5 (Festival Screenings - Manipulate, Ickle Film Festival, Cannes In A Van, Lichtspielklub Kurzfilmfestival, Imagine Science Film Festival, Propeller TV Studentfest, Slamdance)




Project Development

5 was the final masters project for my MA in animation and sound design at Norwich University College of the Arts (for which I received a distinction, woo!) back in 2008. In it's final form I guess 5 is an exploration of childhood memories and experiences, set against the background of some reeealllly loosely interpreted scientific theories, although it took quite a while for these ideas to emerge during the processes of developing and making the film.

The first impetus came from the ideas and work of people like Richard Dawkins and Richard Feynman, whose lecture on quantum electro dynamics in particular sparked off my first little tests...



This ink on 16mm film test ended up forming the central part of the film, which enabled me to make some of the connections between the sound/image relationships I was creating and the childhood memories these seemed to evoke for me. The process of converting the film to HD format was probably the most time consuming part of the film with each strip scanned in at 1800 dpi, which slowied my poor laptop down to a standstill.



This is one of my failed attempts at the transition between the ink on film and the phone sections. Looking back at it now, it doesn't seem so bad, but I think I still made the right decision in simplifying and shortening this part of the film.



Here's an early test for the cotton wool air molecule section - this took bloody ages to sort out, as I had to get the flat images of the wool to coninuously face the camera as it moved around. In hindsight, the subtleties are pretty much lost when it's in motion and I probably should have spent much less time on it in order to concentrate on other, less well developed parts of the film. I wish I'd put something more interesting in the background too...



I think this was the first really basic sound mix I put together once I had edited the majority of the finished shots. It's pretty rubbish, but it showed me how the timing of the shots completely changes once you've added sound - there is a lot more room for the visuals to breathe and I felt much more confident letting them do so after this edit.