mikigaddes

[mikigaddes]

This is the final PDF :) It works best if viewed in Full Screen, or Downloaded :)

[mikigaddes]

This was the final documentation video. I thought that rather than try and document everything via tumblr, a video would be a unique and creative way to convey our ideas and what we planned on doing. Similar to that in the first video, we aimed to explain the idea in a way that would allow the responders to make up their own minds before viewing our thoughts... however because the first video was specifically about 1 project, i thought this would be a nice finishing touch to end the PDF.

I am also queen of cheesy endings and naturally i had a lot of footage to work with for the ultimate cheesy ending. I thought it was fitting to add in the bits of the footage that weren't suitable for the video itself but showcased the fun we had making the PDF. as a group i think we actually did really enjoying the group project. It was a nice break from the individual projects we've done throughout the year, and its nice to have other opinions and visions to work with :)

[mikigaddes]

I'm really happy with my group and how we worked together.

there were definitely challenges throughout the task, mainly due to the inability to find time to meet up outside of cofa class. twice we stayed after class to work on it but it was hard to collaborate the final piece. 

i put the final pdf together with the suggestions of Olivia and Brendan. They sent me the desired layout of their pages and i collaborated and compiled them into the final PDF. The PDF and the embedding of files was EXTREMELY difficult and have given me great grief, particularly trying to embed my videos. 

Further, the process of the video making took a LONGGGG time. I had to collect the footage, then spent the course of multiple days and hours putting the videos together on Premier Pro, a program i have not had a lot of experience with. The rendering took up to 2 hours per video, and i had to render it multiple times..

But i am extremely proud of the work our group put together, and i believe everyone pulled their weight. We did not have any real issues or disagreements, only helpful suggestions. 

[mikigaddes]

The final group idea stemmed from a similar idea to that in the previous idea: home through family. Something that we all agreed related to family and home was MUMS COOKING. We all asked our mothers, very kindly of course, to cook there 'staple meal'. From there we used water colour paints to paint what we tasted in order to create a visual representation of what home tastes like. 

The top image is Brendans, his mother made Chicken Schnitzel. The middle is Olivia, her Mum made curry, and the third is mine. My Mother made 5 spice Hoi Sin Noodles with lettuce. 

The idea was to use colours to show what we tasted. To a great extent i believe it worked, whilst all similar, they show very great differences in terms of presentation. Olivias is quite bold, whilst brendans is more blotchy, and mine uses great long streaks. 

This is a simple way to represent the family through the senses.

[mikigaddes]

Following the audio, we felt that image was needed to back it up and create a scene. We felt that photography was too literal. So we decided to test our drawing skills. The idea was to create a series of three images. The first was a rough sketch of the individual talking, the second a sketch where the pen could not leave the paper, the third a sketch without looking. 

The images were to be drawn on white a4 paper in black sharpie so as when they were scanned the flowed in a nice manner and sat well together.

The left image is my sister eating corn, the right my mother eating Hoi Sin Noodles with chopsticks. 

The final image used was of my mother, a sketch without looking. We felt it really showed our family in all its disjointed parts collectively, but still added a sense of wholeness to the audio it accompanied.

[mikigaddes]

One page in particular became our space to experiment and discover home. Collectively, we decided that a large part of what made up home was family, and in that sense, our idea of home is uniquely tailored to us through each families quirks. Where are these quirks most often noticed? In conversation. A conversation between a family can tell a lot. It shows how close a family is, how comfortable they are discussing different types of topics. It shows a similarity, or lack there of in personalities. Do the subjects respond/sound/act the same? Are they loud? Quiet? Inquisitive? It depicts an image of the family and the sense of home without actually seeing a visual of the home. 

Family is something that, naturally, Brendan, Olivia and I all feel very strongly about, and we were very drawn to exploring how the idea of family can be expressed. 

We decided that there was no true way of expressing our families other than to record an everyday conversation with them. My Mother, my sister and I were recorded at dinner. Brendan recorded his Mother and Sister in law watching Big Brother, and Olivia recorded her Father, Mother and Brother during a lounge room conversation.

By splicing parts of the audio and pasting them together in different orders we can directly see the differences between what we relate to as home, and whilst all the same, they are all very, very different.

[mikigaddes]

Our inspiration for the close ups was drawn greatly from these two scenes of A Secret Life of Walter Mitty. (2013). 

In the two scenes, Mitty is seen scrutinising a picture that he views as a clue to find Sean Penn. The image to him is just shapes, lines and black and white negative image.

In the second scene, Mitty is shown finally piecing the image, and the object in the image, together. He had been so caught up in other things that he had failed to notice that the image he was looking at was something very close to him - his piano. 

SCENE 1: WATCH 19:25 SCENE 2: WATCH 1:1:15

[mikigaddes]

The idea behind the close up page was in reference to a scene taken from the 2013 movie The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. As a team, Olivia and I attempted to challenge the viewers with the idea of recognising the most inaudible details. 

Part of this idea stemmed from something our history teacher once taught us.  "Describe to me your desk." We each described our desk, its white, long, and quite narrow and it sits against my window. "Has it got any scratches is it? Or marks?" Yes its got a highlighter mark in the top left corner and the paint is chipping along the edge. Theres also a chunk of wood missing in the right hand side of the leg. "Have you ever studied your desk? " No. "Yet you can tell me every minute detail." Yes. "Your body has picked up on these details because you spend so much time around your desk that its appearance and connotations are so subconsciously engrained in your mind that without studying it you can tell me everything about it." Although she was trying to show us how study notes on our walls would help us for the hsc, the same concept can be applied to elements around our home. The small shapes, textures and elements that make up our home are things we have never spared a thought for. Yet we still know they are there. With even the smallest depiction of the objects, we as household members are able to instantly place them to their full object. To anyone else, they are simply images of shapes, colours and lines.

