Assessment

Final pieces for Assessment

"How it felt" Film for showreel
"How it felt" Looping DVD for presentation with extra clips
Sketchbook
DVD cover
Poster
Debz Puppet
Mark Puppet
Gair puppet

“How It felt” is an ongoing video project between Deborah Chapman and Mark McGreehin. The work examines the inherent difficulties faced by sufferers of Depression as they attempt to engage with the world outside their heads; specifically the immense challenge of communicating their trials to those around them. This is something the artists have faced in their own struggles with depressive illness.

Deborah and Mark created hand puppet doppelgängers of themselves through which they speak about depression and related issues on camera. Early in the process Deborah and Mark began recording their conversations; capturing raw and unscripted perspectives. From the hours of collected audio were compiled short dialogues dealing with various aspects of their illness.

This edited sound was played back at filming locations where Deborah and Mark performed the puppets' mouth movements in time with the pre-recorded audio. The dialogue in the mouths of the puppets allows the performers to present their usually hidden thoughts to an audience remotely yet emotively.

The completed clips are to be made available to view online where the artists earnestly hope they will help sufferers and non-sufferers alike to better articulate and discuss what it is like to live with depression.

Deborah Chapman - Blog and Documentation
                             Photography
                             Creating sketchbook with her own work and Mark's combined
                             Creator of Debz puppet
                             Performer of Debz puppet and Gair puppet
                             Editor of Audio for film
                             DVD cover
                             Poster

Mark McGreehin -  Creator of Mark puppet
                            Creator of Gair puppet
                            Cameraman
                            Performer of Mark puppet
                            Harnesses
                            Lighting
                            Film editor
                            DVD

Overall input from each other through the project's process as well as help and support with ideas, equipment, planning, materials, puppeteering, and documentation.

Extra help and thanks to Aimee Stewart and Louise Mccusker.

Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYQnN6ZpxSV4N1EzRj9A-zA

Development: Editing the clips and it's proccess

Here is a post about the editing stages and the process the final clips have went through for the show reel and presentation. Mark has been using Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects and syncing it up with the audio I've created for each scene. I've also included some foley sound to suite for each one for Mark to work with as well such as background noise for indoors/outdoors as well as some sounds of the puppets actions.

Mark imported the video files through Final Cut in order to trim and name them, then created a new project in Adobe Premiere Pro where they could be edited on the more powerful Uni. computers. For each video he trimmed trimmed them down to remove the "action" and "cut" points and leave only the performed footage.  To synchronise the audio tracks to the video he expanded the audio clips in the timeline to see the waveforms of the words and matched the first peak to the first movement of the puppet's mouth.  Because during a few of the performance some of the mouth movements did not exactly match the on set audio it was necessary to cut the audio track at points and match the waveforms to movements at intervals to achieve the best lip sync.

With the sound synced Mark colour corrected the videos with the Fast Colour Corrector to make "skin tone" consistent.  The colour was then graded to bring increase the sense of depth in the frame using Brightness and Contrast.  When there was a need to change elements of the scene Mark duplicated the video layer and used garbage masks to isolate areas of it which could then be altered independently of the main scene.  This allowed changes to background action (Tennis ball landing), removal of camera reflections from a window and reduction of highlights from cinema seating that would have revealed on set lighting.  

Adobe After Effects was used to process the green screen footage.  The "Keylight 1.2" filter was used to create the matte.  A photo was put below that video layer to serve as a background with a noise filter added to make it match the grain of the original video.  The finished videos were put into a timeline together in Premier Pro and any inconstancy in sound and video were adjusted with the previously mentioned editing methods.  Title and credits were added and the videos were exported for viewing.

The idea is to mash up all the clips together to create jump cuts between each one which has set the mood to being low when certain clips are more serious and then uplifting again for related clips with more upbeat tones of the conversations and how the puppets behave. We have found the flow to effect the viewers mood in this way after reviewing the order ourselves with also discussion together.
It jumps much in the way that creature comforts does with the same theme in mind but with various scenes and situations that compliment each other and keep the viewer's interest.

The idea was also to make the puppets look as if they did not notice the viewer and that it was us looking in on little snippets of their personal lives and their discussions about mental illness. Which got the more positive response in tutorials and others viewing them with us. We did also try other types of camera angels that were more direct and even including ourselves but they just didn't seem to fit as well as the non direct ones.
The only direct interaction with the viewer is the introduction and outro with Gair's puppet for the purpose of invitation to the viewer and allowing them to settle into anticipation of puppets to be presented to them.

