Artist's Statement

Ever since playing around with Microsoft Sound Recorder many moons ago, I've been advancing in filmmaking skills until the present day. From Sound Recorder to Windows Movie Maker to Ulead VideoStudio to Adobe Premiere Pro, I've been making all kinds of audio and visual works, almost always relying on myself alone. That doesn't mean I've never worked in a team, I've also worked as assistant director and camera operator on multiple projects.

03 October 2011

PCA - Year One

My, it has been a long time, hasn't it? Don't labour under any misapprehension, the lack of updates in almost a year isn't down to lack of new material. Almost constantly throughout the year, I kept meaning to update with the new stuff I was doing, but kept putting it off. No longer.

All five major films I did in the first year of my time at PCA are now up at Vimeo, but are also available below. I've also added the descriptions posted on the Vimeo page below each video.

Here, then, is the much belated arrival of my first year PCA films. Have fun!



When The Cats Are Away


When The Cats Are Away... from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.

Since September, I've been on PCA's (Plymouth College of Art's) Film Arts extended degree. For the first term, we made three short films. This was the first.

Behind the scenes, it was a nightmare. We were never given any clear instruction on what was required of us, just to 'have fun'. That would be fine, were it not that two months down the line we were then told that we should have been doing far more intellectually with it, but that's another story.

In short, I was given a grand total of one afternoon to find a way to improvise a short subject, and only an hour with the Super 8 camera to shoot.

Ah yes, the Super 8. To those not au fait with the medium, Super 8 was the precursor to home video cameras, a cheap, silent film stock that the average joe could operate. You may well have seen it many times without realising it. The film footage of the Kennedy assassination was shot with Super 8, and nowadays it's an overused cliché for a horror film to use it for whatever reason. Some of you may recognise the fact that an episode of Friends rolled it's credits over Super 8 footage of a supposed young version of Ross having a tea party (which somehow had sound despite the fact that Super 8 stock is, with a few rare, expensive exceptions, silent).

Adding to my problems was the fact that we were given half a roll each for our films, and so we had to pair up and share a cartridge. This had advantages, it meant I actually had an actor to work with, but the first film overran meaning my film ran out of stock before it finished. I was expecting it to cut off horribly, but it isn't too bad.

I could have edited out the first film (the file was telecined straight from the film, both the guy before me's film and mine are here), but I felt leaving it in gave my film a bit of context. While everyone else was making quote-unquote 'abstract' films (ie randomly shooting pretty things that people will go "ooh" at), I was the only one to attempt a narrative. With my colleagues film preceding mine, I think it gives you an idea about what people were expecting from me, and how much I (unwittingly) deviated from the norm.

So, despite serious focusing issues and a boring visual style, please remember that we were not allowed any post-production, it was edited entirely 'in-camera' and what you are about to see is exactly as it was shot. Just keep that in mind and... be gentle?

A Clash of Colour


A Clash of Colour from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.

The second film from my first term at PCA, for this we were given a still camera, a tripod, some coloured card and were told to make a stop-motion short with it. I was inspired by a German art film series called 'Light-Play' from the 1920s, and came up with the idea of paper card pieces 'attacking' one another, with corners being 'aggressive mode' and edges showing 'defensive mode'. It was fun to do, so I hope you enjoy it.

Weather Problems


Weather Problems from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.

The first term of my first year culminated in a big, three week project. We were given the brief that the film must be less than five minutes long, and must be centered around either a certain word or a certain phrase. After much deliberation, I chose a quote concerning how different days are different colours.

Pondering how I could work a five minute short around such a vague yet constricting brief, particularly so soon after completing 'A Clash of Colour', an idea that excited me popped into my head: The sun comes up one day, and it is the wrong colour. After that, I worked the story around both that story idea and what limited resources were available to me.

The biggest inspiration was a webseries called "Arby 'n' the Chief", in which two action figures play games, get into hijinks and whatnot. What made it stand out was how it wasn't created in stop motion, instead camera angles and edits were very cleverly used to disguise the fact that someone was holding the figures just out of shot, and simply moving them around. Seeing what I thought would be an easy way to make the film quick, I took it.

The next part of the brief was to address the 'days' aspect of 'days as colours'. This, I decided, would be easily worked in: since the sun is broken, it not only is the wrong colour but is far too fast, with days passing in seconds.