In a sense, the idea was that home is not only something that we decide to be home. it is not necessarily that easy to categorise, rather, it is made up of a huge jumble of things we notice and things we don't. Subconscious elements of home are a huge contributor to the sense comfort we find amongst objects we know.

[mikigaddes]

These were the final three images i chose from for the bus stop shelter. The thought behind this was similar to that of the lamp project. The aim was to take an element of home and comfort and place it on something that holds the opposite of home, and uncomfort. I took the elements of my home that seem most obvious to hold connotations of home. My idea of comfort is my lounge. Thus, taking my couch cushions, and my throw, and placing them on bus stops no where near my home, i was able to contrast the idea of house and home in an aesthetically pleasing manner. I liked the colours in the middle image most. I liked the blues and shadows with the poles behind them - it reminded me of home. It did make the shelter feel like a weird sort of home to me. In contrast, the last image seemed less like home to me, however the location reminded me more of home, with the water just behind the camera. I live near the beach, and have always grown up near the beach. I also felt it was an image that was most open to responders interpretation. the first image felt too obvious and straight forward, with a house in the background, however i liked the composition of the image.

[mikigaddes]

These are the raw files of the lamps images i was assigned. The project was divided, so we took one lot of images each. Brendan took images of the wharf, whilst olivia took images at the beach. I felt that the images surrounded by greenery were most effective purely due to the contrast in colour.

[mikigaddes]

The idea of the lamps was to propose the idea "is home still home when not in a house?". We decided that one of the most overlooked, yet common elements that make up a home is a lamp - although some may say it is more suited to the 'house' category. The idea was that by placing an object with connotations of home into a foreign surrounding, we would see if the connotations remained. Did it cause the foreign surroundings to take on elements we associated with home, or did the item lose all connotations?

There is no right or wrong answer, and we left our visualisation open ended, simply asking the responders to consider what they felt happened when home was taken outside.

[mikigaddes]

These were some of the ideas for the original formatting of the house/home images. I found they complimented each other as a set in the way that they gave an insight into the subjects idea of home/house. The top strip is Brendans idea of house, the middle is my idea of house and home in one, the third is Brendans idea of home.

[mikigaddes]

As a follow up for the documentary task, i was allocated a page to display the images we produced. i tried at first to display all, but the more we added to the PDF, the more the style and simplicity was lost in overcrowded image formats. The best and most aesthetically pleasing option to me was to take the images right back to the raw files. I took the best of house and home from myself and each of my team members. Although our images complimented each other as a set, it was ideal to pull them back, as it translated our idea of ‘can house and home be defined in black and white terms’. Home is on the left, house is on the right. Further, it showed the contrast of what we considered house and home. Olivia took home to be a shared personal element i.e. communal shoes. I took it to be personal and private quirks- i.e. keeping a toothbrush on the shower. Brendan took it to be curves and comfort.

[mikigaddes]

The project at hand was based greatly off a former project ‘One roll of Film”. The documentary saw 4 Tokyo based photographers undertake a challenge to shoot one roll of film on a Hasselblad in the streets of Tokyo. Whilst the physical concept was similar, we decided that to focus specifically on an element of visualisation (6 House, 6 Home) we were able to get straight to the heart of the project without thinking too much about what we considered house and home. It stopped our ideas from being too overthought, which we worried would cloud our original perception of the visual //

[mikigaddes]

3 Students, 1 Concept, 12 Pages of Visulalisation.

  The first part of my contributed section to the pdf was the compilation of an ‘introductory video’. This involved me filming, editing, cropping, designing and formatting the footage completely. Not only did we feel that a video such as this would give an introductory insight into our thought process, but it was a unique way to engage responders. We encouraged those watching to firstly consider what they believed to be house and home, but also encouraged them to assess where they believed such elements sat. Can a house stand alone, and is there such thing as home without house? 

The video style of documentation was a style i am familiar with, and a style i believed to be best suited to the project. Although I have never put together a documentary film such as this, my time at COFA has seen me acquire skills suited to use Adobe Premier Pro. Thus,  I was able to format the aesthetics of the video in the way i did. 

The task at hand was simple. Take 6 images of House and 6 images of Home. There were no boundaries, limitations or expectations. The only outline we had to follow was that the images we took were the images we used. No deleting, no retaking. The project was to capture our immediate insight into House and Home. It was the first task we undertook, thus allowing us to see literally what we, as individuals, perceived as house and home. 

Throughout the process there were difficulties with saving the file simply because of size. All the individual videos that make up the documentary were quite large and continuously caused my computer to freeze and often overheat. The process of rendering took around 4 hours each time, and the video was rendered around 5 times due to my indecisiveness with the file endings. 

Im proud of the video we put together and it achieved everything i hoped it would achieve.

[mikigaddes]

Touch -

To visualise the physicality of the house and home we all collaged our fingerprints. This aims to evoke how consistent physical contact and closeness with objects and a place turn a house into a home. This very basic human ability to interact with the inanimate and invest our emotions into them is central to the concept of home. By plainly putting our prints on a page it shows the house and home as what it truly is: simply a consistent and familiar point of interaction.

[mikigaddes]

What is a house?

I took this as physical elements that i find a connection with, foundations and materials that constitute my home. The external casing of things that make home for me. 

The colour white, handleless taps, whitewashed furniture. Sharp vector lines etc etc.