Tom Lowe

I cam across Tom Lowe when I was looking at Phillip Blooms Vimeo Site. He creates ‘timescape’ films that are shot on canon 5ds. He is also 2010′s astronomy photographer of the year.

This film he has created is intense, I love that he has shot it using 8-foot Kessler Crane with the Shuttle Pod crane motor attachment and that the beginning of his film begins with a piece of footage which shows how he has set it up. Once the video changes into the view from the camera attached to the crane, it appears magical, and unreal. I love this piece of work.

I did begin to feel a bit threatened by how pristine  and clear his work is, and makes me feel like as though my work could not even compare to his quality. That video had been posted 5 months ago, and i noticed that on his Vimeo account he had work uploaded from 3 years ago. So I had a little look through his previous work.

His first piece of film was shot on a canon 350d SLR which is a lower spec range of canon. You can visually identify how his work has progressed over time and practice, so this has made me feel much more reassured, but still, all of Tom Lowes work is amazing!

Editing Images Into A Time Lapse Sequence

So once the images are taken for a time lapse, we need to know how to put them together into a film. I imagined this being probably quite a tedious task. Luckily Phillip Bloom has posted a video on how to edit them together, in a 10 minute long video. After watching it I now realise that it is quite an easy method and doesn’t really take too long to create.

Here is his video explaining how it is done…

He does all the uploading using quicktime, by selecting the folder which contains the images. Then finally he inputs and outputs his selected part of the film which can then be exported out as a time lapse film.

Shooting on a canon 5d will make the images incredibly heavy, which will make the whole end film a huge film. Phillip Bloom also continues to talk about editing the film in final cut pro, to make the image sizes smaller, so they fit within the screen more comfortable and also explains how to add digital zooms and panning with in the software.

Phillip Bloom

I came across this film maker when i was looking at shooting footage using the canon 5ds. Here  is one of his videos uploaded onto vimeo, which is a time lapse piece of Dubai from a duration of 5 days, condensed into a 5 minute piece of experimental film.

From watching this short film, I really like several key elements that he has used. Time lapse is a really good tool to capture a long amount of time which is then presented in a shorter period. It would be too much to watch the whole 5 days as we would lose attention to detail. With the time flying by rapidly, we can see changes to the scene quite intensely and it makes the audience stay engaged and interested in what is being shown. The different shots that Philip Bloom has actually captured are really important. He has switched lenses in different frames to gain the correct perspective. Moving from different levels whilst filming to gain a different viewpoint for different scenes. Phillip Bloom noted that he mostly shots in aperture priority mode on the camera to cope with the light change, and sometimes he would shoot in manual mode.

I am really interested in this time lapse method in film. Coming from a photography background, film and the moving image initially seems incredibly daunting for me, but time lapse is a series of photographs which are captured using a timer to be pieced together to create a final moving image piece.

Bloom has worked alongside Vimeo to produce basic tutorial video schools, and he has done one on how to film a time lapse.

The video is good, but it does seem like it will be a boring process but it could be something worth trying out for when i begin experimenting and capturing footage for my film. As we only have a one minute time limit on the film, no more no less, i think time lapse would be a suitable format to use, if i need to cram in a fast paced long scene in a short time.

Shooting in DSLR

Because I have access to canon 5d’s from the media loan store I will be using this to capture my footage for my final experimental piece. I am fairly familiar with using these cameras, but not so much with shooting in full high definition and using the video functions. I found an artist called Philip Bloom, who is a film maker and a director of photography. He has a section on his website for DSLR and he has some really good video tutorials about setting up your camera to get the best quality.

Birmingham Video Screen Shots

birmingham images

We were set a task to capture images around birmingham on our mobile phones. We could also take videos as well from the day. We will then use them to create a 30 second collage of the photos and videos.

Len Lyes Colour Box Link

Len Lye Exhibition

The first film we saw at the Birmingham Ikon Gallery was a 4 minute long film called Colour Box from 1935. Len Lye made this for the GPO film unit las an advertisement for the postal system.

The short film, Colour Box, was one of the first pieces of film where Len Lye had painted directly onto film. He used paint that had a certain amount of transparency so that when they are projected the bright colours would be vivid.

