Progress

I’ll be using my friend Reuben Brickell as the actor again for my film. If all goes to plan I will be filming on Saturday. Hopefully.

Here are the things I need to sort out:

1. Place to film
2. Camera etc
3. Angles for wood
4. Make wooden bars

Storyboard

Link to full storyboard.

Treatment for Project Three

Redefine the Box

Synopsis
A student inside a wooden box uses the wood of his entrapment to build a house (Bachelor of Architecture/Bachelor of Building Sciences) furniture (Interior Architecture) garden (Landscape Architecture) lamp (Industrial Design) and computer game (Media Design). Slogan: ‘Redefine the box. Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Architecture and Design.’

Theme
The student inside the box is a recent high school graduate, with the box representing his primary and high school mainstream education. Rather than bursting out of it and discarding this education or moving away from it, he uses it as a starting point to fulfil his creative ambitions in the VUW Faculty of Architecture and Design.

The Pitch

Creative high school students coming from the structured environment of secondary education relish the opportunity to develop their own ideas in university and beyond. The aim of the School of Design is not just to encourage people to think outside the box – directing their thought at alternative methods – but to take already-existing tools of thinking and working and improve, adapt, and reinvent them.

Artistic Questions

My artistic aim with this piece is to abstract a common experience, and also to [learn to] make a stop motion film with a person in it that looks smooth.

Production Design
The ad will be sixty seconds long in stop motion (it should also be possible to cut a thirty second and fifteen second version from this footage for TV advertising). The tone is uplifting, playful, simple, and bright; the student is on a plain white background with the box made of plywood strips around him. The score will be playful, simple and creative, not unlike early Architecture in Helsinki (2).

Breakdown
The student is curled in the fetal position inside a square of plywood strips in the centre of the frame. He yawns, outstretching his arms to push the box outwards, and ‘stands up’ (stretches his legs) pushing the box downwards. (This symbolises the widening of his knowledge post-secondary school).
He looks around, assessing his surroundings, and pushes the centre of the top strip upwards to resemble a roof. As his hand comes back down, he draws a string from the apex of the roof to just above his head and puts a lightbulb on the end of it.
He pulls down from the top of the right wall and a piece of wood half the length of the wall folds down from it to a right angle. He pulls down on that piece again to make another right angle, parallel to the original wall, making a backwards ‘h’ formation for a chair. He sits down on the chair.
The student takes the horizontal piece of wood from the chair beneath him, revealing another one below it, and folds it into a laptop. The angle changes to show the screen of the laptop: the student creates and plays a game controlling a square of wood that jumps around a wooden landscape and jumps on square wooden villains.
The angle changes back to the top down view. The student folds down the laptop, stands up from the chair, opens a door outwards from the box and ‘walks’ out of screen.
Inside the house, laser cut plywood letters appear to form the words: ‘Redefine the box.’
The Victoria University of Wellington Faculty of Architecture and Design logo appears below the words.

Props
The lightbulb will be a traditional incandescent lightbulb with the filament replaced by an LED and a self-contained battery.
Plywood will be 3mm pine ply, cut to 50mm in width and forming most of the set. The dimensions of the box, house, chair, laptop etc will depend on the physical dimensions of the actor. The laser cut words and logo in the final shot will fill the ‘house’.

Storyboard

Proposal

MDDN211: Project One Proposal.

Precedent Scene

‘Brick’ (2005) Car sequence

Synopsis

A conflict between two men reveals that they are the same person.

Precedent Analysis

The scene follows a conflict between Brendan, an outsider seeking vengeance for his ex-girlfriend’s death, and Tugger, the henchman of a local drug lord. Brendan threatens Tugger’s car with a brick to get his attention, and Tugger walks across the parking lot to beat Brendan up.  The scene makes use of extended, tense fermata in action.

The emotional effectiveness of the scene is gained from the ongoing conflict between the two characters and the incomprehensibility of Brendan’s motivations in luring the thug and allowing himself to be beaten up.
There are extended fermatas in action, where Tugger is seen walking across the parking lot and Brendan is seen holding a brick above his head for longer than the viewer might expect to see portrayed. This, like the musical technique fermata, serves to draw out the tension of the moment and increase the anticipation for the next moment.

Concept

The concept at the core of this scene is a conflict between a person who uses his physicality to solve problems and a person who solves problems tactically, where the tactics being used by the latter include being apparently beaten by the former.

Process

The scene will be filmed in the Ergonomics lab, with a clear white background and minimal props, to emphasise the central conflict. One actor will portray both characters, with a hat to distinguish them.

Man one will begin on the right of the stage, wearing a hat and sitting in a chair. From the left, the word ‘HEY’ is heard, presumably from man two. He stands up, and the camera slowly pans to the left, where man two (the same actor, without a hat) is threatening to punch a screen. The camera lingers on man two, then slowly pans back to the right.

The camera then follows man one walking to the left, where he discovers that there is no one there. In frustration, he throws his hat to the right, offscreen, and looks to the right. The camera follows his gaze, panning to the right where man two is waiting. He picks up the hat from the ground and sits in the chair, relaxing, when HEY is heard from the left.

 

Set

MDDN211 Proposal

We are planning to film on the weekend. My initial plan was to have animal costumes, but it turns out that it would be too expensive. Budget constraints are pretty tight for the moment.

The central idea of the scene from Brick that we are re-shooting is an outsider confronting a thug by threatening his possessions. One idea I have had for the translation is to conceptualise it as an inner battle, or an inner confrontation; to have both of the characters portrayed by the same actor.

This would ideally be shot in the ergonomics lab downstairs. The only set decorations would be a chair and a wall that could be punched through (or other thing that could be destroyed twice), and the only necessary wardrobe would be a hat and sunglasses to distinguish the two characters.

Hello, world.

My name is Merrin Macleod. I am a media design student at Victoria University of Wellington. This will be my course blog for MDDN251: Physical Computing and MDDN211: Digital Video Creation. It will also be my blog for other design-related things and other learning-related things.

 

Here are some of my interests:

1. Government and politics.
2. Linguistic mutation.
3. Used postcards.
4. Google Maps.
5. Science fiction.
6. Food ethics.
7. Energy ethics.
8. Typography.