Hanna from Ghana

I once read a novel by a white reporter who is living in South Africa. It was about a fair haired little girl who was adopted by white South Africans who admired the Nazi regime. Some day they had to face that the little girl is Jewish, which caused that their behaviour turned against the girl. She from now on looked for friendship and support with the black people around.

However, this intro scene is not about this book, but about a story I have thought out myself, inspired by the book and people I know from Africa. The heroine of the story is a white girl growing up in a small village in Ghana.

You can see the hands of an adult woman starting to tell her story.

I am Hanna from Ghana from Stefanie Jeske on Vimeo.

Steps for making an Artful Video

Get an idea and start planning!

First for any artwork production is the idea. You might already have one. If not you might know about various brain storming techniques. However, even then you need a start.

This can be a question, for example:

I want to show my artist friends something really awesome. What would impress them?

Often we got ideas from assignments a school provides.

You may follow the idea I provide here, which is to juxtapose the visual (photograph) to the audible (narration) in a video and to share this in the Internet.

Please note, this is not just about creating a video. You need this steps for any kind of artwork, although the term pre-production is normally used for the video production process.

When you got your idea, write it down. One sentence may be enough.

I want to make a photograph of white hands on a dark background and add the narration “I am Hanna from Ghana”.

Say something about the meaning you want to convey.

I want people wondering about the juxtaposition of the visual and the audible to make them think about their ideas from skin color and origin of a person.

(you may choose any other picture like the mouth of a bearded man sounding like a child and saying: I am Hans from a Grimm fairy tale. Or you show the back of a woman's head with braided hair saying in a man's voice “I am Jimmy from Pimp Town.” - Sorry for this, but art sometimes must be provocative to make people think.)

After this for visual ideas you should do any kind of sketch. For a video you might create a story board. For our purpose you can use any form you like. Look at my one frame story board.

 

You can do something similar for music and sound, like a time line or musical notation.

Now you have to explore what you need for your production. Compare it to what you have. Write it down. If you do not have what you need write down an alternative.

 

I need	I have
time, about 2 hours	I actually have two hours of time this Saturday.
hands	I will take my own hands.
a dark background	I have a cardboard box I will use.
camera to shoot the picture or the hands	I ow one myself and will use it. (You may lend devices.)
a microphone to make the narration	I do not have any microphone. alternative: I have my zoom recording device and will use it for a microphone. (You may have a microphone, which I recommend for a better quality, or you use your build in microphone.)
a software where I can make the narration with	I know I can add a narration to a video in the Movie Maker. I will use this option for my production which anyway results in a video. (You may have to download it: Click to get the Movie Maker Or use any other software you know.)
a software where I can produce my video with, which is combining visual and audible and export this as a video	I will use the Windows Movie Maker.
a platform where I can share my video	I have heard tumblr is a good place to share. I will get an account there and share my video via this account.

Now go on and produce!

This will be the production part of your work. For the idea we are following here it will be just taking the picture you need. You can also see the narration as part of the production.

The following picture shows how you can shoot for example and eye of yourself. I have to mention that I can take single pictures with my video camera. You may have any other device and an appropriate tripod construction.

I also show you a picture that displays how I have set up my microphone which I have connected with an USB plug. You may have a microphone that uses a jack plug, which also can be connected to your computer.

Next I will show you how to load the picture to the Movie Maker, how to make the narration and how to export your work as a video you can share, which can be called the post-production.

 

Share your artwork!

The next video shows how to share your artwork on a tumblr blog. (Naturally you can use any other blogging page.

 

Color

I loved the title Song Visualization for one of the ds106 video assignments, which simply is making a music video.
Still, music video is more associated with Rock, Pop and other music associated with watching cool and crazy people. I, however intended to visualize how color is mixed from 3 primary colors and this video has turned out to be really cool.

Since I have a passion for mixing colors from just three primary colors, I was delighted when I found a Sesame Street video about this, which was spring '13 when I first tried video together with ds106. However I did not manage realizing my ideas about a music video I wanted to create from the song  in spring. I still had to learn a lot about shooting (light) and video editing. Now, more than half a year later I tried.
It was fun but not easy. The day was cloudy and I had to add light, which again made the colors too yellowish especially the blue and purple. I was able to correct this with adobe premiere elements via an effect called 3-way-color-corrector.
Look here for the effect:

before

 

 

after

 

 

 

By the way, you certainly know that light colors mixes differently from paint.

 

 

Finally look here for a picture of my editing screen:

 

 

 

You can see the clips a various. The reason is I had to interrupt the recording whenever I had to arrange the windmills or little glasses with color. You also can see that I sometimes have changed the opacity of a clip to achieve effects like crossfades. This, for example, helped creating the illusion that the colors of the little windmills are mixing.

