Bibliography

Bibliography :

Mysteries: An investigation into the occult, the paranormal and the supernatural

Watkins Publishing LTD

Colin Wilson- 1978

Non Places : Introduction to the anthropology of super-modernity

Verso Books  new edition

Marc Auge 2009

City Of Dreadful Night

National Reformer

James B.V. Thompson 1874

visual/ audio footage :

 Some footage was sourced from www.YouTube.com.

#  Young man gives an unforgettable speech about Jesus

Lords of Praise

2012

# NYPD Cops wake up a sleeping homeless man before beating him

ABC 7 News

2012

#  Wake up U.S.A.

End Times News Update

 2013

# A child dies every six minutes in horn of Africa

SanDamanioFilms & v2vmom

2012

#Emotional horn of Africa appeal

Ummah welfare trust

2011

#Le calvaire d'un enfant somalien

Afreeque

2011

#Nuclear Explosions ( stock footage compiled)

Manual Fri

2013

                              

# Dachau concentration camp 1945

 Uploaded by The Saass1

2012

# Army- What would you do?

Uploaded byModernSolr4

2002

#Oak Furnitureland Advert

Oak Furnitureland

2013

#Tamara Foster sings

The X Factor

2013

#Nitrostirumpa - A Injection Of Heroin Made Me Happy Today

Uploaded by Konjunction26

2011

 #Tony Blair's Victory Speech

Uploaded by MrElectionist

2009

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Dir. James Cameron

1991

American Psycho

Dir. Mary Harron

2000

Charles Mason: The man who killed the sixties

Channel 4

Dir. Peter Bate 1994

Black Metal Satanica

Dir.Mats Lundberg

2008

Supersize Me

Dir. Morgan Spurlock

2004

The Passion of the Christ

Dir. Mel Gibson

2004

Photos that were also used:

  Niklas Kvarforth portrait  found on www.truemetalhead.com

"Halmstad"  Taken by Niklas Kvarforth 2002

"Prospectors Arrive" by Jonny Greenwood ( 2007) used 

in film.

R.E.D.2 Feedback/Final thoughts

RED 2

Feedback/ Final Thoughts

I had become concerned before the screening that I may have taken the content of the film too far, the goal was certainly to make the film an intense experience , I wanted this film to be as honest and frank as I could make it, but I did have to ask myself whether or not I had stepped into the realms of the offensive, which as I mentioned earlier , wasn't a concern of mine. The most I wanted to do is be provocative and present my point of view, I decided to simply run with a screening of it without any changes. I was nervous about it, more than usual probably because this was the first time that I hadn't been helped by anyone and there wasn't anyone up there with me, I was alone.

I think the film screened very well, once it was screened I had one of my peers shake my hand, and was praising my film which was something that I had not experienced before. I got a few shocked expressions and one of my fellow students simply asked " why?" I did my best to answer that question without preaching too much, I tried to say that this film represents me at my most negative.

I was given some feedback from one of the lecturers who said first of all asked why I named it " the Negation"  I replied by saying that in simple terms that means "denial" after which he added that the film comes across as more of a confession which I thought was an interesting point and one that certainly made me consider changing the title afterwards.

I also was advised that the audio may need some tweaking before submission, but unfortunately i had lost all the original audio elements and I felt worried about sourcing them all again, which could potentially cause problems with the timeline of the film, I decided to leave it, although I did attempt to locate the audio before making that decision.

Ultimately I think that this project has been my greatest success and I have a new sense of confidence going into my next project, I feel more articulate as a film-maker  and  I feel able to make a valuable contribution at a greater level than before. I have a better understanding of the processes that go into the technical side of post-production and I think I have achieved what I initially  set out to achieve. I think this film is very much me, it says something about my style and abilities and It's a film I can feel proud of, this must be true  as I have looked at it far more times than I have viewed any of my other films. Here's hoping that I can take what I have learnt into my next project and beyond and maybe make something even better.

