The Exhibition Plan.

We started planning all the exhibition, painting boards and putting them up and so on. Deciding on the layout and speaking about who was going to go where, what they wanted and what they were going to put up if they had an installation, I ended up having a discussion with the tutor in an attempt to decide whether being in the room dedicated to film, presented as a cinema and shown as a projection would benefit my work more than showing it on a small screen with various other activities going around that could easily drag the audiences attention away.

It also occurred to me that the sound is going to be better, and the headphones that would have been good to use I put on loan to another student for his piece, which left me with very little options and all this seemed to go through my head it seemed that the answer was going to be pretty simple. 

So any plans that I had made for the installation, any progress that I had made with my book was put to a halt as I decided to go for the big projection in a room dedicated completely to pieces of work that needed your full attention, and won't be distracted by other pieces, would serve my piece to its full advantage.


This is how a piece of work evolves through experience, experimentation and trial and error.

The Final Appearance.

The above image is a picture from the screen that was currently showing my triptych whilst I was editing. As you can see the layout goes TV, celebrities and then football. I felt that it seemed to make more sense, the celebrity being in the middle was a definite,. They want to be the centre of attention, its what they aspire to be, to be loved by everyone and watched by those that love them.  So it made sense to put them in the middle, Football and TV didn't really seem to have much of a reason as to why they were placed where they were, other than when I reviewed the footage on my own computer from practicing, the layout of the TV, celebrity and then football seemed to look aesthetically pleasing. 

The Sound

Sound was always going to be something I had to be wary of in my piece. With three panels demanding attention, decisions had to be made about what parts needed more attention in certain places or how i was going to present the audio.


Previous plans had been to grab pieces of audio from the various clips that i had, and other clips that i could get for this sole purpose, grab segments of each and create my own message through the manipulation of pre-recorded audio, there were slight problems with this, the isolated sound that may not be loud enough to grab the audiences attention or even coincide with the idea of footage running against each other in a form of competition. I also found that some of the re-scribed footage that I had captured, with the audio being streamed into the camera from the computer, that some of the footage was out of sync and would therefore look odd if it were to be played on its own. It was a problem that had to be solved, and it wasn't until I'd played my test of the triptych with all its audio and listened to all 3 audio pieces being played at once, that I decided I liked the muffled sound that were spewing out of the speakers, overwhelming the audience with the whole sound and footage constantly changing.


Like many things in my project, this decision had to have a meaning, if i were to create a piece and have various lines of audio running at the same time to make an incoherent sound of people talking over each other, there had to be something behind it. 


In the world there are many religions, all saying the same things, be a good person, do good things for others, help each other, and don't kill each other. They all seem like the basic morals of a human being, but like many things where there is more than one found in the same area, all religions are crying for their voice and their beliefs to be heard, some a little more drastic in being heard than others.


In technology things are constantly competing to be bought, celebrities are constantly competing to be liked, and will slander against any other if that raises their popularity or at least destroy the competition, and of course football fans want to put across, time and time again, why their team is better than any other.


It all seems like a constant race to be heard, and to finally sway people in to thinking you're right. It's this that i wanted to put across in the audio. This idea that everything is trying to get your attention, and in doing so there is just this constant uproar of voices, singing and so on.


With the use of adobe audition to make the mix downs of the sound clips from the celebrity footage, or the TV footage, or the football footage, I managed to make a sound of constant chatter, constant noise, and constant need to be heard, though some channels may overpower others on occasion, I found that with this type of audio, through getting other students to listen to it, that the audience can in fact zone in and out of sides, they can listen to some of the TV if they so pleased, or even the celebrity parts.


It took various attempts at adjusting the sound in order to get the levels right I found that after a few play backs that the TV part of the sound seemed to be overwhelming other parts of the audio with its music etc, but having it on adobe audition in separate clips then as a whole as a mix-down, it made adjusting the levels a lot easier than attempting to do so in adobe premiere.

Problem Solving.

