Lens Based Media 210MC Tom Mellish

Hard Ball Behind The Scenes

mellisht21 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 16:25:28 +0000

Evaluation

I made this piece as an extra to a short film that I photographed. I recorded sound as well as taking photographs, and this piece reflects the overall atmosphere of the set. Not busy, but productive and quiet. The short film is about a boy whose dad is ignoring him and goes to the pub instead of giving him attention. The boy and his friend put bricks in a football and leave it outside a pub for his dad to kick when he walks out, drunk.

When I got told the outline for this film, the first pictures I had in my head were feature films such as This is England, Billy Elliot, and Dead Mans Shoes. I imagined the colours to be slightly washed out and desaturated, but not so much that it just looks grey and dull. The English working class style film with orangey reds, grey blacks and grainy.

So from having this image of what this film would look like, I decided to make this piece using stills and sound my interpretation of final images. With all the images, I increased the saturation and contrast slightly and then adjusted the primary colours curves until I was happy with the image I had. Then I added a black border with a vignette fade towards the edges.

If I got the chance to do this assignment again, I would take some more time thinking of the structure of the piece. I’m very happy with the presentation of the images but the progression of the video is slightly disjointed. But overall I am happy with how I came up with this idea and my work pace. I liked working on my own for the majority of the time

David Creedon

mellisht21 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:18:07 +0000

Creedon is famous for his photgraphy series of Ireland. An Irish man himself, he began photographing bands in his early teens.

He has made a series of run down houses in Ireland that have been left for years to rott and fall apart. I like the colours and framing of his photos, but I feel that he’s set them up a lot and based them too much around the Catholic religon. Which ofcourse captures the feel of Ireland, but he has clearly moved these settings around to capture that feel.

Maeve Berry

mellisht21 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:09:12 +0000

Maeve Berry is famous for her photgraphs of the cremation process called Incandescene. These photos capture the transformation from a past away body, to ash. She takes these photos through the peephole that cremators use to keep an eye on the body.

I really like this series of hers because they are a different sort of photography of the dead. A lot of series focus on freshly dead bodies in post mortem like (name here) – (pictures). Or the death of war. But these photos are of a very quiet process, a body slowly burning away. They’re not bloody or gorry, you could look at them and imagine it to be anything.

The lighting in all of her photos really captures that burning look, because ofcourse she has no lighting. These photos weren’t pre planned and set up. The light is from the fire, and that’s why I really like these, what you see is what you get. A burning body.

Eric Lusito

mellisht21 — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 16:39:56 +0000

“For almost fifty years the world lived under the shadow of the Cold War, and the fear of
an apocalyptic confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union. But after the rise of
Mikhail Gorbachev to the Soviet leadership there followed a series of tumultuous events that would eventually culminate in the fall of the regime founded by Lenin and Stalin.

Eric Lusito has travelled throughout the former Soviet world from East Germany to Mongolia,
from Poland to Kazakhstan, in search of these former Soviet military bases and his photographs
are an extraordinary record. As the USSR crumbled many bases were simply abandoned.
A few still remain – traces of a once powerful Empire – yet over time they too are beginning
to disappear. The military departed but much else was just left behind.”

Eric Lusito’s photographs capture the impact of the fall of such a strong military power. In terms of image quality, I feel that his pictures are very natural. You can tell that he probably uses a normal SLR but doesn’t put them in to photo shop like a lot of other photographers do. The colours are very drab, dull and grey, which really captures the emptiness of these places.

Final Idea

mellisht21 — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:58:49 +0000

My idea for my final piece involving stills and sound came during a process that didn’t really have anything to do with the module. I was taking photos for Mike Billingham’s video fiction group for their production folder. I reviewed the images and adjusted some of them and started to get some ideas. I thought about making a piece that documents the behind the scenes process of the story through audio and stills.
Initially I was under the impression that there had to be a clear narrative within the piece and I couldn’t get round this. It was difficult to keep track of everything that was going on because I sometimes found myself helping them instead of watching for arguments or dilemmas. But after talking to Clifton, I now realise that there doesn’t need to be a clear narrative within the piece.

The video is a documentation of a fictional video making process. The images will be presented with my interpretation of the film. So the colours, saturation and framing will be how I imagine the short movie to look. The sound track for the piece will be sounds from the scenes seen in the images.

Here are some examples of the images so far. These are the colours that I will be using for my video

And these following photos are from the first shoot. The colours in these are nice but are not how I imagine the film to look, so I won’t be using images with this colouring.

Ansel Adams

mellisht21 — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:15:02 +0000

Adams was a photographer of the pre-digital era, he past away in 1984 after being best known for his black and white photographs of the American West. Adams developed the zone system with Fred Archer, as a way of determining the proper exposure and contrast of the final photo. This and his use of large format cameras resulted in intensely sharp images because of their high resolution.

At the age of twelve, he taught himself the piano and read music and he pursued this as his career, but ultimately ended up in photography and a passion for nature drew him to environmentalism. Some of his most famous photographs were taken in the Yosemite National Park, California where he did a lot of environmentalist work. In particular, the photo Moon and Half Dome.

Here are some more of my favorite photos from him. I plan to go to Norway after Easter and will be taking a lot of inspiration from these photos while i’m there.

Carl Wooley

mellisht21 — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 22:19:29 +0000

Carl Wooley is a New York based photographer. He has done some short movies and several series of photos. Included such ones as “In the rose garden, get in the car, and night”. From looking at the pictures, I get the impression that he enjoys to experiment with light a lot. Most of his pictures seem to be focused around either a light source, or the main focus of the picture is lit up vividly. These two pictures from his “get in the car” series demonstrates this.

In this the main subject is the man in the chair, but the two lights above him are also in the upper the third

In this the scene is lit by a strong light source and has dominating shadows

Wooley’s most famous series is probably “night”, a series of empty areas lit up and taken with long exposures. When looking at these images, you do begin to think about the sounds you would hear in the background of the dead of night

Night

I’m unsure if I want to say that “night” is my favourite of his series, because as I started writing this, it was. But as I look through all of his pictures, I’ve begun to enjoy his “amsterdam nacht” series. It’s very similar to “night”, because they are taken at night with long exposures and really nice lighting. But they seem busy, even though there is no action in them. They still have that quiet night time setting, but inner city rather than the empty car park feeling.

He has also done some really pleasing landscape photos mostly following the rule of thirds that I just want to throw in at the end here.

The Sandpit by Sam O’hare

mellisht21 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 19:11:14 +0000

This is a beautiful example of Tilt Shift photography used with video. Sam O’Hare isn’t particularly well known, but I stumble across this video while randomly browsing the internet.
I love how the shots in this are completely static and from a high angle, but there is always a lot of activity in every one. It wouldn’t look the same if it was played at normal speed though.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

Task 3 – Sound

mellisht21 — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 16:23:14 +0000

Task 3 – Epic

mellisht21 — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:06:11 +0000

I tackled this “Epic” task head on by thinking about the most obvious things that epic stood for. The first things that came to mind were big things such as buildings, landscapes and planets.