Filming

I started my filming today in the college tv studio, I decided to use myself in the portrait as I looked at francis bacon's art work of self portraits which inspired me to do one of myself. I had help from my college friends Dan and Ben to help set the lighting in the studio and also the vison mixer as I could not do it on my own seeing as i was the subject being filmed, The lighting was a probelm as i could not decide on how I wanted the lights to be set for the scene as I wanted some shadow on the side of my face which we evntually managed to do in the end.

Here is a diagram I drew out of the studio to give an idea on how the setting was for the filimng of the portrait.

Using one of the three HD cameras I set up the shot of the postion I wanted to be in for the portrait. The shot was straight down the middle of the cameras view focused on the portrait of myself. I thought the shot looked good and captured 3 - 4 mins of footage which is all I would need for the editing process of my film.

Francis Bacon portraits

Looking through Bacons work I started to take intrest in his self portraits, I looked at how the images were distorted and morpherd giving them a diffrent state of mind making them disturbing showing a diffrent type of emotional state to how they were originally pictured.

"The living quality is what you have to get. In painting a portrait, the problem is to find a technique by which you can give over all the pulsations of a person ... Most people go to the most academic painters when they want to have their portraits made because for some reason they prefer a kind of coloured photograph of themselves instead of having themselves really trapped and caught. The sitter is someone of flesh and blood and what has to be caught is their emanation." - Francis Bacon.

The works of bacon is somthing which I intend to work from for my short film of portraits, I want to combine fear into the portraits so that each of the portraits has an elment of fear in each one of them, I intend to use this to enter ones state of mind and to portray the fear shown through moving images and audio.

Portraits

Looking into the work of francis bacon and his portraits they have given me the insperation to base my short film on portraits which they will be moving images. I intend to film the portraits using the studio in college so I can set up a single HD camera to use for the filming, I will position the portrait in the middle of the studio with the black backdrop so I can frame the position up through the cameras view.

The lighting will be an important part to the portrait, I will need to deicde on what lighting to use on the portrait when in the studio using the lights to set a tone on the person being filmed.

Progress

In recent progress I have been struggling to generate ideas for my film, me and my tutor had a discussion on what diffrent forms of fear there is and how these kind of fears lead peoples lives, I generated a mind map in my sketchbook to help me create ideas around fear and diffrent links.

I was recomended to watch this short film called "Dads dead" the film pieces together moments from the young mans past with his best friend Johnno.



The film's experimental effects caught my attention such as the ghostly figuers and disfigured faces gave great fear to the film, the sound and atmosphere of the film was impressive the quikness of the sound at points gave a sense of paranoia making you think what was that? or were did it go? my intrest in this make me want to look at using simaler ways to experiment with in my film.

Fear

Looking back on my previous project which was based on hope and fear, I looked into how light and darkness represented them both. I went on to see how light could be seen to people as hope and how darkness could be seen as the fear in which people want to avoid in the night and to use the light as comfort for their own saftey. I used these in my film experimentations in which I filmed street lights in the darkness and added sound over the top to give somesort of an atmosphere from which I created high and low key tones on my synthesizer, by matching the tones to the light and darkness i generated an atmosphere for hope and fear.

Looking at this as a refrence helps me to generate an outline of how to go about creating the fear of which I intend on using in my film.

What elements could I look at in fear?

- Death
- Living
- Darkness
- Alone
- Paranoia
- Disturbing
- Shadows
- Structures
- Danger
- Symbols
- Failure
- Psychological
- Nightmares

These are considerd to be part of fear which links to the human condition, looking at what our minds create and how we create fear to ourselves and others. Fear is part of what runs the world and what makes people who they are and how they act making desicions on either living with fear or dieing with fear.

Bacon Painting Insperation

                                Study after Velazquez's Portrait of pope innocent X (1953)

"We are born with a scream; we come into life with a scream, and maybe love is a mosquito net between the fear of living and the fear of death. - bacon"

My intrest in this painting is how bacon showed the fear and terror through the scream of the pope, the fear of living and of death is shown through the pope's scream and this could be shown as a symbol of fear to represent both.Bacon was always haunted by velazquez pope he never saw the origanel painting, he imposed a horrific theme onto the pope with dark shades of colour and sharp yellow lines, the figure was distorted and twisted and bacon created a not so innocent pope.

Bacon worked from many images to create a series of screaming pope paintings. he took a still image of the nurse from the film "Battleship potemkin" and morphed that image of her screaming into the face of velazquez's pope.

1:49 - image of the nurse screaming.