The I have found more footage and the edit is much better. I have added a "war sequence" to signify humankind's misuse of the fire that once brought progress. I decided to use Bach's "Erbarme Dich, Mein got" as the soundtrack for this sequence. It translates to “Have mercy Lord, My God, for the sake of my tears”. I distorted, muffled the sound and added layers of dark ambient drones to both match the sound quality to the lo-fi sound of the film and also create a more heavy, miserable sound.

Throughout the sequence I made the face of prometheus flash for a few seconds (with a negative luma keyed look), to symbolize him watching the actions of mankind in regret, while enduring the eternal punishment of the gods. This sequence is a nice addition to the film; it questions our morals, prometheus questions his creation, it adds a more melancholic note to the film which is a nice shift in tone, and it makes the final sequence more powerful.

After the war sequence I cut to black, and repeated the "Let There Be Light!" VoiceOver that we hear in the first portion of the film with images of prometheus flashing and cutting to black again. This is followed by a sequence of technology, cities, people thriving, man going to moon etc. There is a VoiceOver that celebrates the achievements of humankind and looks to the future, as the music builds, and the final shot is a closeup of prometheus, looking with pride at his creation. This is a positive, hopeful ending to the film. I like how the story is told and the themes explored, and I think this probably close to what I want my final cut to be. I will now work on tweaking the footage, making the title screen, sound mixing and editing, etc.

Today I did the final shoot with my brother. All of the filming was done in our living room, but I still managed to get every shot I needed. I got shots of him in front of the fire by using the TV as a backdrop. The tv worked very well as it was the only source of light so the light reflected onto my brother looked natural. I also shot through a mirror in the living room with a shallow depth of field, to give the illusion of distance and depth. Since the TV was shot from an angle the fire looked squished in some scenes, but I fixed that in post by tasing it and stretching it; since it is footage from the same shot it worked perfectly as the camera movements were matched and the lighting on my brother still looked natural.

We also reshot some scenes of "Prometheus giving light to man". This time since I knew how I would create the effect in post, we shot our scenes separately. We still used an iPhone flash as the light, it works well. One of the challenges was that we had to ensure the light was always facing more towards the camera, as any light on the walls around us would completely ruin the effect.

Finally I shot some more footage of my brother (still using the TV as a light source, but with only him in frame). I shot closeups of his face, tried to get different reactions from him, and tried to capture him "in agony" (for the punishment scenes).

I am very happy with the shots I managed to get in this very restrictive space. In a way this restriction inspired more creativity with the cinematography. With some camera tricks and editing I managed to get very effective footage.

I spent the last few days looking through stock and archival websites, to see what resources would best suit me. The videos on stock sites are not very useful, they are too bland and usually have very plain content, which is understandable as they are mainly used by advertisers. I find archival footage to be mush more interesting and rich. It is also usually more lo-fi, which is a stylistic direction I could explore. I found the archive to be " The Prelinger Archives"; it has a lot of very interesting content from 1940s-1990s and all of it is in the public domain, which eliminates any legal issues of me using them in my film. I will have to come up with effective ways to combine archival footage with footage that I shoot. I could make It a more stylistically inconsistent mashup of footage, that would tell a more general story, or I could try to imitate the video look and film footage that looks similar.

I got good feedback on my work so far. Lucy provided my with interesting references as inspiration to push my project forward. Since I am limited in terms of actors and shooting location, I could use stock footage and archival footage to tell my story. I will finalize a story and start working on my final piece shortly.

Today I drew out the scenes from my shoot on to cards, to potentially create a storyboard (images below). It was an interesting exercise to try and make sense of a seemingly random set of scenes. I somewhat arranged a sequence that "makes sense". I will see how it flows in the edit. There is barely any story or context, but enough for it to feel like a sequence. I think this is more of a visual exercise. 

For the future if I do decide to use film as my medium I have to consider that the only actors I have access to are me and my brother, so if there is any dialogue, or drama it will have to be very basic for us to perform, as neither of us have any experience. I could create a piece that relies mostly on movement, or something completely arthouse and ambiguous, but I don't won't to sway from my aim of telling a story; a story based on a greek myth.

I spent some more time tweaking the scene. I chose a 21:9 ultra widescreen aspect ratio for that cinematic look. I added a few more nodes in the compositing window for post processing and noise reduction, and got the image ready for rendering.

I rendered using two different engines: Evee and Cycles (outcomes shown below respectively). Evee is a much weaker but faster rendering engine (usually used in games). It took only 10 mins to render, but the physics simulations are very poor and basic, hence the outcome is not as appealing. Rendering with Cycles however took almost 3 hours, and due to its professional status, the physics simulations, the lighting, the textures, etc, the outcome looks fantastic. I wouldn't say its quite photorealistic, but it is not far from it.

One big problem I am facing however is the precessing power of my computer. I am doing all of this from my laptop, and due to COVID 19 I will not be able to get access to better equipment. 3 hours of rendering can even my harmful to my disk, and this is 3 hours for 1 frame, so animation rendered locally is out of the question. I have found some great online services called "render farms" which have supercomputers specifically for rendering, and most are compatible with Blender project files (quite cheap price wise too). This would be a great option if I were to work on a 3d animation, but even the animating would be quite heavy to handle for my CPU. Even for this project I experienced a lot of extensive loading times and even some crashes in the compositing phase. I do not want to close my doors on 3D completely, but it is probably not the best medium of choice for the final outcome, especially because I have only picked it up recently, and still have a steep learning curve to overcome. 