 

 

 

 

 

Lulu the green crane finally flys

A stop motion animation.

This is something many people already have done in one or another way, animating an origami crane. Then again this exactly may be the reason I also wanted to do it.

I once wrote a story about a woman who meets a Japanese man and this was about a crane, too. I've lost the story and now had to rewrite it to have it in a written form. However, I can tell that it was about shifting to a parallel world from watching paper cranes moved by a breath of wind to watching real cranes flying. For my stop motion animation I do not shift away, but let a paper crane fly.

The video is made out of photographs I took while folding the crane. After I've finished a step I put the work on a background and took an image of it. My camera was fitted on a tripod with the possibility to place it right over a table, like a reproduction stand.

For the flying crane I used a thread and let the crane appear in front of the now 'standing' background, where I took the images of the crane. I needed three with different positions of the wings. This was not as easy as I would have wished it, but it worked well enough.

The three images of the flying crane I combined in Photoshop to an animation and exported the frames as single images.

In Premiere Elements I loaded all my image material and put it on the timeline. I added a title and exported all as a video.

For the future I intend to learn about tweens in Photoshop, which can help me to make the motion smoother. This time I was happy to get along so well and got what I imagined for this project.

Click here for the appropriate ds106 video assignment idea.

The piece of music I found under the menu item Music of my Premiere Elements. It is called Pavane.

The dancing sisters and their dog.

You think I am just a stuffed animal. I AM NOT!!!

OK, when I was found by my friend Hanna I actually hung around on a stand for stuffed animals, by mistake, naturally, but this didn't mean anything and Hanna knew this.

I was called Herr Hund and became part of the sister's life. One day they had the idea to perform a dance for a charity event together with some kids. I really was utterly embarrassed of this idea, but then after some while I had the wish to join.

Hanna taught me how to tap dance and that it was. I also recommended to the sisters that they should have feathers on their heads, like dancers have to have, but they didn't want. I have to admit I was a bit disappointed of this rejection of a really good idea, but then I just put a feather on my head which looked very nice.

A friend of Hanna made a video of us. Enjoy :)

Making of the video:

I used a tripod to position a camera in front of my screen. Then I fixed the dog puppet on a stick. I started a youtube video clip and the same time I started the video recording option of my camera.
I took the puppet and let it dance. I tried to make it coherent with what you can see in the video and I added wuffs with my voice. It was funny to watch how I had to dance to make the dog dance. I even get a bit out of breath.

The video I've used, is "Um Himmels Willen - Nackte Tatsachen". This is a German show about sisters and a town in the south of Germany, where many people are Catholic.

The corresponding video assignment asked for making a video with a clip and a puppet, where you can either use the green screen technique or let your puppet appear in front of a playing video.

Interactive Spiderwick

When I was at art university and this way watched the world of art for some while, I expolored that artists may call themselves free and liberal, but they are not. I studied the Fine Arts and my professors very much critizised the ideas of their students and by this taught them the rules of the Fine Arts. Nobody did dare to contratict, but I quitted some day, a kind of outnumbered.
One issue was somehow arrogance concerning the content of artwork. If I have a great idea and clearly do artwork like a skilled painting, sulpture or printing, why not having pop culture as content? I ignored the rules by doing 12 big paintings on the Harry Potter movies. I've paid dearly for this; no aknowledement at all for this great paintings, except from people who were interested to show them children. I did not mind, just for little children the paintings might be frightening, because my idea was to bring to consciousness what big faces on a wall could cause, namely being overwhelmed or even frightened while being movies.

However. I had to fight this rules again for a ds106 assignment, in which you may comment while playing a game.
The most influential people in my life would not like to hear that I play any game anyway, except maybe together with other people and then a board game. This is OK, but I'm so excited of exploring different media, that base on a story in a book. This case the Spiderwick Books by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi.
This way, apart from commenting, I discuss the claim that the game is completely after the movie. Yet, I have to say that the game has mostly its own elements very different from book and movie. Even more important I find that the game contains ideas of the books, which are clearly not part of the movie.

 

 



Which I did not forsee was how much editing this will going to be.

 

 

I played the game for about 30 minutes and recorded it with a software called bandicam. I thought it might be more lively when I speake and record the comment the same time. Now I had 30 minutes of game play and 30 minutes of comment and I had to make it into a clip not too long. When I cut the material anywhere I had to find a piece which fit to this cut. In the above screenshot you can see what this meant. I've worked hours on this.

