Final Major Project – Karyn Easton

May 09

by Karyn in Books, Conclusion, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Final Outcomes, My Work, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Books, Conclusion, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Final Outcomes, my work, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs

Book Photography

Product Photography for the Balance of Power Book – My book is now fully augmented and the whole of its contents can be viewed in the augmented reality video that I made to accompany the ‘Balance of Power Mobile. A full digital copy of the book can be found here. The next step in my process was to create an image that would represent my book – something that I could use for social media posts and head up any literature that I might like to send out. It might even form the cover of a brochure about the project as a whole. Contact Sheets from Experimental Shoots Refining the Concepts There are many references to nature in my ‘Balance of Power’ Final 5 Minute Video. Therefore, in the first instance I decided to shoot my books outdoors. One of my chosen concepts to explore was having my books with foliage or vines wrapped around it. Below are some of the concepts that I decided to refine further. The original ‘Balance of Power’ Book was a large scale book (30 x 30cm), but sadly when I came to scale the book down, the title wasn’t as prominent. […]

Augmenting the Book

Augmenting the Balance of Power Book – As part of my body of work I felt that it was really useful to produce an explanatory book all about the ‘Balance of Power – Unity in Bits’ mobile. When I began the journey into the augmentation of the book I hadn’t really planned to shoot many clips, just enough to fill any gaps in my final film (Film Mark 2) and to give a flavour of the fully augmented book. However, as I began creating each clip I decided to go ahead and augment the full book. This needed to be done anyway as it will form part of my body of work. Once each of the pages had been augmented with video I decided to run all of the clips together to see how it looked. What I hadn’t necessarily expected was that the total length of the resulting film was just over 7 minutes. I wondered therefore, would it be possible to trim and tweak these clips to make the resulting film exactly 5 minutes? My thinking was that this would afford me yet another possibility in terms of films to choose from. I was also keen to experiment […]

Apr 30

by Karyn in Experimentation, Film Production, Final Major Project, Final Outcomes, My Learning, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Film Production, Final Major Project, Final Outcomes, My Learning, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos

Audio Revamp

Missing Film Clips and More Audio – Today after work, I thought that I would afford myself a little break. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t take my mind off my film, so here I am at nearly midnight working on it again. I’ve got to be up for work in a few hours, but at least I wan’t feeling quite so ill today. The more I learn about sound and audio, the more I realise how little I actually know and how much there is to learn! I really can fully appreciate why film companies employ sound engineers. It is a whole art form in itself! Looking back I really wish that I’d paid more attention at college to film and sound. Thirty years ago I was much more interested in just pure photography and photographic techniques, but fast forward to the present and now I am somewhat regretful. There’s just so much that I still want to learn and so much that I want to achieve, I think this latest bout of feeling poorly has really made me reflect. However, enough of the self pity this will not help me finish my film. Tonight as I’m just about to go […]

Mar 04

by Karyn in 3d, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos 0 comments tags: 3d, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos

Visual Exploration #2

Video Exploration of the Mobile – In my first visual exploration of the ‘Balance of Power’ mobile I shot a number of stills using a wide aperture. This was to allow for only a narrow band of focus on each of the images. The goal was to add an air of mystery to the mobile and hopefully leave the viewer wanting to know more? In part #2 of this ongoing visual exploration I shot some videos using my DSLR camera. My aim again was to add an air of mystery to the finished video clips. Below are the experimental results from this endeavour. The Balance of Power – Unity in Bits Mobile This is a complex piece that has many hidden layers to it. Below are some of the key points: The mobile comprises 11 lines of individually hand drawn elements that represent the ones and zeros of binary code. The binary code represented in the mobile spells the words ‘Unity in Bits’. It is a visual metaphor representing how our society is ultimately fractured by computers and their code. For example the harms of social media and the taking of artist work without permission. At least 10 […]

Mar 04

by Karyn in 3d, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos 0 comments tags: 3d, Experimentation, Final Major Project, Photography, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos

Visual Exploration #1

Photographic Exploration of the Mobile – Now that my ‘Balance of Power’ mobile is fully installed I can start to experiment photographically. Over the weekend I took a number of stills and I also shot some videos. Editing the videos will take a while longer. In the meantime I thought I’d share some of the stills. I decided to shoot my stills using very specific camera settings. The mobile hides many things, therefore it was important to me to try and capture an air of mystery about it. For this reason I deliberately chose to use a very shallow ‘depth of field’. Indeed I was actually working with an f-stop of 1.8 (A very large aperture). What this means essentially, is that only a very narrow band of my image will actually be in focus. These narrow bands of focus can be seen in the images below. I certainly had enough light streaming in through the windows to enable me to shoot at f-16 (the minimum aperture for my 50mm lens), however, I genuinely feel that the selective blurring adds something a little more mysterious to the images below. I feel that the images are much more atmospheric. I also […]

