OK, that's two weeks of Image done.

Lots of male hair in the student group.
My shaggy locks are fitting right in.
I reckon I managed to work with almost everyone in the group.

Character begins next week. As in ‘acting.’
Not sure if I’m looking forward to it, but it’s a bloody important part of the process so ‘bring it on.’

This is a brief summary of the ‘Image’ course (art happens in your head.)

The 'image'
First day was all bout what makes a 'classic image.'
Lot’s of slides o black and white photography.

We split into groups and were sent out to recreate a classic image.

Then we had to change it...

Colour
Telling story with colour.
You know how it goes, Red is sexy, blue is introverted, yellow is warm, and purple is for mystery.

Lighting
Spent the entire day in a studio learning bout lighting.
We then got to play with the lights.
What’s the difference between a Redhead and a Blond?
Bounced light is your friend.
Watch out for hot metal.

Lighting exercise

Movement
Telling a story with the camera.
Where you put it and what you point it at.
Trust in an audience’s ability to suck in information.
Human
eye has about forty five degrees of view. Therefore wide angle lens
tend to unsettle us (mind you IMHO, everybody likes wide angle on their
cameras cause it’s more unsettling to have a small field of view in our
images. What are we missing?)
‘Locked off’ cameras tend to make us feel restricted.
Left to right movement across a frame gives us the impression of forward movement.

We were shown the axe scene from The Shining where the camera looks like it’s locked to the head of the axe.
Bit of North by Northwest where Cary Grant is attacked by the crop dusting plane.
Finally
a clip from Blade runner where a scene between Decker and Rachael where
the camera is ‘locked off’ for most of the piece until a dramatic
moment where a close-up of Rachael is gently vibrating in sympathy with
her ‘high emotion.’

Practical for the day was to shoot a suspenseful scene with three shots.

Suspense exercise

We
found a place in the school with red walls which ramped up the ‘colour
emotion,’ and I pushed the highlights into green in Post, so that the
glass walls increased the contrast with the red walls.
Also crushed the shadows a bit to darken the tone.

VFX
We
had a short talk on the history of VFX. Then we were down in studio
shooting footage of us goofing around in front of a green screen.

Green screen exercise:
Spent a day fooling around with our clips from the day before in After Effects.

Green screen exercise

Pulling
a matte was hard on the people who had no experience o compositing. I
was impressed at how quickly everyone grasped the concepts and got
'something' out of After Effects.
The software situation is a bit difficult for some. There are folks doing the course that have never used Photoshop!
Extra classes have been organized by the school.

Final exercise
Final two days were devoted to teams creating pieces which create emotional attachment with an inanimate object.
This is our piece…

Final exercise

We’ve been pointed to two books as reference.
Adventures in the screen trade by William Golburn, and Story by Robert Mckey.