In an attempt to lower my own stress levels, and keep within the time limit given to finish off the piece of work, I wished to start editing out the piece of work I'd been previously planning on my own computer, I need to get onto the official editing suites in college that are of a better quality, in order to finally finish, if not make a huge dent, in my work.

I've previously retrieved footage off the computer over a period of time, finally it came to the time when I could edit and finally finish my piece once and for all, and with some time to spare for my sketchbook. 


Now previously I'd been using a different file type for things like the footage that I'd grabbed from the TV, and then converted it to work with Adobe Premiere, however it seemed that the task was not to be that simple when it came to using things from the internet.


The footage that I had gained from the computer was under the file type of MP4's, as there was little option for anything else, and it seemed the only ones that were available were for mobiles etc. After speaking to the technician in an attempt to sort out my problem, we found out that the programme he had specifically for converting files to work in Adobe, didn't support the file that I was attempting to change, which meant I had to use one of my own. And though it finally worked after many trials and putting videos through numerous times in order to get it to actually convert, I finally had the correct file, an AVI file. 

With the light at the end of the tunnel slowly coming to view, I attempted to place the files upon my USB and then onto the computer tower I was using to edit the footage. This in itself seemed rather time consuming, as converting the file seemed to more than double the size of any other, limiting the amount I could fit onto the USB and slowing my progress.


When it came to looking over the footage that I had, after finally converting the programmes with Prism, I realised that the quality had lowered so much that a lot of the footage became pixelated, unusable and out of sync, all due to the many attempts at conversions, compressions and then trying to raise the quality of an already low quality film. 


Going back to the original files, We were thinking about changing computer to one that holds a couple of different programmes that would allow me to work still without affecting the quality too much, however it again would take too many hours to do from sheer size and work that would be needed. Leaving me with very few options, the final decision made in an attempt to cease the problems, was to re-scribe the video piece, a suggestion offered to me by my tutor who'd had some history of doing it himself.


In order to re-scribe it meant that I had to set up a camera in front of a screen, which is playing the footage I wanted to use on my piece, and then film it from the camera, which seemingly gave it a better quality than it had on the screen. Re-scribing allowed me to edit on the current computer I had grown accustomed to using. It also seemed to blend more into my work, recording off the very screen that people worship just seems to re-inforce my statement that it seemingly solves many problems in life, helps people in their time of need and not forgetting is a good use of escapism for those with the need to live another life. 


Re-scribing also allowed me to do a basic edit of the footage I wanted. Going through each clip that I had on the hard drive, I had to make an editing decision on what footage I wanted, needed, and what would be best served for my piece and how it would look in the end, all this giving me more creative influence on footage used.

A problem in the process.

To make things a little easier I aimed to get footage for my piece of work from both the TV and the internet, allowing me  a  vast field of footage, information, and messages that I could cut up, place together all in aid of creating my own message. 

However I've been struggling to find a suitable programme to retrieve the footage off the computer. There had been various reviews, suggestions etc that I had looked at to see which programme would be the best. After following many of the suggestions put to me, I am still struggling to find an adequate programme.

The main problem was with quality, even with a lot of these programmes set at its highest quality, I find that the footage jumps, though the sound remains unaffected, and when the footage jumps it becomes pixelated, which will affect the quality of the work over all, even if the images won't be on a huge scale on the screen. 


It seemed logical to assume that recording off the computer screen would lower the quality, as well as struggling every now and then with other programmes to deterime the output of the audio (as some programmes record off the microphone of the computer, therefore picking up all the noises of my surroundings and making it harder for the audio of the video to be picked up).  Therefore, I deemed it better to find a programme that allows you to download current footage used on the web-platform. Upon further research I finally managed to find a programme, which I have checked the playback of, and found it a decent quality that shouldn't affect the outcome of my project, as well as using the original audio file that comes with the video, and not recording it off your computer with all the background noise that could occur. The next task that should bring me closer to the end of my project is converting the files to work with Adobe Premiere, and then placing the pieces of footage in the time line originally planned and practiced on.