R.E.D. 2 Post- Production

RED 2

Post- Production

Over a period of about three to four weeks I set about editing my film, first of all I took the footage that I had captured on the z1 camera and painstakingly went through every shot finding things that I thought may have some relation to my project. I initially knocked all the footage I deemed usable to around twenty minutes, at which point I began thinking about the idea of using music to score the final film. The one track I had in my head from the very start of this project was by Johnny Greenwood called  " Prospectors Arrive" and It was originally part of the soundtrack to the film  " There Will Be Blood"  ( Dir. P.T. Anderson 2007), I couldn't envision the film without that scoring it.

Next I started compiling audio snippets and video footage from  various sources. I found a speech by  a young Christian on YouTube which was titled " young man gives inspirational speech about Jesus"  I used excerpts from an interview with Charles Manson, an interview with Niklas Kvarforth from the aforementioned band "Shining" whose talks very candidly about his own philosophy on life, I also used audio snippets from" Terminator 2: Judgement Day " ( Dir. J. Cameron 1991) and " American Psycho" (Dir. Mary Harron 2000) also I snuck in some audio from Tony Blair's victory speech from 1997, on their own they had remained empty statements but once I found images to put them against they found new meaning. I struck upon the idea of using footage of the concentration camps in Dachau  to use in a specific place in the film I had managed to get lots of footage from the z1 which showed a very long high grey wall that ran along the docklands area that  reminded me of the military and the notion of war behind those walls and I decided that with "fitting " dialogue I would insert footage of the concentration camps with it. This was where I really started to explore  the editing system and really start to gain the confidence to orchestrate and take control of my film , I decided to start taking the colour out of the preceding few seconds and then to gradually make everything dark until it met the footage from Dachau which i hoped would marry with the colour palette of the footage and the dialogue. After learning how to sue the key frames and experimented with all the different effects tools to achieve this, I really felt that I was close to finally achieving what I had been missing since I started the course and that was seeing exactly the film on screen as the same one I had in my head.

I really started to play around with the rest of the film, using all sorts of fades and dissolves, I injected and faded still photographs into other footage, I even managed to make an animated title  card at the beginning, all of which took me a long time to achieve but I was determined to get this right.  I found the audio to be a problem, as I had ripped it from the internet, so the quality was not always as fantastic as I had hoped and although I was able to manually adjust the gain  wherever needed, I was not able to filter it out and make it clearer. I could've used " sound soap" to help clear it up, but  sometimes this would've proved too difficult, for example one of the clips I used already had pre-recorded music embedded into the track which would've meant turning up the music as well as the dialogue which would've clashed with the music that I had already chosen. In the case of the rest of the audio, I felt that I really wanted to use this opportunity to concentrate on the visuals first and foremost. I thought that as long as you could understand what was being said, I had achieved my goal.  I tried to really concentrate on the cut and examine every edit until the night before screening, I was literally taking out single frames that at that late a stage, I really believe that every editing decision had to count. Due to some of the imagery That I had used,  the atmosphere did start to get to me after awhile, I found myself having to step away from project for a couple of days sometimes as there  was only so many times I could play with real life footage of dying infants before I got started to feel a bit peculiar. This helped me to keep up my enthusiasm for the film and kept me engaged and invested to make the film as good as I could.

R.E.D.2 Influences

City of dreadful night

O melancholy Brothers, dark, dark, dark!
O battling in black floods without an ark!
     O spectral wanderers of unholy Night!
My soul hath bled for you these sunless years,
With bitter blood-drops running down like tears:
     Oh dark, dark, dark, withdrawn from joy and light!

My heart is sick with anguish for your bale;
Your woe hath been my anguish; yea, I quail
     And perish in your perishing unblest.
And I have searched the highths and depths, the scope
Of all our universe, with desperate hope
     To find some solace for your wild unrest.

And now at last authentic word I bring,
Witnessed by every dead and living thing;
     Good tidings of great joy for you, for all:
There is no God; no Fiend with names divine
Made us and tortures us; if we must pine,
     It is to satiate no Being's gall.