Apart from the cutting I added illustrations from the books, which I found on the Spiderwick Wiki and I put on scenes form the Spiderwick movie to make my point clear. To find sources for pictures and to scan the movie for appropriate scenes was part of my last week preproduction for this assignment. 

 



The Lion and Me

Some time ago I did an audio assignment, for which I recorded foley sound for a movie clip. I uploaded this to a group at Soundcloud and wondered about what will become out of this. I  now know. For the assignment "Charlie Chaplin’s Foley Artist" you now can use all the uploaded foley sounds to finish your video and so I did.

It was a nice experience to have not just material I recorded but could choose from what other people have created for this assignment, which often were more funny than my recording. This helped to develop a lovely story.

 

 

 

This was not too complicated. I just had to combine the clip with the appropriate foley. All the same I added two music clips which I both let appear repeatedly. This gave the movie an exotic musical rhythm.  I lik this because of the tiger and the lion and to make Charlie appear more modern, which he surely was anyway. 

For the last segments I had to think out something, because there was no foley given for this. I decided to record some dialogue. I further add two groans, one for the tiger and one for the lion.

 

Here a screenshot of my video editor, where I have already removed the sound of the clip and I also have added the given foley sounds.

 

 

 

 

Here a list of links to the materials I have used:

 

foley sounds:

https://soundcloud.com/klasalata/lions-cage-foley-style by Kelsie
https://soundcloud.com/heymsparker/holy-foley by MsParker
https://soundcloud.com/confusedeasily/chaplin-lion-03 by ConfusedEasily
https://soundcloud.com/klamb912/foley-sounds by Klamb
https://soundcloud.com/cwyrough/chaplin-foley by Cwyrough
https://soundcloud.com/kaitlyn-crotty/chaplin-lion-02 by kaitlyn

additional sounds:
Tigers Roar
http://freesound.org/people/videog/sounds/149190/
Lions Roar
http://freesound.org/people/Terwelp/sounds/24797/

music:
Flowers Simplistic Beats
http://freesound.org/people/hello_flowers/sounds/34518/
Chance Piano Intro
http://freesound.org/people/toiletrolltube/sounds/181700/



Delusion - A Video Peom

I once designed three photo cards and sent them to a friend, because I thought he might be interested to know something about my past. He has never answered to this offer to deepen the relationship. This is also past now.
Yesterday, while thinking about what else video I can produce I remembered having read something at ds106's assignment collection about ambiance in a video. More precisely the assignment advises to record a piece of literature and to add clips and music for a little video production.
I decided to look for a poem about memories and combine this with the photo cards. I did not know how much I had to remember while producing the video.
First I had to remember that my PC has crashed recently and I've lost nearly all my digital work and photographs and with it the photo cards. I searched my e-mails for the photo card post and while doing so, any mail I caught sight of were reminders to my past, good and bad ones. I finally found the cards, but thought the original photographs would be better for my project. I again had to recollect,  this time if I anyway still owe this good old paper photographs. When I had to move into a smaller apartment I really had to get rid of many things savagely, a rather unpleasant memory. Anyway, I can not find out about the photographs, for I presume them in my storage place far away in my hometown. Memories, memories, memories.

While searching for a poem about memories I observed that there are many which describe memories as troublesome and I find even one poem which was not really about recollection but more about stumbling over truth you rather want to forget. I compared this to my intention for the video and found I did not plan to make it a drama. Still it was intriguing to combine my more neutral photographs with a dramatic poem.

For the video I used the poem "Delusion" by Alyssa Waters.
I like how the poem is written in a way that it is not clear if it is mostly imagery or complaining about a real event. For example once there is a person approaching the speaker of the poem:

He makes his way towards me, majestic also wise,
it was hard for me to distinguish between what's loving and what's lies.

This could mean a remembered treacherous person approaches or it can also mean truth comes nearer and both may cause the following reaction:

My heart it starts to flutter,
My body starts to fall-
I try to scream out for help
but I don't know who to call.

In this way I produced my video to make the impression of something wants to be realized, but it feels scary and confusing.

Because I've already thought through my past this may not be a recent problem to me, but it was, this I can remember.

Additional elements in the movie are a video with clips of rainy weather, a clip of sun in the trees and a recording while I am turning right around. I also added some music which is called Violin Mystery.

Here you can see a screenshot of the project in a still early state.

 

 

The video recordings are already added and I have worked on the photo cards to make them appear and vanish again by manipulating transparency and motion.

Later I added the recording of the poem. I did so by mixing it with the turned version of the piece, which gives the video an element of mystery.

The "Violin Mystery" music is a very short piece, but I found it is great to just repeat it which gives the movie more unity.