Overall, I'm ambivalent on this one. On the one hand, I think the tone is somewhat askew. For the most part, it is rather irreverent, just being silly and surreal for the sake of it, yet near the end is a jarring tonal shift, after which it returns to wacky again. On the other, I like how the hand-moved action figure look came out technically, and while the ending is a little jarring, I like how bizarre and simple the ending is. I'd compare it to the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but I'm not that egotistical.

So, here it is. The culmination of my first term of my first year.

Through The Fourth Wall


Through The Fourth Wall from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.

The second term of Level 0 (the first year of the four year film course... don't ask) was something of a gear change. In the first term, I made three major pieces, all of which are already uploaded here. In the second, it was far more low key, with two of the three films made this time not being worth uploading (one was a two second animation, the other was an abstract that wasn't very interesting, not good or bad enough to merit discussion). So, this was the culmination of the second term.

This time, the brief was the same for everyone across the year. Everyone from the painters to the sculptors to us film-makers had a one word brief around which we would build our final piece for the term: "Transformation".

For this, I knew what I wanted to do almost immediately. As part of my training with drawing skills in preparation for making storyboards as part of my career, I had created several characters made out of geometric shapes. One of these characters, the inventively named "Triangle Man", would star in this short.

I pondered how he would fit into the theme of transformation, and as I thought, I thought about how I would go about animating TM. I didn't have any animation software at the time, but his design is very simple, so maybe there would be a way around the lack of software. There was, and it was a workaround I'm still rather proud of.

Microsoft Word has an 'AutoShapes' function, where you can insert various simple shapes into a Word document. After some tests, I found I could build a close approximation of TM in the software. It was a crude method, but all I needed was the ability to create TM digitally and animate him on a limited level, which Word allowed, so it was a quick and effective one.

First, I would position TM as I wanted, then I would take a screenshot, then paste it into Microsoft Paint, exporting it as an image file. As it turned out, I could copy-paste AutoShapes directly into Paint, which cut down the already short animation time even further. It gave effective results with little time and effort. Then, all I had to do was time the images to sound effects and music in Final Cut, and I had the opening animated sequence. After studying the limited animation style of Zero Punctuation, I had a good idea about how to make an effective animation with a very low frame rate.

From there, it was a matter of tying it into the idea of transformation. The answer came quickly. Something would force him out of his animated world into the real one. My first idea of how this would work would be that he would end up (Quantum Leap style) in the body of an action figure. The twist would be that he would be in the body of an evil character, so the so-called 'good guys' would in fact be trying to kill TM out of habit. It was a nice idea, but I nixed it when I realised how hard a story that would be to realise in two minutes.

The simplified version I went with (after my course tutor gave his advice and some ideas) was that TM would become a 3D version of himself, realised in cardboard, and would arrive in the middle of a battle between two warring sides of action figures.

I like this one a lot. I'm proud that this one was deemed good enough by the course tutors to make it into the end-of-year exhibition at the college. The third term film I made wasn't ready in time for the submission deadline (no-one else had theirs ready either, though), so we'll never know if that one would have been deemed good enough as well. But that's for next time. For now, I'm happy with this one, and if I could have picked any one of my films to go into the exhibition, I would have picked this one too.

*NOTE*
There is a brief moment from around 1:20 to 1:21 where it appears that the frame rate drops considerably for a brief moment. This is just a note saying this is not intentional, it is just a glitch in the conversion process that I can do nothing about.

When Worlds Unite


When Worlds Unite from Ashley Watts on Vimeo.

Thus we come to the end of my first year at PCA. Here, we were fully let off the leash. The third term was entirely devoted to a single piece with no limitations: we could do whatever we wanted. The only rule we had to follow was keeping the final film down to under ten minutes.

Throughout the year, I had occasionally thought about all the various characters and production methods I had deployed throughout the year, and how great it would be to have all these wildly different elements come together for one epic event, like what Crisis on Infinite Earths was to DC Comics, what Forever Red was to Power Rangers, or what The Five Doctors was to Doctor Who. I never really gave much serious thought to the idea, it was just a fun "if only" kind of deal. But, as the third term approached and no other exciting idea came to me, it was decided. The third term film would have all the characters from my films coming together in one big finale to the year.

Although I now had a premise, I needed a story. Ideas like a Royal Rumble between the characters was nixed early; I wanted the characters to form one big (and awesome) alliance. But what would they be gathering together to face?