It was the dark delusion of a dream,
That living Person conscious and supreme,
      Whom we must curse for cursing us with life;
Whom we must curse because the life he gave
Could not be buried in the quiet grave,
     Could not be killed by poison or the knife.

This little life is all we must endure,
The grave's most holy peace is ever sure,
     We fall asleep and never wake again;
Nothing is of us but the mouldering flesh,
Whose elements dissolve and merge afresh
     In earth, air, water, plants, and other men.

  James "B.V." Thomson 1870-73

I found the above poem after doing some research into quotations that I could use at the end of my film, I found that this poem resonates particularly with me, it's seems as though everything i wanted to say in the film is here in this text, what was even more striking was the date it was written.

I have been influenced by the Swedish band " Shining" whose lyrical content and conceptual ideas revolve around the idea of " suburban misery". I also liked the atmosphere that the scenes in the cities in "lost In Translation" and " Until The Light Takes Us" that was created.

R.E.D. 2 Influences

Here's some example of some of the work that I found helped to inspire and inform when I was first thinking about my project.

R.E.D. 2 Production

RED 2

Production

I Had the idea of shooting footage  around the city  at night time.  the reputation  that the Plymouth nightlife had acquired meant that I could find some interesting behaviour to display on screen. I  spent some time thinking about how I would want this film to look. I thought about the city lights and the atmosphere that various areas of the city could generate. I knew it was going to be very dark when I would get around to filming it, so I knew that I would have to use a camera which could generate some interesting and atmospheric scenery, some good lighting yet have  the details of the buildings  roads stand out and look dense. I wanted the "blacks" , the negative space, to have some aesthetic presence, so I picked the z1 Camera as I had some good experiences shooting with it before for similar conditions. I knew that when it came to the editing, I considered that it may give me more opportunities  to play with  effects and hopefully learn a few things than if I had used a DSLR which I feel tends to make the image look flat in "low-light" .

I actually shot the R.E.D. 2 footage the same day as the R.E.D. 1 footage, it was simply a case of wrapping one film and starting the next. My initial idea for the film was always to use lots of audio excerpts from  different sources but the idea with the footage was to find  certain things around Plymouth that people would find to be negative, I travelled round the poorest areas, I went round through the areas of the city centre where people would be drunk, I searched for any signs of police cars, ambulances, fire engines etc. I tried to pick out any derelict areas, any evidence of homeless people, anything that I could add to my film. The reason why was because I wanted to  present my own feelings when confronted with these things, all of which made me feel uneasy, resentful and fearful, I have always had a " love/hate " relationship with my home, I have experienced some of the best times in my life here but at the same time I have seen many things that I would wish to forget and some characters that I would go so far as to say that  I would ever socialise with them if I could help it. Unfortunately, or fortunately in a sense, there wasn't much to see, it seemed as though everybody was on their best behaviour. It was when I got home and I started to think about what I could put into the film to communicate my ideas that I struck on the notion of taking material from other sources and to use the footage from that night as point of reference from which the clips jump off from, in the context of the story, I wanted to portray a journey  around the city , where the clips would almost come from the driver is if he/she was reflecting on their feelings and anxieties.

 I wanted the clips to have some sort of synergy, some relation to each other and to the dialogue the other footage being used that could follow it, for example  I put together shots of brightly lit gambling establishments together that tempt people with the acquisition of monetary wealth and  underneath the dialogue talked about " how Jesus asks you to love him more than your parents " followed by the image of a dying child in Africa, limp in an adults arms, the idea was to show how we are so far removed from the reality of what is important in our lives and I was maybe presenting the notion that the worship and "need" for money  and fame has become almost a religious cult in it' s own perverse form. I could say that with the footage of the dying child I could be saying that this child is going through more suffering than most of us will ever endure, does the idea of god or money really mean anything to this individual at this time in their life?.