PRP Artefact 4 - 'The Laughing'

Here's my fourth artefact, a short scene from 'The Shining' with added sound effects.

PRP Artefact 4 - 'The Laughing' from Kez Whelan on Vimeo.

If you've seen the film 'The Shining' before, then taking this survey - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FMCTPCX would help me greatly.
Don't worry if you've never seen 'The Shining' before, there's a seperate survey here - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FMZNQGN that's designed specially for you!
Enjoy =)

PRP Ideas

I've got two more ideas lined up for my PRP artefacts, one that continues in a similiar vein to the earlier videos, and one that explores the extent of sound's abilities in film from a slightly different angle.

The wondrous 20p and the evil penny (definitely a working title, haha!) –
A guy goes for a stroll and encounters two coins on the floor. The first is accompanied by pleasant, triumphant music whilst the second is soundtracked by an ominous, menacing theme. This video and it’s questionnaire will be designed to observe the soundtrack’s ability to create character, which is quite similair to my third artefact, 'Dog Whispers', but it has the advantage of starring two inanimate objects. In 'Dog Whispers', the music for each dog and their different voices are a large part of their character, but the dialogue itself is also a big factor. Here, I think it will be easier to see the effects of the audio itself without any extraneous factors to confuse matters.

The Laugh Track idea –
This idea is to take a scene from a film that is either very melancholy, harrowing, or disturbing, but definitely not funny at all, and add canned laughter to it. I was thinking maybe the scene from ‘The Shining’ wherein Jack Nicholson first confronts his wife, wielding an axe. The aim of this is to discover whether or not the laughter of others actually influences us to laugh, and whether it’s possible to recreate this effect in film. I would definitely think that the laughter of those around us has a strong influence, but this may be more of a social effect than a physical one, and so I think it'd be interesting to see exactly how canned laughter, detached from any kind of physical presence, affects us.

Artefact 1 - Fridge Inspection Survey

Here is the first of my PRP artefacts, a short film called Fridge Inspection with two different edits, the only difference between the two being the soundtrack.
If you could watch both these films (which will take about 2 minutes) and then fill out this short survey - http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WPP9MZS (which will take about 2 minutes too, if that!) it would help me out a lot. Thanks!

Fridge Inspection A -


Fridge Inspection B -

Sound FX & After Effects

I've just finished some filming for, potentially, the first of my PRP artefacts. There's a fair ammount of editing to be done, but the bare bones are there and I have a rough edit rendering at the moment. The film makes heavy use of After Effects, and I think so far it's probably the best work I've done with that programme.
I've been having a look around for various sound effects too, and have found quite a large ammount but with varying degrees of quality. I've been thinking about how different pieces of music can work here too, and thankfully this time I'm not restrained by copyright, as the film is not for commercial use, it's just to illustrate a point.

PRP Artefacts Ideas

So, one of my initial ideas for the first one is to re-edit a piece of existing film with different music to change it's atmosphere. I'm still not entirely sure whether to do this with just one scene from a film or attempt to make a re-edited trailer instead. Another idea I had is a short scene that I can edit in subtly different ways to make it either appear as a comedy, a horror, a drama, etc etc. but at the moment I'm having a few troubles trying to think of a basic, easily adaptable scene. It should be something fairly mundane to allow scope for the sound effect to drastically change our perception of what's happening on screen.

Heider And Simmel Animation

Here's an interesting animation I found whilst doing research for the PRP essay -



This was an animation made in the 1940's for an experiment into 'apparent behaviour'. Participants were asked some questions about the three shapes after viewing this video, and, unsuprisingly, the majority of people viewed the large triangle as a villainous bully, the circle as tense and scared, and the small triangle as more relaxed, and more eager to provoke the larger triangle. This is pretty much the impression I got from watching the film too.
Later on, an experiment was carried out by Sandra K. Marshall and Annabel J. Cohen, whereby the same experiment was carried out but this time played to different participants with and without sound. Different sounds were able to distort or strengthen the emotions and actions percieved by most viewers.
This is great evidence for my research project, and I also think it'd be useful research for any animation topics too as it demonstrates really well how you can give an inanimate object a clearly defined character.

EDIT : Here's another awesome example of how sound can give and emphasize character.

The Pilot

Here's the pilot for 'Chuck Voyager' -

As one of the actors in the scene was unable to film before this deadline, I had two of my friends stand in for both the actors (it seemed pointless to get the actor playing Dr. Tipler to travel down here just to film a pilot that won’t actually be in the final film), so the cast in the final version will be totally different, as will the location, props, etc. The footage looks a little rough around the edges but I feel it gives a relatively good indication of how this scene will look in the finished edit.
The scene is a LOT longer than I imagined it would be! However, Elliot suggested allowing 6 minutes for the first scene on the film set, 6 minutes for this one and then 6 minutes for in the future, which is probably what I'm going to. This would give me 6 short films that could (kind of) stand alone but also work as a whole.

I just had a talk with Deborah and Danny as well about my third year project. Danny said my idea of doing a music video for a band isn't quite enough, so suggested doing a full audio visual package for a band, which is a cool idea.