This is where practicality came in. All my first year films were made with just me on the production team, no-one else. I couldn't deliver something too big in scale, all I had was what I had left over from the previous productions and my house as a location. After the hard shoot I went through on 'Weather Problems' when I actually travelled to outdoor locations, I wasn't about to repeat the experience. Thus, I needed a story that would require all these various characters to come together, yet could be filmed with my meager resources.

The one I came up with had promise. It wasn't about saving the multiverse or defeating a supervillain, it was about saving a downtrodden group of innocents from an evil dictator. I liked how it defied the convention of big crossover events in being much smaller and intimate in scope than the norm.

So with that in place, I began structuring the film. Taking a cue from The Five Doctors, I knew the first section of the film would show the characters living their ordinary lives when suddenly they're whisked away by a mysterious force. I liked this idea, as it meant I could flesh out the already established mythos (as well as make my life easier by using plenty of stock footage) from the previous films, as well as building some good mystery. I knew then that the force abducting these characters would involve the clocks from 'Through The Fourth Wall', so I could finally explain why a device that can jump dimensions shaped like a clock suddenly appeared near Triangle Man for no discernible reason.

Originally, the parade of past characters was originally meant to start with the Mac mouse from 'When The Cats Are Away'. After the opening scene setting up the villain, we would have seen the Mac mouse escaping from a dumpster, flashing back to WTCAA to explain to newcomers who the mouse is and why it's randomly in a dumpster, when it would come across a clock that would whisk it away mysteriously. Although still planned to appear right up until production began, it was quickly dropped for several reasons:

1) Filming in and around a dumpster wouldn't have made Health and Safety too happy.

2) The college had no Mac mice available to loan out, and buying one online was too expensive when considering how little use I would get out of it.

3) I felt that, since this film would be shot exclusively on video, it would jar to cut back to blurry super-8 stock footage from WTCAA.

4) By this point, it was looking like I was going to overrun the ten minute limit, so any time-saving cuts I could make were welcome.

Meanwhile, after wanting to use another action figure I had bought so I could stop-motion it (as it was more posable and it meant I could add yet another production method to the large amount I was already using), I decided that he would be the reason the characters had been gathered together. I liked the idea of a hero wanting to stop an evil-doer, and instead of just going in by himself, he gathered a team from across multiple universes just because he could.

However, I was having serious problems with the ending. Although I was happy with the scenes of the various characters being abducted (the scene with the action figure from 'Weather Problems' and TM interacting was a favourite of mine), and the scene where WarGreymon (the action figure responsible for gathering the characters together) explains himself, I simply could not get a good hook for the ending. After WGM and the others head off to fight the Elite (the evil action figure ruling over the Lego characters), I had no idea what to do next.

Eventually I came up with the opening bit with the Elite throwing a fit at his Lego underlings for childish reasons and inadvertently killing one of them. It showed just how little he cares about the poor Legos. It's not that he wants to use them to rule the world or anything, he just mistreats them because he's like a stroppy child who has somehow been given power over others. I thought that was a nice touch.

However, after that, I had absolutely no idea what to do. For the longest time, I simply threw my hands in the air and ended it with the Elite summoning his evil versions of WGM's team, the two sides charging into battle, and then cut to a title card saying I had hit the time limit. The ultimate cop out ending. After talking it over with two of my course tutors, I changed it slightly by altering the hokey dialogue (think the dialogue in the finished version was awkward at times? The original version was far, far worse), adding the additional threat of the dragon beast, and cutting to a "THE END?" credit instead of a straight-up admission that I had no idea how to end this thing.

I still have the same opinion of this movie now that I had when I finished it. From a technical standpoint, I love how I managed to make the wildly different production methods mesh together, and how I pulled the production as a whole together under enormous time and budget constraints.

However, as a story, it's probably the weakest of my first year films. Although I think it works okay up until WGM and Elite meet onscreen, from then on the dialogue becomes unbearably awful, the evil Triangle Woman doesn't look at all menacing, and I don't like how trivial the characters other than WGM become in the end. They just stand in the background doing nothing, other than sticking by the leader who abducted them and they have known all of three minutes.

It does have some moments I like, though. I like how Triangle Woman and Triangle Man interact even though one is really in front of the camera and the other was added in post production. I like her reaction to the Elite's obviously rhetorical question. I like how I shot the dragon beast.

So, this is the production out of all my first year films I'm most ambivalent about. It has some moments I love, and others I detest. I'll let you decide whether the pros outweigh the cons or vice versa.

I'll see you next time, whenever that may be, when we start on my second year films (which is technically Year One since the first year was Level 0... this will be very confusing...).

Till next time!

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