Troll Beauty

I like watching fantastical movies mainly for the imagination they show. What I've never understood, why trolls? And why do they always fall on down with a big thud? See here Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone (2001) and Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring (2001). I thought they are just big and boring.

I started looking for troll scenes for this assignment, which is to use five 1 second clips from 5 movies to create a 5 second video.  First I hoped I will find more clips with trolls falling on their bags, but then I got a new idea. It looked like many of the videos I watched were caring for showing me the reason why so often trolls are so intensively occupied in fantasy movies. I observed movie makers of recent fantasy films has gone beyond trolls being just stupid and hideous, but often let their heroes discover beauty where audience like me can not see any. The effect with me was in fact that I also were able to see it. Yet, what is the King in Merlin doing?

After choosing five seconds of my gathered clips I arranged them from "normal dump troll" to "passionate love for a troll". When I watched the result, nothing of my intention was noticeable, but I wanted it to be noticed and like this I again ignored the demands of an assignment and just slowed the movie down about two thirds, but I've just learned today there is nothing wrong with being creative.

  

 

This is how I did arrange the clips in premiere elements to start the editing [after realizing that having the movies assembled at 0, you have all the audio at once and you can just see the topmost clip (: ]

 

 

 

 

Clips I've used for this video are:

 

Hansel and Gretel Behind the Scenes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoqD_9O-YUM

Merlin King and the Troll

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1dGeyIPaU4

Snow White & the Huntsman - Troll Attack

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6uSLUnfna8

The Hobbit - Troll Battle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iENuf2muUaI

Troll Hunter - Bridge Armour Scene

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwuHhlD5dO0

 



 

 

Harmonium Love

Why turning parts of a modern movie into a silent movie? I wondered while reading about this ds106  video assignment. I had no idea but was just intrigued by the idea to do so.

I did some research on how to change a movie into a silent film and found that mostly the advice was to imitate the style completely, including original music for silent movies and taking care that in the clip you can't see any modern props, like modern cars.
I thought about this and decided to just use the elements but not to try imitating an entire film from the silent era. This way I changed the color into black and white and made it run faster, I added some noise and rustling to audio and video and I added a music track.
Which I did not is choosing clips, that don't contain modern issues like modern cars, and I don't choose any old music but modern compositions.

Some time ago I got introduced to the movie Punch-Drunk Love (2002), which tells a story about a growing couple, in particular about the male part. He is depicted as passionate and even violent and it is not for certain if the reason is that he lives under the pressure of keeping up his business. Another reason may be that he is controlled by his sisters and feels helpless towards their interferences in his life. However, my clip doesn't contain any of this, but I concentrated on a little story within the story, where a harmonium is found by the protagonist and finally carried to his girl friend.

 

The clips doesn't contain much dialogue and speak for themselves, so I thought this might be great for the silent style. In addition, although the film is in color, the tones are rich in contrast which I thought important concerning the change to black and white. Finally the running scenes of the movie remind me on running scenes of silent movies, which always appear funny, for the silent movies are running faster. I wanted them appear funny or at least emphasize them to show that it is a kind of crazy in a lovely way to carry a harmonium around. I myself wouldn't be able to do so, for "stupid" embarrassment, which is why I like watching it in a film. I also felt the faster move of the scene associates tension within the story, which is desired.
For the choice of the audio I myself wonder about it. It is true that the title "Music For a Found Harmonium" was great to match my little clip composition, but does also not really emphasize the visual part, but is rather treated on an equal bases with the video, which might be OK anyway. It also is very different from any silent movie music. I even added to the start of the clip some digital music. Together with the visual style of the very first films it appears surreal and adds to the surreality of someone throws a harmonium out of a car and then it is carried around like a new found treasure.

I edited the clips with premiere elements, which is a bit complicated, compared to more expensive editing software, but it is possible to get good results, especially because the effects come out very nicely, they are not just numerous but well thought through concerning aesthetic and quality. This way I add a filter who makes the film look old (in German "Alter Film"). That it was, except from making adjustments to the filter and speeding the clip up.
It is difficult with sound, when you want to reduce its quality, because almost any effect is designed to improve the audio. I had to edit the sound in audacity to add noise and rustling, mostly by hand using the pencil tool.
To put in the title cards I had to create a black area, which I did not manage in premiere elements. I had to design it in gimp and to import this as media. Then I added the title with the text tool. I could have cut the clips and add text between the clips, still, I needed to have the possibility to change the position of the cards for the right moment of appearance.
All the same with the opening title sequence and closing credits.

I like the result very much, but I already have received a message by Youtube about using material which may be copyrighted. I hope they'll not remove this nice piece of art, which I did not produce to harm any rights but to enrich the world of art, movie, music.