day times shots was high, and I loved the overall balance of night and day in our final film and thought that it was visually effective.
In a youtube tutorial that I found, I was inspired to merge the colours of the blurs together. I loved how all the different colours that would usually clash were visually pleasing in the footage. Because we do not have a conventional linear narrative, we needed to engage our audience visually. The mergence of colours certainly engaged our audience, and the feedback on this was outstanding, and audience members commented on how they loved the gradient blurs.
The final shot of our film was inspired by Bokeh Beautiful, which is an experiment on creating original bokeh blurs, without manipulating the shape of the light. Once again I was captivated by the mergence of colours and how the opacity of the lights change when moving the camera. These shots were intriguing to our audience because of the changing opacity and the merging colours an how colours spread out over the screen.
The opening of Love Bokeh show a wet vehicle with bokeh lights shining through. I wanted to develop this idea and show a single drip traveling down the window. Our main theme is travel, so I wanted to show different types of travel, whether it be common or whether it be something small like a drop of water traveling down a window pane.
Our film challenged the conventions of experimental bokeh films is through cinematography. We decided that we liked the effect of using the lens caps as a vignette. This was visually engaging, especially when a seagull flew through the bird lens cap. It would have been better if the black background were darker, and less transparent. We would have also work better if the shape in the centre had been cut out. This would have created a less smoky image in the centre of the screen.
Poster - Inspiration/Development/Challenge
When researching film posters, I came across this poster for the film Martha Marcy May Marlene. I liked how the character image was shielded by the Letter "M". I thought this was very visually engaging and quirky, so I tried developing this technique and having four separate images behind our title, "BLUR". Our audience liked the use of colours and the quirky idea of having four separate images that show the genre of our film.
However, Marth Marcy May Marlene was a more saturated release compared to our art house film. We started looking at experimental film posters to see what information they put on them.
We found that most posters have who the film director/production team is, with no distribution or release information. This is why we put little information on our poster. If audience wanted to find our more about the project, they could look on our youtube/vimeo/twitter and facebook pages.
If we were to improve our final poster we could put social networking and online distribution links at the bottom in smaller print. This is so our audience knows exactly what website to go to instead of going through search engines like google or yahoo.
Review Page - Inspiration/Following conventions
We didn't feel the need to challenge or develop the conventions of a review page. Most magazines keep the same template because readers are used to and expect the same quality from every issue they purchase.
Daze of Wonder was the inspiration when creating our review page. When researching the different types of review pages we needed to focus our search to magazines that would promote experimental films. We found that the magazine Sight and Sound promoted saturated and niche films. We deconstructed the design of the magazines initially and found what we liked and didn't like. We liked the simple layout, and our audience felt that a simple layout made the magazine more engaging and easier to read. The language used is for students/professionals, and we liked that this magazine targeted a maturer audience. When promoting our film we wanted to target students and professionals that have a broad/deep interest and knowledge of the field. The font we used was a font that is used in other products that our target audience are interested in. When asking our audience members they said that they relate to this font because they have purchased, seen or watched this font on other reliable products. We wanted audiences to relate our font to a reliable product so that they were intrigued in our film.
If we were to improve our review, we could put a page number and date at the bottom to make it feel more like a professional magazine.
Below is the final film that myself and Jess annotated showing the conventions and how we challenged these.
