Anna Osborne – Second Semester

During class, Adam brought to our attention a book called The Photographer’s Playbook with 307 assignment ideas in it. As I have been a little stuck with ideas for this brief, I warmed to some of the ideas in the book that involve films and telling a story.

A couple of ideas I have had for my project are:

• Telling a film or tv plotline in 10 photos using objects, locations and sound
• Telling the lyrics of a song in 10 photos etc

These ideas could both work in and out of the studio and now I just need to think of a film/tv series/song that I could take photos for.

These ideas make me think of a book that I once saw in Waterstones – Film in Five Seconds.

The book is full of symbols and vectors that represent films which the reader is supposed to guess. It should then take you approximately 5 seconds to guess each film. This is similar to my idea as I would present images and sound that represent a film and the viewer would have to guess them too.

It also reminds me of the Guess The Film App, where you are shown a drawing that represents a scene in the film and have to guess what the film is.

For research, I have been trying to think of ways of how stories are told with both images and sound. I tried to think of a music video that successfully does this but have not remembered any yet. Another area I thought about was opening titles for films and tv series. I then remembered that in the opening titles for The Walking Dead (seasons 1 + 2), photos and still images are used with tense music to give the audience an idea of the world the series is set in.

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

The opening titles combine photos with zooms and pans on them as well as moving images too. I like the use of the family photos and simple screen movements from left to right to show the entire image and highlight the most important parts.

I like the foggy, grimy look to the images, suggesting the genre of the programme is horror or a thriller and that something has gone wrong. The shots change with the music – a simple way of tying them both together and making the story flow.

Another I have had is to create a story like the beginning of The Walking Dead. I could combine a group of photos with some uncopyrighted music or sounds to make an opening title for a made-up programme or film.

I was not very keen on many of the examples shown in our first workshop. However, one man’s work that I was more interested in was Chris Watson. I loved the landscapes he was recording sound in to accompany a painting in the video we were shown of a lake. I have always found nature sounds relaxing and peaceful and they remind me of holidays to places like the Lake District when I was younger.

Chris has worked very locally to me, recording sound in Aldeburgh for some of Benjamin Britten’s work and for John Constable’s ‘Cornfield’ for the National Gallery.

I have an idea of combining sounds with images that completely contrast each other. For example, I could have a photo of a busy road and then have a clip from this:

to accompany it. This would then confuse the brain as they are two sounds that you do not associate with each other. Another example could be a photo of an empty field with the sound of heavy road noise – two contrasting senses together.