These are my first few experiments with a 3D scan of a statue of Ares. This is directly related to my theme, and not as consuming to experiment with as the modeling is already done. I played with textures and lighting to get these results. They are very dramatic and visually appealing, but quite simple, and surface level in terms of concept. However, at this stage I am only trying to familiarize myself with the software.

Started a blender tutorial today. It is a series that teaches you to make a realistic donut, but it teaches the core principles of the software. At the start, it is quite daunting but after a few hours, I became more familiar with the interface. I have made the basic donut shape and used modeling to make it look naturally uneven 

I used a torus shape at the start, got it to the approximate accurate thickness and modeled it further in the sculpting window (while following the tutorial. Obviously, for now, the donut is completely irrelevant to my project, but this is how I will familiarize myself with the software to later make more intriguing imagery.

Today I learned more parts of the interface of Blender and worked on shading/texturing. There are a lot of parameters and options to create completely different results, so hopefully, with more practice, I will be able to use these parameters creatively to achieve the textures I want.

I created a glossy texture for the icing, and slightly increased the subsurface scattering of a realistic lighting. Later for the dough, I used a noise texture to simulate the little bumps (not visible in the screenshot above). Also, the more protruded they are the more brown they are so I added a color ramp window to simulate that. Below is a screenshot of all the nodes I used to create a realistic dough texture.

With the intense outbreak of the coronavirus, everyone will be on lockdown, staying inside, practicing social distancing. I was hoping to build sets, cast more people, experiment with studio lighting, etc, but now I will have to change the direction of this project. I still want to head towards moving image. I think a good medium to experiment will be 3D design and animation. Over the next few weeks I will try to learn a 3D software, and hopefully make outcomes that will guide me in the right direction.

Today I spent time sketching and generating ideas to push the project to the next step. I like the urban/modern look of my film experiment, so I will try to create a story that suits this environment. The Icarus myth, although simple and accessible is quite overplayed, so I might choose another alternative. Listened to a podcast on greek mythology to help with ideas. It was an interesting insight but was a bit irrelevant to what I was looking for. 

The final edit is one minute long. It is a sequence of icarus "escaping", "chasing the light" and "flying too close to the sun". I put those actions in quotations as there are many ways to interpret them, and how I depict them in the sequence is not final either. This test was a simple play on light and dark. I tried out some visual effects as well to give off a more elevated look. What really holds this sequence together is the sound design, o think it plays a major role in stringing together seemingly unrelated footage. I did not do much of a color grade either as the footage was already very close to what I intended it to look like, so I just tweaked it mildly so it flows. I find the final scene to be the most effective, it shows a blurry distorted icarus moving closer to the light, and eventually collapsing. It was a very simple sequence to shoot as it was just my actor in front of a tv screen, shot out of focus. The result however is strange and almost haunting when paired with the dark drone-like sound design.

I got feedback on my outcomes. Most of it was positive, but as stated by the tutor I should consider the aesthetics to use them with more intent. This is fair as the colors in my photos are not of any meaning, they just create more visual intrigue. Overall the idea was well received and has potential to be expanded upon, but I will probably do tests that are more relevant to my project direction.

We got briefed to produce anything by the end of a week to help us in development of our work, basically to create our own brief. I want to choose a myth and create short "test film" so I can start experimenting with cinematography, locations, potential casting etc. I want to start finding the story I want to tell, while also developing my visual aesthetic.

Today I did the shoot for the Minotaur idea. I went after sunset so that the shadows would be visible. It was quite difficult to find places to cast The shadows as the area was very well illuminated and the flashlight on my phone is not very strong. I managed to access the conservatory which I found to be a great location as they were lights of different colors and a lot of areas with shadows which I could use for my projection. I got great reactions from people passing by; some of them were actually spooked by the shadows not knowing what they were.

The photos came out quite effective. I did some editing in Lightroom to adjust the lighting and make the shadows a bit clearer as I was shooting in a very dark place with high ISO. Unfortunately a lot of the pictures came out blurry because my shutter speed was low, but I got enough good results to count this experiment as a success. I think this was an interesting way to reintroduce a myth into a more contemporary landscape.

Today I did all of the planning for my shoot tomorrow. At first I found ways to design a costume that would resemble the Minotaur but not be too literal, however I think this idea is not creative enough. I also considered making posters in a minimalistic style and putting them up. Another idea that I had was to make some sort of video and project it onto a wall. After some small tests and a bunch of iterations I decided to stick with a simpler idea that I believe would be more effective: I made two small cut outs of Theseus and the Minotaur which I will use to cast shadows on two different surfaces at the barbican, and use the flash on my phone to play with the size and distance. This will work both as an installation and as a photo project.

Today I visited the barbican. My aim was to photograph the area both interior and exterior, and find potential places to either do a shoot or some sort of projection,. The weather was sunny so I was able to capture the barbican in a very a vibrant and almost angelic atmosphere. When it got darker the place transformed completely, and it was much harder to find my way around. The first word that comes to mind when visiting the barbecue is labyrinthian, so I think a very relevant myth to interpret and place within this architectural space would be the Minotaur and Theseus myth.

so far I have two ideas of how I could execute this. I could either do a shoot with the model where I design a costume that somewhat resembles a Minotaur, and go around the area finding interesting locations to capture it, or I could do some sort of installation or a project something onto the wall. The visit definitely helped me and understanding the area and it’s potential to be used as an environment for my project.