#thetricksters

Week 13

We don’t show the video content to our peers or even to Maggie as the story line is the trick so by showing it to our peers this early would ruin everything. Also when we said that we showed our “plans” to our peers, we only showed them the set up, without the video content. We did showed Maggie a couple of screenshots and 10sec videos, and she said that the visuals look good, so I think we are good. I showed the whole edited video to the team and they liked it as well and I did follow the script we designed. I just have a minor tweeking to do so it’ll have a much better look in it. A couple of weeks back, we showed our progress video content to Maggie, and she asked to remove a scene from it, which I couldn’t as that scene was an important part of the story transition, so I end it up speeding it up a bit, and now as we see it in 2 separate video, it looked like there’s 2 couple dancing, which is not major issue, but we would prefer to make it into one couple so this is just something to tweek about.

Week 12

After the editing was done, we get to have a quick chat with Kim and Maggie about our 2 plans about the physical installation design. Which are:

Plan A: Both videos projected on the booked shaped object coming out of the wall.

Plan B: Both videos projected on to the walls to create a book shape.

Both Maggie and Kim thought that its better to not have the board as they were worried that it’s going to look “unprofessional” and it might look off. I think they have a point, but they did say that its not bad to try it out and see what happens, specially that we want to achieve that “immersive” feel. We also thought that it might be way too simple and we could at least try it out. I have been struggling with minimal design and I always tend to not go for a minimal design, I would like to learn how to create a successful design and not do too much.

I also thought that maybe cutting a book shaped cardboard would make everything obvious and we’ll be going back to Maggie’s best advice to not be too literal and go to a more literal approach so We had a chat with a couple of our Creative Tech peers and ask their feedback about our 2 plans and they thought that it might be too literal as well.

Week 8

We developed/simplified the video script just to make it a base idea to what we are going to film, and give us enough ideas to experiment during filming.

Conceptual Script (Not final, I repeat, not final)

Scene 1 - Baby and a lion cub both positioned at the end of the screen.

Scene 2 - They both slowly started moving towards the middle, During this process the baby becomes the child and The lion cub becomes a lion. Eventually meeting up in the middle.

Scene 3 - When they met up in the middle, the lion turned into a man, while the child turned into a woman.

Scene 4 - The man and the woman undress, as they slowly change clothes they change gender.

Scene 5 - After they finished changing gender. Man and the woman hold hands facing each other

Scene 6 - Dancing ballerina silhouette. Close up of the ballerina to double exposure. Double exposure - natural disaster AND bad shit

Scene 7 - Double exposure/overlaying, Crying ( waterfall from eyes)

We designed the script/video content to be the “trick itself, it’ll be some kind of trickster storytelling. We were inspired by how our perception is influenced by our past experiences, knowledge and our culture. So the script is not a traditional Hollywood story-line, where there is a conflict, characters and then the result, this is an experimental storyline, it is designed to have that ambiguity artistic feature, so it should have a complex meaning in it. This is where the book shaped installation came in. The book shaped represents a personal diary, meaning individual’s story, past experiences and knowledge. 

A new study tests this hypothesis that personal relevance is the critical factor in differentiating between reality and fantasy by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare the brain’s response when processing real and fictional characters. Anna Abraham of the Max Planck Institute forHuman Brain and Cognitive Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and the University of Giessen in Giessen, Germany, and D. Yves von Cramon of the Max Planck Institute for Human Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Max Planck Institute for Neurological Research in Cologne, Germany, have published their results in a recent issue ofPLoS ONE

The processes of perception routinely alter what humans see. When people view something with a preconceived concept about it, they tend to take those concepts and see them whether or not they are there. This problem stems from the fact that humans are unable to understand new information, without the inherent bias of their previous knowledge. A person's knowledge creates his or her reality as much as the truth, because the human mind can only contemplate that to which it has been exposed. When objects are viewed without understanding, the mind will try to reach for something that it already recognizes, in order to process what it is viewing. That which most closely relates to the unfamiliar from our past experiences, makes up what we see when we look at things that we don't comprehend.

Clearly our culture plays a part here, as does our past history and experience with others.

