Friday 18/10/20 - The Film

Editing the film itself was within my comfort zone as I've done this countless times for fun and even for a previous project. I decided on using the song III. Urn by rapper Childish Gambino due to the instrumentation and the meaning behind the song itself. It seems like a relatively chilled out and beautiful song due to the instruments and the way the vocals are sung. However, it's a song that explores themes of space, loneliness and death, all major aspects of the album it's from. I chose this specifically because the album, titled 'Because the Internet', looks at themes similar to my own. Whilst I wanted to look at the future and the good and bad that may be yet to come, Gambino looked at the age of the internet and the best and worst of it. His covers internet culture and how it can fill the feelings of isolation and loneliness but when it boils down to it a lot of it is fake. How information and knowledge can be spread without there actually being any meaning.

This is the music video for the song I chose.

For more added context on the album there was a short 24 minute film made by Childish Gambino

I started the short film with a quote that I felt really fit the ideas I was trying to cover well, this was shortly followed by a fade to black until the video kicked in alongside the song. My footage and cuts were timed with the beats and lyrics of the music, I wanted to give the impression that it was a music video. I then cut in footage of 3 different things, a rocket taking flight, rioting and a nuclear explosion. These were to show the good and bad of the future, the rocket being the ambition of 'reaching the stars' and the other two for the conflicts that could come with the advancement of technology. I intercut this between my shots of the two different people standing alone in the same spot as if they were alone in their thoughts. One to represent the two sides of the future. All of this used distortion effects I added in post (inspired by my experimentation with the glass prism) to add a dream-like and nostalgic feel. This was also based off the effect given by an anamorphic lense.

The film also purposely never lets you see the full face of the two people, only their eyes. It's to represent the ambiguity as to what will happen. I closed my film on the shot of the cybernetic hand close followed by static. The arm belongs to the person representing the darker future, it ended up costing a physical part of themselves, and the focus on it is their realisation of all this.

When it comes to criticisms of this work my main focus is on the technical side, I lost a lot of quality due to the unstable nature of the footage and through the compression that came with using a program on my phone as a camera. I know that next time I will be using a gimbal and the plain old camera function on my phone, or I will use a canon instead. As for my VFX I know that this was only my first attempt so it looks very amateur but the benefit now is I can do it again and I'll have more time to focus on making the quality higher since I already know how to do it to a lower standard. I will also be able to experiment with more features in blender and get myself more used to how it works. Overall I am happy with how this turned out, I experimented heavily and turned a painting about the glorification of war and turned it into a short film talking about the aspects of the future and the good / bad it could bring.