Having researched briefly into his work I discovered that he is heavily influenced by ancient aboriginal artwork., and after seeing his installation you can definitely see a connection between his work and the aboriginal art genre.

The film shows several frames of patterns and shapes, that are dancing about on the projection. I found that this use of experimental film was extremely different to any other I had seen before, and it is certainly a different theme used in advertising. It’s vibrancy and patterns brought in curiosity from me. This technique of motion across each frame was enticing and it really kept my eyes glued to the screen. With the addition of pulsating vibrant patterns, eccentric Cuban music and the all important message being conveyed, I think Len Lye’s film Colour Box, and many other of his films, are totally unique and he has definitely pioneered an inspiring genre.

As this was my first ever visit to a film exhibition, I found it really interesting and an inspiring experience. Also, Len Lye also works within kinesthetic sculptures, and a few of his pieces had been placed in the Ikon Gallery. It was great to see how the artist has investigated motion through different art mediums in a sucessful way.

Len Lye

This tuesdays class we are going to Birminghams Ikon gallery to view Len Lyes exhibition of films and scupltures. I haven’t seen any of his work before so I have researched into him so that I have a basic understanding of his work.

There is nothing worse then turning up to an exhibiton and not knowing any background infomation about the artist etc.

Being a virgin to film exhibitions I am quite excited about how I will react to seeing a moving image instalation, and I’m sure I will be questioning certain decisions to help develop my understanding.

Extract from Wikipedia:

As a student, Lye became convinced that motion could be part of the language of art, leading him to early (and now lost) experiments with kinetic sculpture, as well as a desire to make film. Lye was also one of the first Pākehā artists to appreciate the art of Māori, Australian Aboriginal, Pacific Island and African cultures, and this had great influence on his work.

Lye continued to experiment with the possibilities of direct film-making to the end of his life. In various films he used a range of dyes, stencils, air-brushes, felt tip pens, stamps, combs and surgical instruments, to create images and textures on celluloid. In Color Cry, he employed the “photogram” method combined with various stencils and fabrics to create abstract patterns. It is a 16mm direct film featuring a searing soundtrack by the blues singer Sonny Terry.

I think it will be interesting to see Len Lyes work as he seems to be more experimental within the production of his films, such as how they are created by directly paitning/drawing/etching onto the film, instead of being experimental with in the narrative and purpose of the film like we have seen from more recent and current film makers (Christian Marclay and Bill Viola)

I look forward to the exhibition this tuesday for several different reasons, mainly being introduced into film exhibitons, and also to visually see Len Lyes techniques and influences in his films.

Also I have avoided Youtubing his work to see his work initially at the gallery.

How time is used in film

As an audience to a film we accept that time can be used and especially unused in certain ways. An easy example to explore is a journey from one place to another. It can be portrayed in several ways. One way would be that this journey is the key element to the narrative, and it is spread out throughout the duration with a rollercoaster styled structure. This being the ups and downs along the journey that make it easy or difficult along the way. The film Road Trip is one that comes to mind. The film follows the journey of a student travelling from his college to his girlfriends to try to intercept a tape that she was not meant to see. The “road trip” is spread out, showing the different scenarios that occur throughout the travel, until he reaches her college and then the film begins to wind down to the ending.

In a contrasting effect, the journey in a film such as kill bill, where she take a plane journey from america to japan (which in real life would be a long and boring process) is condensed down to the basics, so the audience can understand where she is travelling to and from. The journey may be an important element to the film, but what is more important is her destination, so the film does not wind down when she reaches japan, but actually the narrative developed and continued much further, before it even thinks about concluding.

Although these two completely different relations to time are at opposite ends of the scale, they actually both have one important similarities. The similarity is so that the audience remains engaged and involved with the narrative and continues to keep watching. If Road Trip didn’t have the rollercoaster journey from A to B then it would simply be a smooth drive, where as the audience needs to keep being fed the bumpy road so that they do not switch off part way through. Similarly, but done in a different way, speeding up the journey from America to Japan in Kill Bill is done because although Japan is the important location in which she needs to get to, so the journey actually doesn’t take place between one country to another, the journey actually continues after the journey. If the plane flight was played out longer then it needs be then the audience would get bored following, as it is not a fundemental part of its narative.