What is 'Real'? How Our Brain Differentiates Between Reality and Fantasy. (2016). Medicalxpress.com. Retrieved 23 October 2016, from http://medicalxpress.com/news/2009-03-real-brain-differentiates-reality-fantasy.html 

1st week of break

As mentioned from my last post, we met up this week to explore ideas. We started exploring techniques and the set up of the installation first as the projectors needed to be returned early. We started with our initial set up idea which is two walls and 1 corner. We tried using just one projector to limit our equipment needed as we know that in the exhibition all the resources are limited. So first we have 1 projector and we found out the it’s too small to create an effective immersive video projection installation, so then we used 2 projections as Kim suggested. Using two projectors covered a bigger space, creating an immersive environment. 

We then started to bring random things to experiment with. At some point, we even brought those circular stand thingy. It was very random and it was just weird and no relation to our project theme.

I also tried putting water bottles with water in front of the projector, which created a cool water shadow effect, not really sure what it could mean, but we didn’t really seen any relations to our project.

Because I wanted to explore on overlaying, I asked niishahn if I can re-position the setup and make the two video projection overlay each other. We love the effect it created. It created some kind of mirror effect and surrealism effect. This got us thinking about parallel worlds, 2 different worlds that people thinks exists - real and imaginary. We then started to keep exploring this technique because we started to make meanings out of it (to reflect on this, this is when I started to understand the art of exploration more), we then added a third projection just because why not. The third projection have a webcam connected into it, we played around with by pointing the camera towards the video projection and it created a trippy-infinite like mirror effect, we didn’t see how we can incorporate this, so we kept experimenting with the camera, we set the camera down and pointed it out where the audience are seen, I thought this was a great technique idea as it helps visually create a personal connections towards the audience, but Niish and Krisma said that it was too much and there is too much equipment and sorting out the space will be too hard, so thats a no.

Week 5

We came back to Maggie and discussed our individual personal inspirations and how we connect to our project. She was fine with it, she also understood that because we are still in the early stage, we still need to develop our initial concept, but she was happy. She also mentioned that she is more interested on the disturbing grey boundaries between the perceptions of real and/or fake, and we need to focus more on that idea rather than the side of real and fake individually . She also explained to us to stay away from being too literal and cliche. She explained that being too literal is like hammering the viewer’s head and making them dumb, our project needs to be lateral, where we have to make our audience think and trust that they will get it.

Honestly, I never really thought of it like that, I’ve usually work on projects that were made commercially rather than being a serious work of art. This is where I understand the big difference between serious art work and commercial projects. Commercial projects are more on being clear, straight-forward and catching the audience attention rather than stopping them and making them use their time to analyse the work. What Maggie thought that we are making is an art- installation that are designed to be shown in an art gallery as we did mention it being an art installation, personally I am okey with the idea of it being an art-installation and Im interested on learning the art process and art-work in general. however, I am worried about Niishahn as he is more into business-like projects, and the way he thinks would be different for this type of projects. But it’ll be interesting to learn from him on how he can take this project while I’m self - learning about this creative processes.

Anyways, this is the reason why (Me and Niishahn usually end up yelling at each other) I started to explore ideas more rather than having a linear process, while Niishahn likes to have a linear process, but sometimes I get carried away and end up going back and forth with my ideas, so it’s a good thing that Niishahn are able to support me, however Niishahn sometimes gets too organised and plan the whole project , but I think this is good as me/krisma contrast with Niishahn creative process, but we are learning to balance everything out.

Week 4

KNK - Krisma, niishahn and I met up and discussed all our individual research and personal connection towards our studio project.

I talked about how mental illness runs in my father’s side blood and how I’m interested on how they think, see the world and how much they get confuse for which world are real or in their minds.

Niishahn talked about his interest on non-fiction characters. Since he was a little kid, he loved comic characters, like joker and batman. He then talked about the perception of different people towards this character. Some people thinks that Joker isn’t really a bad guy while, Batman is the actual bad guy, Again it’s really about the person’s perception towards the character.

While, Krisma, talked about how in her Indian culture, there are people called Hijab (im not sure how you spell it), They are intersex and she wonders why they are worshiped in India, while in other cultures they are not. Also, when she was a little kid, she gets confuse what they’re actual gender are.

So in conclusion, we realized that all our experiences, stories and personal research is connected to each other. All of us are interested on people’s perceptions because of those reasons I mentioned. We also discussed that we will narrow down our theme to to people’s perceptions towards reality or not. It is really all about individual’s beliefs and opinions.