Final Product and Reflection on Creative Process

            

The First step to making this film after planning it was to collect all the parts. The first and most tricky piece was the fish-tank. I asked about online to see if anyone on Facebook had a fish-tank I could borrow, however, the only fish-tanks available weren't big enough for the exhibition. Luckily, my friend had an old tank he has been trying to get rid of for a while and said I could have it. So once it was brought to me, the next obstacle was making it appropriate for the exhibition, which entailed cleaning it...A lot. This job took a few hours but I eventually had it clean enough to atleast be transparent (as seen below). Following this I needed to decide which of the subjects discussed in the component experimentation page; I decided to go with 2 of my friends fake potted plants and a pineapple as the center piece, I chose these because I feel the colour pallet presented by these subjects contrasts nicely with the white environment and also, the black pots go nicely with the ink. I also felt as though they did a fair job at serving their purpose in the exhibition in representing life and nature. It was also nice that the budget didn't have to extend to paying for the plants and the tank aswell as everything else. The pineapple and the ink, I bought on the day of the shoot; I bought the ink from the university shop and the pineapple from Tesco Metro. The camera equipment, I hired out from the university media resource centre.

Once all of the pieces for the exhibition were on set, the task of filling the tank up with water took place which was not a difficult process but extremely long and painfully repetitive, as the sink was at the other side of the studio, meaning we had to carry a bucket back and forth through the studio several times. During this process however, we encountered 2 issues. The first issue was that the tank, presumably due to its age, began to leak from the bottom, however, it was only a small amount and my tutor said to just carry on and be careful so there was no real resolution to this problem other than get on with the exhibition quickly. The second issue was that the pineapple kept floating to the top. As I wanted to keep it at the bottom of the tank, center frame and vertical, my friends and I had to come up with a way to counter act this issue and quickly. The idea of cutting it open and weighing it down was brought up however, nothing in the studio that could fit inside weighed enough to keep it submerged. We eventually settled on impaling the pineapple on a long, thin stick; the stick being held through out the filming of the exhibition, which worked out well enough. Had I had more time to plan the shoot, there would have definitely been better ways to deal with these issues; for example, had I filled the tank with water before the shoot to test it, I would've known about the leak and would've been able to figure out some sort of fix, such as covering up the seems of the tank around the bottom. Also I would've known about the pineapple floating had I experimented myself, beforehand and I could've chosen a different subject, or gotten a better way of weighing it down and keeping it submerged.

 The next grueling process to undergo was to empty the tank which was essentially the same process as filling it but backwards; scooping the water out of the tank with the bucket and then carrying through the studio to the sink and pouring it out, over and over and over. There would've been more efficient ways to fill and empty the tank had I had more people helping me, a hose, a pump, or setting up the exhibition closer to the sink, however the way it was done was good enough, as it got the job done in the end all the same. 

The next part of the production process was the editing. This process took about 2 days or 5 total hours of work. Seeing as I only managed to get the single wide shot of the exhibition, I was unsure how I could edit it to make it more interesting than just the exhibition itself.  I begun by fiddling with the brightness, contrast, lumetri colours, etc. Until the shot had an aesthetic that I was happy with. This aesthetic pronounces the black and the green, while also maintaining the powerful, pure white environment which I felt was important to portraying the message of polluting and destroying life and nature in its purest form. I then chose what I was going to use for the audio. I went with the erhu music reversed because, it had the same sort of juxtaposition to the message of industrialisation as the normal erhu music, while also, in itself representing the artificial treatments of nature and tranquil sounds to create something a bit more ominous and dark. The idea to sync the ink dropping to the music first arose when I decided I wanted to sync the first drop to the first sound of the song, at which point I also added the title sequence and the fade. I feel as though this was an interesting introduction into the exhibition and it set the tone for the rest of the video, following this, I decided to try and sync every drop of ink to a distinct sound in the song, this gives the video a very erratic and bizarre pace which I think sort of in a way interprets the progression of pollution and industrialisation. If was able to do this project again, I think maybe next time I would switch up and experiment with different subjects and also have 2 or 3 cameras capturing the exhibition at once, so that I can get different perspectives and shots of it which would in turn make the final film more dynamic and fluid.