This has worked out for the purpose of assessment show reel when we also have the intention of uploading all the clips to YouTube which would allow it to be in a much more random order but the clips to still work with jump cutting.

Here is some screen shots of the process of colour grading the scenes to tidy them up a little better.

Mark also used his television while at home to help with the work flow and also to see how it differed from being on a computer to a television screen as color and quality would be different.

Here is some screen shots of the final clips.

Here's also an example of one being finished on it's own to just show the finished result of it being through editing but also to see how it stands on it's own as a single clip.



It's all coming together nicely just a case of rendering and putting it on to dvd and getting the other bits ready for presentation at assessment.

Poster and DVD cover

After photographing the puppets in better lighting conditions I took some into photo shop and alterted them to create a design for a poster. I did several examples to try out different ways of how it would look such as a photography version as well as a drawing the puppets as well. Used just layers e and the selection took with copy and paste to put it together and make it look like the standard images for children's kids shows or kids DVD covers.

I also took the time to write all the text by hand to give it a more creative cartoon looking effect as well as keeping with the theme since the puppets are hand made and keeping with that for the design for font. I also drew the puppets incase it came useful and also all the decided titles of each 'episode' of the conversations.

This ended up being the final template for the design for the poster I did a couple with the way the text was positioned but ended up liking the first below more as the finished one with also Mark's input. The photograph version ended up turning out better than in comparison with the drawing one. With some tidying up from the eraser, contrast, highlight tool and using the fill bucket was able to colour them in.

Our assessment space wall ended up being a dark blue colour and so I made several  different coloured versions of the poster template to choose from. We ended up liking the blue and red the most but choose red because our wall was blue and the blue one didn't stand out as well but we choose blue for the dvd cover.

This was the final choice and we got it printed to A2 size after some test prints of smaller ones.

I then took the template and used the standard DVD cover measurements to create a simple cover that explained and showed briefly what it would include. We wanted to go as far to create special features for the dvd with bloopers and making of but because of time we will add this on after assessment.

This ended up becoming the final DVD cover with a small blurb and some screen shots and got it printed.

We will have a tv to play our film on loop as part of our assessment space with the dvd as well as a sketchbook, poster and of course our puppets on display.

Heres us having a chat of the over all look and about the final film having intros.

Development: Surprise we made one more puppet

We went ahead and decided to make one more puppet after getting the majority of our work done. We ended up doing this so we could have another puppet representing our puppet shorts with intro and outro's because it felt a bit bare aesthetically. And because we've had so much fun with this project and positive support all the way through we wanted to make another Puppet. 

We decided to make a puppet of our Tutor Gair as he's been organising a puppet workshop for over the summer for us with funding and has shown so much support and positive outlook on what were doing. We did have plans to make other tutors and people we know but because of time and because some people weren't comfortable with the idea also didn't want to offend anyone which isn't this projects intention at all. We will maybe make more after assessment for other tutors and friends a like.

Mark made a tiny clay mock up of Gair to get a sort of three dimensional guide before we continued to make the rest of the puppet.

We made him much the same way that our's were made with sponge, cardboard, rubber mouth piece, fleece and felt and put all together with a hot glue gun. The cardboard helped to shape the head better from the inside.

We did both take turns at creating the head but because of time restraints and other work to share between us Mark ended up finishing the Gair puppet while I worked on Gair's audio, blog, uploading YouTube videos, and sketchbook.

We decided to use some faux fur from a winter hat for Gair's hair it ended up being a great texture and best we could to represent his hair.

The next day we booked out the production studio for a few hours to film Gair and to get some photography opportunities of the puppets. The reason Gair is wearing a lab coat is because in the context of when we asked him for advice about if we needed some sort of warning for our project since it is about a serious subject matter. From the audio I created Gair mentions if someone did an introduction wearing a white lab coat in the view that people usually stop and listen to people announcing or introducing something of importance in this way. So from that the idea stuck that his puppet should be wearing one.

Someone left safety goggles in the production studio we borrowed them for our filming.

We set up the green screen area for the performance using the board to deflect the green from the felt of the puppet and used Mark little camera to film it.

I volunteered to perform as Gair to the audio tracks we created for an introduction and a outro of him.
We also used green screen  to keep our options open for a background to use for him and also because we sorta did this all as a secret from everyone.

I also took some shots of our puppets to use for further images for presentation and also to have some shots of them finished to present.

We also have found placing the puppets on lighting stands or microphone stands is a great way to present them and we managed to borrow some from a local church for assessment.

Now theirs a couple of weeks to let Mark edit and for me to finish off the blog, sketchbook, poster and dvd cover get everything ready for assessment.