Over the weekend I did the main bulk of my filming for The Journey on a drive up to Scotland to visit family. As predicted though the weather was awful and I ended up shooting the moving shots from the interior of the car through a slightly filthy windscreen/passenger window.
Having taken into consideration that my footage isnt as good quality or quite what I was expecting it to be (due to the weather which was obviously out of my control) I have been thinking of other ideas which I will carry out:
A short stop take animation of a toy car going along the route we took on a map
Adding the driver as a character with a quickly cut sequence at the start of the driver getting in the car and starting the engine
More photography
Sequence of traffic lights
The stop motion animation section is most important as not only does it encorporate another skill I have learnt this year but will also aid greatly in piecing the sections of footage together as if I just pasted them together as they are the camera position and location would jump around incredibly unnaturally and look awful!
The excercise was this: Your montage should demonstrate an understanding of the narrative affect of combining images. Duration 90 seconds to 120 seconds.
Using Final Cut Pro, I put together my photomontage which lasts around 1min 53secs. My pictures were taken on a day trip to Bristol and the song I have used is Warning by Green Day.
I found it difficult to decide which transitions I wanted to use, as I thought simply using straight cuts between photos would look rather amateur. Also with using a song that is quite well known I didn't want it to look too tacky.
This is my final piece uploaded to Vimeo, comments welcome =]
For my montage I am going to take the theme of warnings
I will mainly use still shots covering different warning signs and examples of when authority tells us what to do. To do this I want to get at least one shot of each of the following things:
Road signs
Warnings (e.g. wet floor signs)
Pedestrian crossings
Pay&display
For my song I will be using Warning by Green Day as the lyrics are very relevant and it also would give a light hearted look at the excessive amounts of warnings and direction we are given everyday. It may lead watchers to question whether they are really neccessary?
On first listening to Beatsystem by Beatsystem, I immediatiely thought of a church, mainly due to the sounds of bells. To begin with it sounds more sombre and serious, but it does continue to sound more joyful.
This immediate association to churches made taking photos of a couple of different churches in Bristol the perfect idea!
As the music at the start feels quite cold I also include some other images that give a sense of loneliness and the cold.
Using Final Cut Pro in Fridays session, this is the montage I created:
...and each have made an impact of cinema. Okay so that wasn't a joke, but you cant blame a girl for trying...
Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948)
Eisenstein is often referred to as the "father of montage" he is a leading figure in the modern cinematic form. It was in his 1924 film Stachka that he first showed what he called "dubbed montage". This contained a series of conflicting images which aimed to overlap symbolic meanings, who's emotional effect on the audience was more powerful than the individual images themselves. Eisenstein became a scholor at the Moscow film school where he wrote essays about montage and motion picture direction.
Here is an example of one of his montages from his film Oktiabr:
Dziga Vertov (1986-1954)
Highly influenced by Marxism he was a strong believer "that the impartial eye of the camera is far better suited to recording and organizing the truth than the subjective and often faulty human eye". His films provided a reflection on Soviet 'reality' and were often seen as highly poetic. An element of this is that came out later in his career is that he wanted the viewer to identify himself through the filmmaking process.
His most famous film would be Man With The Movie Camera which was filmed in the Ukraine with Lev Kuleshov.
Lev Kuleshov (1899-1970)
What Kuleshov is probably most famous for is the Kuleshov Effect where he juxtaposed an expression less actor against several different pieces of footage of various items creating an emotional piece. The concept of the montage was very important to Kuleshov and said that it is not neccessarily the content of the film that is important but actually the way it is structured and put together. Therefore when looking at montage theory he is a very important person to consider.
He worked with Eisenstein and Vertov on films in the late 1920's such as The Man with a Movie Camera.
Here is a short video of Alfred Hitchcock going some way of explaining the Kuleshov effect:
