12 Final edit

Now that the audio was finished it was now time to put everything together, it all fit perfectly, just a little tweeking to line everything up in Final Cut Pro X and it was ready.

Even though I had to address certain issues half way through my project and take it in a new direction while scrapping many previous edits I do truly feel that the themes and messages that I wanted to get across in this piece have done so and that it has been a very important learning curve for me even at this late stage of my degree and I will take my experiences with me as I progress through academia in order to work methodically throughout and achieve the best possible level of work for my masters degree.

I always wanted to do something different throughout my degree, make something that I can say is mine and have work that I have accomplished on my own. For me film is about making something you believe in and not compromising on your ideals and making work to be proud of. For most it is a chance to create that one great drama or documentary but in my case I use film as an expression of who I am and what I believe in and use it in experimental ways to get the results that I want and I feel that I have managed to achieve that with this project. 

11 Exhibition

Ideally this piece would have been exhibited, but due to the impending deadline of this project it is unlikely that it shall be exhibited in a space fitting for the piece. If given the extra time then I would set up a screening of the film on a continuous loop throughout the day and set up a camera to document peoples reaction to the film and find out if the film clearly portrays the themes that I am exploring like I think it does. I have been in touch with Jen from my group who has offered to make me a mock up poster for the fictional event (please note this is when the piece was under the working title of Exit).

10 New soundtrack

In order to compose the score for my final film I decided to section off the film into musical movements. Each of these movements followed the film and built towards the breakdown/glitch section of the piece.

Within Logic 9 I imported the final edit of my film and began my composition with five simple instrument tracks. Using the EXS24 sound generator I created four different stringed instrument sounds and one bass sound.

I started by composing simple long atmospheric stings lines around a major chord. In order to achieve my desired sound I added a large amount of reverb with the ptVerb plug in, next I added a Bitcrusher plug in to created a stuttered cracked effect. I employed a similar sound technique with the remaining three string sounds, adding a variety of reverb effects and some slight distortion and overdrive. 

For the bass I decided to work with a simple bass line that melodically complimented the F major chord I was working around. I added a quick delay to the sound as well as a large amount of reverb to achieve my desired sound.

Once I had created the sounds and the basic melody for the piece I began layering the sounds over and over with slight melodic variations. 

I used simple major resolutions for the melody line during the first portion of the film. As the piece progressed I began to increase the tempo of the piece with a doubled and then quadrupled bass line. In addition, I began to add dissonance and reduced the melodic resolution to create musical tension.

I then sourced a variety of Microsoft effort message sounds that I sampled and imported into Logic. I then used these sound to punctuate the piece, adding cut up a glitched versions of these error messages throughout the piece. I added a variety of effects to these samples and cut some of them into tiny sound artifacts in order to simulate glitch sounds.

Using both editing and automation techniques I then matched the glitched sounds to the error messages that are used in the glitch portion of the piece. I then used a sound effects and further glitching techniques to create jarring hissing, slipping and error sounds to accompany the final portion of the piece.

Finally, I added automation to the entire piece in order to add dynamic changes and bounced the score down to an MP3 in order to match the score with the film within Final Cut Pro X.

9 Layering Techniques

In order to further manipulate and distort the image I have decided to layer the frames ontop of each other, taking inspiration from Castro Street by Bruce Baillie (http://www.ubu.com/film/baillie_castro.html) using this technique I feel will add to the feeling of watching an overload of images, more than you can process therefore making the viewer aware of the multitude of images that are online as an archive. I have also taken inspiration from Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci made me Hardcore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dS2McPYzEE) that also uses images blended together through masking and layering showing transitions between different scenes of the found footage piece.

For this technique I have continued to use Final Cut X, and adjusted the opacity in the effects editor section, cropped and resized the images layered on top.   

From Castro Street - Bruce Baillie

From Fiorucci made me Hardcore by Mark Leckey

From my film

I have also decided to use this technique later on in the piece to layer Glitched images to further distort the images.

8 Re Addressed Pacing Issues

After this weeks group tutorial I have been given some feedback regarding the pacing of the piece, it would appear that people start to lose interest in the piece and I feel that partly this is due to the soundtrack that I am using at the moment, also the piece has a real lack of structure something that I will be fixing over the next couple of weeks.

I have now rewritten a structure to properly get across the themes and to keep people interested in what they are watching. This new structure will build and build in the way a song does, having a crescendo that all the previous parts build to, this I feel will also benefit from the new soundtrack that I am composing to run alongside the visuals.

The film now starts with the super 8mm footage, moving swiftly onto the video footage from past projects, it then moves into the section of images from old to new eventually layering ontop of one another to the point they become pixelated then the video breaks as it can no longer be read by the device that is playing it and it begins to glitch the sound and visuals, this glitch then becomes worse and worse as the piece continues as it struggles to process the layers of glitched images and video until it has no choice but to revert back to the start of the video and the super 8mm footage.

This now better gets the themes that I am exploring with this work rather than being an over edited collection of home movies and facebook photos, which is what I had presented at the last group, tutorial.

7 Glitch software and new techniques

Glitch software fell through

After being in contact with an MA Computer Music student from Plymouth University, they said they would be able to help me with the glitch section of the film as they had created a program via MAX MSP (which is a software based on algorithms) using John Cage’s dice theory to create a random selection of glitched audio and visuals.

In return the MA student would get to see their program used in a practical application via my final film that they could then use in their thesis, but unfortunately due to the lack of progression with the program I have had to cancel this arrangement and seek other methods of glitching the third part of my film. This has also made me rethink collaborating with other students from other universities, as it is difficult to keep an eye on how the works are progressing.       

Research and use of new glitch techniques

I have now had to Glitch the Video and Sound myself, as it is increasingly unlikely that the software patch will be ready in time. I have previously experimented with Glitching images after reading The Glitch Momentum by Rosa Menkman as it has a detailed way of how to glitch an image by making the image unreadable by the computer, for example when you take a digital image and open it in Text/edit from the applications selection after right clicking on it the image is shown as lines and lines of code, this code is how the computer reads the image as what sets the shapes, colour and size of the image, by cutting out sections of this text and pasting it in a different part of the image causes an error that the computer can no longer read as the original image but instead reads it as a whole new one and produces us with the Glitched image. And as this technique uses a Text/Edit application you can add and remove any text you like even this blog post

Glitched image

Datamoshed image

Using this technique over and over again to Glitch the image section of my film would work but, what about the moving image portion of the film that is also to be glitched? During my further research into Glitch Art and techniques I have come across a number of ways and techniques that others use that can be applied to video. One of these techniques is Datamoshing, this technique involves the placing of video over an image using IFrames (or key-frames) which contain all visual information of a video's frame as in a film or an animation and P-frames which contain information on movement from the previous I-frame, allowing a video to be compressed with less I-frames and therefore take up less space. 

I have found an instructional video via YouTube to help me with the process and where to get the software.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYytVzbPky8

I have also found in my research that people have also used the image glitch technique via a piece of software called YouGlitch, this instantly glitches the images in a variety of ways, but mainly focusing on image/code glitch from The Glitch Manifesto by Rosa Menkman.

I want to give the impression that the images have become unreadable by the device be it a computer or other and create the shadow of the technology.

"Scratching and rumbling of the machine itself, inextricably registered along with the sound it was supposed to faithfully preserve. Unlike the environmental sounds, these sounds would not exist if the recording had not been made. I call this the shadow of the technology." (Paul DeMarinis)