'You don't know the half of it'

Today, we spent some time editing the empty noise we will have behind the voices in the instalment. It was challenging to get the clip to loop properly so that there was no break in between the loops of the clip because the clip is only a minute long. We finally got it to work and we are happy with the end product. The sound we used is royalty free and is called 'Ambient Cave' and we found it on Sound Bible.com. Here is the link: http://soundbible.com/6-Ambient-Cave.html Editing the empty noise and trying to make sure there is a smooth transition between each loop. After recording all the recordings of words on a Zoom mic, we have finalised what recordings we will be using. The Zoom mic we used. We then named each of the recordings by the word that was said. The recordings named by word said. Then, we brought each of the recordings into Audition where we cut the clips down, played around with the levels and faded in and out the recordings. It was important...

Today, we attended Helen's workshop on the group project presentation. We found the workshop really beneficial and it really helps us in narrowing down what to put in our presentation. The workshop made us aware of the importance of the presentation and we learned what makes a good presentation. We thought about questions we may be asked after our presentation and prepared answers for these questions. We discussed and wrote down what we feel makes a good speaker and a good presentation from our previous experience. We were thought the importance of having a story incorporated in the presentation. A story in a presentation keeps the audience engaged so we came up with our own story we will incorporate into our presentation. This is the simple storyboard of that story. We learned that a good presentation has a 'Hook' at the beginning, three key points in the presentation and a call to action at the end of the presentation.  We will take everything...

Today, we went and visited the room where we will be presenting our instalment. It is a large room with no windows which is perfect because we want the room to be dark for this instalment. We don't want any natural light, we want the only light source to come from the little lights we plan to have. It was good to get a feel for the room. We figured out where we're going to hang the masks and where the projector is going to go. We plan to have the projected images projected onto the white background. The room where we will present our instalment.

We are making a video to play in the instillation. The video will consist of people's faces flashing and the words that are written on the masks will be played aloud as the flashing images show. We decided to use a black background. To make the people really stand out, and therefore your focus won't shift from from the person to the background.  We are blacking out the background using photoshop.  The method we are using is selecting the person, using smart radius to help define our selection more and then selecting inverse, then using the burn tool on the shadow option and blending out any parts that we missed. After than we flattened the image and exported it as a PNG. We followed the below tutorial on youtube:

The masks turned out quite well after we left them to dry. We were happy with how they dried. The painted turned out really well. We then went onto to try and figure out how we were going to write the words on the masks. We played around with the size of the lettering, kerning and whether or not to make the words capitals or not. We wrote the word out in pencil first and then wrote over it in black marker. We first tried out using a tippex pen on the black side of the mask but found that the tippex chipped away from the black paint so we needed to come up with another tool we could use. We tried a marker for writing on steel but found that to be too watery. We then found the perfect white marker in Art n Hobby which gave off the effect we wanted.

We first painted the mask using acrylic black paint, we found this paint to not be the best quality so we then bought some poster paint and found this worked better. The poster paint was thicker and easier to work with. We painted one layer and then left it to dry over night, then we painted the second layer. The two layers were sufficient enough to cover the masks completely black. One layer of paint on the masks. The masks drying. The finished product.

This week, we went into the studio in college to test out a similar space that we would be presenting our project. We tested out different lighting, using different lighting strengths and different colour lights. We tested out the different heights the masks will be hung at. The masks will be hung at different heights to represent different people's heights. Testing height of masks Testing lighting. 

Today, we went to the 77 Million Paintings Exhibition by Brian Eno in the RHA. It was amazing to see such a famous audio and visual instalment in real life. The visuals perfectly match the audio. There were tree trunks and piles of sand scattered around the room. These helped to create an atmosphere in the room. The room was pitch dark which and the only source of light came from the visual piece that was on the far wall of the room. The colours from the visual piece really stood out in the black room. We really enjoyed the exhibition and will definitely be taking inspiration from it for our own installation.

This week we focused on finalising the way the photos will look when projected. Below you will be able to see the different ideas we were playing around with. The first image below is the original photo.  This is the original photo. We thought it might be a good idea to have a black background behind the person. We thought this would correspond with the atmosphere in the room.  We then decided that the bright colours on the black background might be a bit too much so we decided to make the image black and white. We then brought this image back into photoshop and cut out the black and white version of the person and put it on a black background. We also paid attention to the framing of the image here and found this is what we aim to do. We want a close up shot of the person.  We tried blurring the background. We decided we didn't want to completely blur it so you couldn't see colours so we liked the middle range blur so you could still see some sort of...