Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Project description

In making this film I intend to explore the effect of colour as the sole visual representation of a musical piece, as reflected in the title “Just Colour”. I also want to implement a simple narrative structure to show how colour by itself is capable of telling a story.

I have chosen to base my film on a classical orchestrated piece because of the unique sound and personality that comes with each acoustic instrument. I wish to extract these qualities and transfer them into the different colours in my film, and thus give them personality. Looking at it the other way around I will also affect the instruments personality by choosing the colour to represent it and conducting that colours movement on the screen. I will naturally choose bright colours for instruments such as flute or violin, while cello or contrabass will be represented by black. The reason why I’m not using a song with vocals is simply because I feel it would have moved the film a step away from the simplicity I am trying to achieve.

In order to explore colour as the sole element of music visualisation, I wanted to find a way for it to move freely without any limitations or constrains. By dripping droplets of different coloured paint into water I found the sort of effect I was looking for. By using a square and transparent cube I can display the colours from all three dimensions. This also gives me the opportunity to shoot it from every possible angle, and at the same time gives the colours a fluent and dynamic shape. Depending on the height from which the droplet is dropped its shape, size and speed will vary greatly, creating heaps of different ways to visualize the musical piece. In addition to droplets of paint I will use coloured salt to create the smaller particles or a more even shower of colour.

The narrative structure I’m using in the film, which is a stripped down version of Aristotle’s dramaturgic curve, will rely on a few different elements. Firstly the orchestral piece the film seeks to visualise will provide the basic narrative outline: what type of instruments plays when, how fast they’re playing, the intensity and of course the volume. Secondly I will use cutting and different angles to control the tempo and build tension towards certain points in the dramaturgic curve. The last narrative element is the colours themselves. Different colours have different associations bound to them. For instance, while green often is associated with nature and harmony, red often associates anger, blood and war. I tend to use this at my advantage to create the narrative structure for my film.

The most time consuming process will be the actual shooting of the film, but I can save a lot of time by using After Effects during the editing. By working in layers and mashing multiple colour droplets together I can save time on the set. It is also possible to use After Effects as a colour correcting tool. I could for instance shoot all the droplets separately and in the same colour, and then change it into different colours and mash the clips together during editing. I could also just use After Effects to boost the original colours.

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