emily - immersive environments

brief 2

exercise 5 - lighting design

-create a night time and day time lighting state in both our models and real spaces.












- i learned a lot in this exercise about the difficulty of creating a lighting environment in a real space, which at times can be quite large and open. for me, what i found interesting about my real space in the daytime were the shadows created by the sunlight filtering through the spaces through the windows and doorways.




-experiment with light through a doorway













-what i noticed on the particular day i was filming was the subtlety of the sunlight. it was a sunny day however it was quite cloudy, so i noticed how frequently the light was changing depending on the sun's positioning behind and around the clouds. this is then where i got the idea for the lighting in my model, i decided to place it on a staircase next to a lot of windows, which was where it could best pick up the sun's natural lighting.

-chosen film for exercise 5
















-for the night time lighting in the real space i noticed the coloured reflections on the floorboards in my living room from the tv. i found it quite interesting to take note of the way it distorts the actual image of the tv into a few basic colours and quite a rectangular long shape.


-the night time lighting in my model was a bit more experimental, i used a table lamp to create exaggerated shadows, particularly with my cardboard blind, which i found made some interesting shadows.











exercise 6 - sound design

- make 2 soundtracks for the video documentation from exercise 5

- for this exercise i wanted to create a soundtrack which was very subtle and reflective of the feeling and outcome of the film in exercise 5. i decided to make a few recordings of the sounds outside of my house, the birds, creek, wind, etc. to use as 1 soundtrack, which would be the 'actual' soundtrack. the second soundtrack i decided to try and replicate the first in a way by using sounds from ilife, imovie etc.

-this is the first soundtrack, the 'actual' sounds of my home on a sunny day. i also decided to reduce to volume to around 5-10% to make the sounds quite subtle, but still noticeable, matching the lighting qualities of the film.

-this is the second soundtrack, the 'artificial' sounds. i used some ambience sounds such as forest and water to try and replicate the first soundtrack. i again reduced the sound to a very low volume, around 5% which i had thought was low enough. however, when listening to the soundtrack at uni i realised the water noise dominated the soundtrack and sounded a lot louder than i had first intended. from the feedback in class i found there were both positives and negatives to what had happened.




exercise 7 - immersive environments

- use sound and light to create an immersive environment in your home

- for this exercise i decided to create an immersive environment in the room i occupy the most in my home, my bedroom. i decided to concentrate the filming to a small corner of my bedroom next to my bed, as i thought the shadows might play out in a different way when they hit a corner of 2 walls. i used a flashlight on a phone for the lighting and various objects around my room to create the shadows, such as my bed, clothing, rings, necklaces and as pictured a paperweight.

-immersive environment created using a flashlight and paperweight, background music from the radio

- the film i decided to use for exercise 7 was created using shadows from my blind from the flashlight, which i found created some really nice effects. i wanted to create a soundtrack which was both calming and had a haunting quality to it, to match the film as much as possible. the sounds were a mixture of stock sounds such as synths, cave and wind, thunder, rain and traffic. i feel it matches the film quite well and the addition of the traffic sounds give the illusion that cars, trucks etc, are what are actually creating all of the shadows in the film.


- exercise 7, immersive environments

brief 3 -

- ideas and research

for brief 3 i have begun researching some artists such as janet cardiff, george bures mille, herbert distel and sophie calle.

excerpts from my journal -

     - have had the idea of taking an everyday item eg a chair, table which would be the constant, and taking it to a number of different homes where people can put their most treasured possessions. so each time the location and possessions change but the constant (chair, table) stays the same.

-on herbert distel's the museum of drawers

     - am contemplating this for brief 3. really like how each compartment houses a certain artwork as if that space is its own. for my own version i like the idea of capturing details of my home through photography for each compartment with possibly a soundtrack incorporated somehow.