Words In Motion : communicating with words and images
i visited her on a sunday.
Siena Clarke
tom hobbs
introduction
For our Words In Motion project we picked the poet Ian MacMillan and the artist Ellen Gallagher. At first, after only minor research, we thought the two were not going to gell in a film setting, but on closer inspection we found a certain poem called ‘I Visited Her on a Sunday’ that worked well with Gallagher’s 50’s reminiscent style. The poem tells the story of a man who seems to have developed Alzheimer’s throughout the poem, and forgets the days of events and plans he has made along with actual time scales, which corresponded well with Gallagher’s style of slightly spooky, faceless subjects shown in old collage.
i visted her on a sunday, and she said that it was monday. i said no, it’s sunday and she said no, it,s monday. i sulked. sunday, i said. monday she said. sunday i said, monday she said. we argued for a day, and it was monday. now it’s monday i said. and you can guess the rest.
poem choice
the arguement went on and the days changed, we were always one day behind, one day infront, one day ahead and one day behind. this went on for fifteen years. then i had a call from my wife. “ you’ve been away for fifteen years” she said, her voice rising and oddly welsh. “did you manage to find the cauliflower?” dinner’s ruined anyway. those fifteen years were the best of my life, in many ways.
ellen gallagher
intial ideas and process
Ellen Gallagher’s work reflects a more commercial or advertising perspective; in lots of her pieces she uses slogans or brand identities, which was really difficult to bring into our film. However we decided to home in more on the nostalgic and aged feel of her pieces and use the 8mm film app for iphone. Gallagher’s main influences were Agnes Martin (painter) and Gertrude Stein (writer), who are directly visible in many of her works both film and still images.
after reading the poem through, it didint initially make any sense, but after reading it a few times, we started to pick out some connotations from it. it conotes early stages of dementia and altzhiemers. the poem speaks in first person, which looking back, really worked well for us as we shot the film in a first person’s point of view and communicated the text that way too.
research and development
we researched many aspects of both gallagher and macmillan’s lives and work, finding several interesting points to follow from a design and film point of view. we struggled to focus on one of these, as the ideas we came up with all sounded effective and fitting to the project, only they would have been much more time consuming than what we needed to achieve. after looking up 50’s and 60’s style fonts we found one called ‘ballpark’ which fitted with our vision.
we stumbled upon a condition that is a sympton of alzheimer’s, which is as yet technically unnamed, causing the blind spot that everyone has to become clouded in a way by memories or other thoughts not present at the time. so the subject will experience patches of other information in their eye, making them disorientated and confused. we thought using this technique within our film would be beautiful, mysterious and would hit upon the more unusual aspects of the poem. we sketched separating the screen into background, that would contain the main substance of the film, and a blurry circle in the top right hand corner, containing nostalgic footage e.g. countryside walks. lots of the research time was spent trying to find elements of the film that we could match up with both gallagher and macmillan, as they have such a different outlook on their own works.
design process
we did plenty of film tests, using typewriters, cups of tea, imagery explaining the lines of the poem one by one, before we decided that each would be too complicated and time consuming to film well before the deadline. this is when we hit upon the idea of making the poem into a journey, starting in a garden, so that the subject begins disorientated, and ending as the poem does, with the main character coming home, unlocking the door, putting his keys down and putting on the kettle.
we experimented with finding type in natural situations when coming into a home or walking along the street, but we would have had to use hand written typography which would have illiminated the 50’s/60’s advertising style fonts, slightly cutting gallagher’s influence out of the aesthetic.
so we decided to create the type in photoshop and plant them in locations around the house we chose; in the gardens and along the street, so that the film would flow better and more naturally.
Production
the production of our motion work was a fairly painless process as we had taken steps to ensure we knew exactly how we wanted everything to look and we had already sourced audio before shooting.
we decided that to fit in best with Gallagher’s style of art work, we wanted to shoot the film and have it hold a true old home movie aesthetic or 1970’s feel. after deliberating on how we could achive this effect we decided upon shooting the motion peice on our iphones, shooting in a single shot, and using an application called ‘8mm’, which allows the user to achieve effects like an old film 8mm camera would provide. this allowed us to then get on with shooting and deciding on the correct storyboard.
along with the 8mm app we used this hand held iphone monopod to make the film more stable than hand held, but still maintaining the home movie feel.
Evaluation of project
tom
key frames
at the very start of the project, after obtaining our direction in the form of two names i think we were full of apprihention and excitement to really go ahead and create a new, exciting motion piece, but after really delving into content related to the idea’s we threw around we started hitting patches where we really didnt know what way to turn,. this problem grew until the middle of the project when refining our earlier ideas. we made discoveries in how we could be able to start making the work of Ellen gallagher and ian macmillan correspond, and we built upon these discovered visual flavours. after designing how we wanted go ahead with our ideas, we started conducting valuable tests with equiptment and props, this helped us guage more of an insight into the possibilities of our ideas and whether they needed further refining. i think after our discovery of app avaliable for iphone we had a eureka moment. we could shoot a film on our iphone’s, single shot and with no editing, like a old, twitchy 8mm home movie from the 1950’s. the title sequence itself is a true reflection of what me and siena craved to achieve and i belive it connotes all relevent feelings and emotions that we were trying to push from the film., i think after relecting on what we have achieved we have created work of satisfactory stature, though in saying this, if questioned on would we create it again from scratch with the knowledge we now know, id say yes, and i think it would be better.
siena From the start we both dove into the project concepts, conjuring and testing many new ideas every week, but none of them fitted perfectly with our assigned artist style AND the poet we were given to work with; however lots were effective for one or the other. The ideas we had towards the middle of the project were more on target, but were too complicated to shoot or needed ridiculous amounts of props or planning for the time we had left to create the film. Luckily towards the end of the project we hit upon several good ideas that blended well with each other to compliment both the artist and the poet. These were the 8mm film app on our iPhones (which gave the effect of a nostalgic, old fashioned home movie), the jazz song dubbed over the natural backing track to make it feel a little more ‘vintage’, as in the style of Ellen Gallagher, and the idea of placing broken up lines in a path, forming a disjointed journey through the text, as the author (we suspected) was trying to portray altzheimers disease - which disjoints the mind withing its self, causing confusion and loss of identity and memories. I think if we had more time we would take into account more the blurriness that the app instilled into the text of the poem, as the point of the film is that it is disjointed and hard to read, however the poem, because of this, is a little harder to follow. But in my opinion this makes the artist influence and connection more solid.
Words In Motion : communicating with words and images
thank you.