Jan 22

by Karyn in Experimentation, Final Major Project, My Learning, My Work, Timelapse, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Final Major Project, My Learning, my work, Timelapse, Unit 3 Blogs, Videos

Blogpost 200

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly – After working solidly for two days over the weekend, I finally finished the first prototype for the mobile. I felt on the whole it was pretty good. However, the sheer weight of the project even at this scale was pretty bad. Balancing the elements was also an absolute ‘nightmare’. This meant that some of the spacing between the mobile elements was pretty ugly. The short time-lapse video below shows roughly how many elements went into making three quarters of the mobile (some elements were already strung). I always imagined cardboard to be quite light but after this project I’ve come to revise my view. On the whole I do think that the prototype was a success – not because it was perfect or anything like that, but because of what I had learned during the whole process. First Looks Below is a very short video of the mobile. As I was concentrating on the movement of the video there is nothing to show scale. The mobile turned out to be around 6ft tall in the end! I had envisioned something much smaller and lighter. Alternative Music […]

Jan 16

by Karyn in Experimentation, Final Major Project, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Final Major Project, Unit 3 Blogs

Stringing Along

The Mobile Hanging Process – Today a number of items arrived that I identified as being useful for my mobile. I felt that black elastic bands might secure the pieces in place better than tape. I also ordered some phone charm strings and some swivel head keychain clasps. Below is a picture of my ‘haul’. New Hanging Items The items shown below contain tiny black eyelets sat on top of the box they came in. There are also some swivel head clasps and some phone charm strings. I have threaded together the swivel clasps using a phone charm string to illustrate how each bar of the mobile will be held in place. The large circular key rings will be used to suspend the zero elements of the mobile. I tried stringing one line of the mobile this evening using the new items. It has made an immeasurable difference. It will now be so much easier to standardise the thread lengths because the phone strings are already a uniform length. Also with the zero elements now secured using the tiny eyelets everything will now stay in place. I was extremely hard trying to balance everything when many of […]

Hanging Around

Choosing a Suitable Stringing Method – Choosing suitable materials and a hanging method for my mobile has to be one of the most challenging aspects so far. I’m way beyond my comfort zone with this! Noah one of my fellow students shared a link by the creative force that once was, namely David Bowie. Im going to put what he said here so that when I struggle I’ve got a point of reference to start things moving again. Today, having produced enough mobile elements to explore hanging and stringing I started running into multiple problems. Some of these included: 1). What kind of stringing method would I like to use 2). How do I arrange the elements neatly enough so that the viewer understands them as binary. 3). What materials should I use to actually string and hang the mobile? 4). Will a smaller prototype actually translate into a much larger one? The problems above were to name only a few. I spent the evening trying to source suitable hanging materials. I managed to source a very good older pdf on the subject of mobile making which helped a lot! How to Make Mobiles How to […]

Jan 02

by Karyn in Experimentation, Final Major Project, Food for Thought, Unit 3 Blogs 0 comments tags: Experimentation, Final Major Project, Food for Thought, Unit 3 Blogs

Still Thinking

How Do Computers See Art? – Throughout my research journey, I focussed a lot on how humans perceive AI generated art. On the whole there was quite an amount of negative bias towards it. Further research revealed that some of this negativity could be mitigated by carefully crafting a narrative to accompany the AI art. However, this led me to question how do computers actually see and understand the art that they are fed? I did some further research and I stumbled upon something called ‘pixel data’. This is the raw data the computer uses to display both the colour and brightness of any given pixel on a screen. I wanted to learn more about pixel data. While doing some research I stumbled across a really interesting website called ‘Think Maths’. On this website was an interesting piece of software to enable the extraction of pixel data called the ‘Spreadsheet Pixel Converter. After watching one of Matt Parker’s videos on the website, I became completely ‘sold’ on the idea of pixel data and how a computer might at some level actually view or ‘see’ the imagery that is input into a machine learning system. In his video, Matt demonstrated how […]

Book Photography

Augmenting the Book

Audio Revamp

Visual Exploration #2

Visual Exploration #1

Blogpost 200

Stringing Along

Hanging Around

Still Thinking

Recent Posts

Categories

Tags

Recent Comments