Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art-Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
BRIGHT STAR 2012
Created by Alexander J. Ward & Rachael Woollard Starring Chloe Johnston & Jason O’Donovan
Introduction The 2012 ninety-second film Bright Star is the result of two Graphic Design students’ engagement with a moving image brief. Based on the poetry of John Keats and the artwork of Fiona Banner, the film follows The Girl (Chloe Johnston), a 21st Century woman whose monotonous life is dominated by business calls and work forms, with no time for romance. She receives a love-letter, which she reads whilst walking to one of the many destinations of her busy workday. However, she soon finds herself lost within the words of the poem as passion begins to emerge within her life…
John Keats 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821 John Keats was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of romantic poets. Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his life, his reputation grew after his death, so that by the end of the 19th century he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. The poetry of Keats is characterized by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analyzed in English literature.
Bright Star 2009 Directed by Jane Campion London 1818: A secret love affair begins between 23-year-old English poet, John Keats (Ben Whishaw), and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish), an outspoken student of high fashion. This unlikely pair begins at odds, he thinking her a stylish minx, while she is unimpressed, not only by his poetry but by literature in general. However, when Fanny hears that Keats is nursing his seriously ill younger brother, her efforts to help touch Keats, and when she asks him to teach her about poetry, he agrees. When Fanny's alarmed mother and Keats' best friend finally awake to their atttachment, the relationship has an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers are swept deeply into powerful new sensations.
The film allowed us to consider the heavily romantic themes of the poem in a visual context. Typefaces and imagery from Bright Star (2009) were considered for our ninety second moving image piece but ultimately many of these design decisions were based on the context of our film set within the Twenty-first Century as opposed to the 2009 film’s Ninteenth-Century setting.
Fiona Banner Born 1966 Much of Fiona Banner’s work explores the problems and possibilities of written language. Her early work took the form of ‘wordscapes’ or ‘still films’ – blow-by-blow accounts written in her own words of feature films, which varies from war to porn. These pieces took the form of solid single blocks of text, often the same shape and size as a cinema screen. Banner’s current work encompasses sculpture, drawing and installation but text is still at the heart of her practice. She recently turned her attention to the idea of the classic, art-historical nude, observing a life model and transcribing the pose and form in a similar vein to her earlier transcription of films.
Adjustment 2006 Directed by Ian Msckinnon Adjustment traces the break-up of a relationship precipitated by and relived through an obsessive requirement by the film's narrator to record events the two have shared. The part animation, part filmed drama is extraordinary in that it becomes something of a manifesto for flip books.
We viewed Adjustment early in the design process, during the stages when different mediums were being considered for the final outcome. The film demonstrates a variety of technical processes of film and animation, which aided us in our ultimate decision to follow a route of film-based work.
Take On Me 1985 Directed by Steve Barron The video named as the third best of all time by MTV. In the video we find a girl reading a comic about motorcycle racing in a busy cafe, when all of a sudden, after staring intently at the handsome hero in the comic, a sketchy hand reaches out and grabs hers, pulling her into the comic. The girl gets caught up in the world inside the comic, becoming romantically involved with the rugged hero.
The music video was a significant influence during the early stages of production of the moving image outcome. At this point we were considering working through the process of rotoscoping film footage and recompiling it into a ninety-second animation. Ultimately we decided that, due to time limitations, a film –based process would be the most efficient approach to the project and the animation idea was scrapped.
The Wizard of Oz 1939 Directed by Victor Fleming
Based on the 1900 children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, the film is notable for its use of special effects, Technicolor, fantasy storytelling and unusual characters, It has become, over the years, one of the best known of all films.
The sepia tones utilized during the film’s Kansas setting heavily contrasts the bright colours set in the Land of Oz. These juxtaposing colour schemes provided inspiration for our film’s palette, allowing us to use the passionate nature of colour emerging within a dull, desaturated, black and white setting, in a similar attempt of providing a sense of optimism and fantasy in the Land of Oz in contrast to the monotony of Kansas.
Sin City 2005 Directed by Frank Miller & Robert Rodriguez Four tales of crime adapted from Frank Miller's popular comics, focusing around a muscular brute who's looking for the person responsible for the death of his beloved Goldie, a man fed up with Sin City's corrupt law enforcement who takes the law into his own hands after a horrible mistake, a cop who risks his life to protect a girl from a deformed pedophile, and a hitman looking to make a little cash.
After deciding on alternating between a black and white and full colour palette, Sin City provided a unique film approach in terms of stylization. The almost harsh emphasis on primary colours provides an effective emphasis on specific narrative elements. However, this approach proved to be too severe for our moving image piece, which, as a romantically themed film, required a far more delicate contrast.
Resident Evil: Afterlife 2010 Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson In a world ravaged by a virus infection, turning its victims into the Undead, Alice (Jovovich), continues on her journey to find survivors and lead them to safety. Her deadly battle with the Umbrella Corporation reaches new heights, but Alice gets some unexpected help from an old friend. A new lead that promises a safe haven from the Undead takes them to Los Angeles, but when they arrive the city is overrun by thousands of Undead - and Alice and her comrades are about to step into a deadly trap.
The opening sequence to the fourth film in the Resident Evil film franchise played a significant role in the typographic decisions of our moving image piece. The film embeds text within an environment and over footage in a very fluent and dramatic way, revealing the opening credits behind realword objects and placed across the footage with consideration for composition and legibility.
Pleasantville 1998 Directed by Gary Ross A brother and sister from the 1990s are sucked into their television set and suddenly find themselves trapped in a 1950s style television show. Here they have loving parents, old fashioned values, and an overwhelming amount of innocence and naivete. Not sure how to get home, they integrate themselves into this "backwards" society and slowly bring some color to this black and white world. But as innocence fades, the two teens begin to wonder if their 90s outlook is really to be preferred.
The film’s emergence of colour is done via a subtle contrast against the monochromatic greys of Pleasantville. One of the key influences of our moving image piece, the film delicately integrates colour within the environment slowly and with significance; the materialization of colour mirrors the materialization of life and passion that the people of Pleasantville are beginning to feel, a sequence found in the final moving image outcome in which colour bleeds into the imagery as the protagonist continues to read the passionate love-letter.
Initial Concepts
Storyboards