Art Exhibition – Opening Night.

How exciting, our opening night went so well. Here are the photos I took:

Natalie Pearce
N.A.P

Johnny Fraser.

Untitled, 2014

Staju Joseph.

Visual Magic Digital Media.

Didi Bleinagel.

Untitled, 2014.

Seane Watkins.

Not your Grandmother’s Needlework, 2014.

Jess Harrison.

Technopoly, 2014.

Emily Sorensen

Invisible Women, 2014.

Casey Chamberlain – Marks.
Drake and Nate, 2014
Sixteen, 2014
Billie, 2014
Drake, 2014
Bevan, 2014

Linda Nichols

Make (of it) what you want – a participatory art project, 2014.

Bobby Besley

Desire – A Journey Towards the Self, 2014.

Leigh Jukes – Smart

Shadow Horse, 2014.

Van Za Thang

Dark Moods, 2014.

Roxy Matheson

Every Week Night at 6:00pm, 2014.

 Our wonderful booklet made by Bobby.

Matt Cross

‘It’ Imagine That…2014.

 Working hard in the kitchen..

Violet Rose Vink

Untitled, 2014.

Aleksander Dahlberg

Haggle, 2014.

Jemarve Endrina

FusionTech Sports and Nutrition.

Morgan Hunon

ABCollaboration, 2014

Pauline Neal

Smiling Facade, 2014

  

   Children watching ‘A Dream by My Children’ – made me smile 🙂

 Cheri Thompson

Utopian LuckCheri, 2014

 We had music! Thank you to the wonderful Russ and Phil.

 Linda pouring punch.

 Alex and partner.

 Molly and partner.

 Morgan with his work.

More of the opening, all of our supporters:

  

         

Final thoughts on 604

My strongest feeling as I sit down to type my final thoughts on 604, are relief, relief that it is almost done (apart from the Refinery Exhibition which will be fun – the hard stuff is all over now)… the relief is strongly followed by satisfaction and pride… of a project and assessment done to the absolute best of my abilities.

I have learnt a huge amount about project planning, research, experimenting & critique.. learning from mistakes also.. nothing that I did on this project wasn’t important in some way for my learning.. even if it was not used in the final piece.

I am so glad I choose to try video over photography this semester for my 604 paper (which is one of the papers towards my Degree) I have learnt so much in the way of creating videos. Trying videography has opened up a whole new door for my career. Before I started this project I wasn’t sure I would be able to pull of a piece of moving imagery that I could be proud of. I wasn’t sure I would want to do video again.. It was an experiment.. that has been extremely successful.  Not only do I want to do video again, I now know I can create clips which I can be just as satisfied with as my still imagery.

I can add a whole new selling point to Jessica Shirley as a service provider.

Jessica Shirley Photography AND Videography!

Now all that is left of 604 is to set up this Sunday for the Refinery Exhibition Enjoy the opening night Tues 18th 6:30pm ( I will be there at 5:30)  take lots of photos.. Encourage the public to visit the exhibition which runs from the 18th-21st November 2014.  Clean up on Sat 22nd.. Then relax! (well kind of.. doing two papers over summer.. Digital Photography & A&M Branding 515.. but that’s another blog/story!)

Setting up for marking.

On Thursday we all met in studio to set up for marking/grading. I collected the TV from Power Store.

Symen had kindly built me a plinth, which I painted along with some movable walls.

Every thing went really well with all of us students helping to clear out and set up the studio. Another Student suggested that I go with a few others in a block of corners.

Here is the final set up for marking:

I went to Speedy Print in Nelson and got them to print out my Contextual Statement on quality paper, along with instructions ( instructions for people to turn on my exhibit, when I’m not around)  which I made up into a PDF. I had the instructions laminated as this looked more professional.

My work has a small title attached to the plinth which has the name of the work ‘A Dream by My Children’ and my contact details:

jessshirley1981@hotmail.com

Jessica Shirley Photography (on Facebook)

0211452417

I had Speedy Print, print this onto card  – hopefully it will draw people who see it at the public exhibition to my photography page on Facebook or better still to contact me!

If I had enough time I would have business cards set up ready for people to take away with them, but I am in the process of re-designing my logo.. just don’t have them ready yet.

Symen suggested I have seats for people, so they could sit down and really enjoy my work. I thought this was a great idea.. I tried a bean bag, but it was really too low for people. The red seats in the Johnny Cash room at NMIT were nicer than the studio chairs so I used them. They looked rather flash.

I left the remote on the plinth easy to see in front of the TV and the documents on the viewing chairs.

Photographed, and then finished.. done!

Displaying for end of year marking & Refinery Exhibition

I had a think about how I wanted to display my works. The piece was created to be viewed online for my portfolio, so I feel that it needs a simple fresh and contemporary display.  A Brand new flat screen TV will be perfect. Will suggested I approach an appliance store and ask if they will sponsor me – buy lending me a new TV to display my video on.

I typed out a short letter with information to take with me to Power Store, my first choice. It is a local business – which is great to support. Here is the letter –  Support for B

Will also typed out a very professional excellent letter which I took to them. They are happy to support me lending me a TV which not only plays my USB, it will play it on LOOP, so there is no need for a DVD set up and in the way. I have chosen a smaller TV 32″ as it is less expensive with less risk – should something happen. It will also fit on the only available Plinth I have, which Symen the wonderful technician at NMIT has made me.

We will be setting up in the Studio this Thursday at 1pm for marking, I’m hoping the Plinth is ready if not I will set it all up except for the plinth until I can get it in by Monday’s

3:30pm marking deadline.

I will be placing the TV on a white plinth or a plinth with a white sheet over it. The plinth will be in front of a white wall which will have the contextual statement pages attached to it. There will be a power source above, I have checked with Klaasz (another tutor) and I can use one of the NMIT extension cords which have already been safety checked.

So that the Tutors can easily turn on the video I will write down easy instructions for them – on a piece of paper (this will also be handy for people at exhibition for turning it on and off)

Now all I have to do to complete this 604 paper is set up my works for marking, assemble my process work to submit, complete the Refinary Exhibition, and finish this blog about it all along with my final thoughts.. 🙂

A Dream by My Children

Without further a due I give you ‘A Dream by My Children’

Click on the link here to view.

Here are some of my favorite still images taken from the footage:

Credits:

Final Contextual Statement

I have now written and completed my final contextual statement. It has changed from the second one I did in which I had stated that I wanted to have audio recordings of the children’s voices, and laughter fading in and out with the Instrumental work. I decided to follow my motto with less is more.. and leave it as is. I am very happy with it, it is beautiful.. as Will says LEAVE IT ALONE now. It was suggested in the future if I wanted to I could play with it again, but for now and 604 it is done.

Here is my contextual statement which will be attached to the wall for marking beside my TV which will be playing the video.

Jessica Shirley 604 Final Contextual Statement

Final Tutorial 3rd November

I emailed my tutor a link to the final video on Tuesday… I waited with baited breath for his feedback after a very long and tiresome Labour Weekend, re-shooting and re-editing the video – not to mention loosing my original file and having to start from scratch again wasting so much time, I was hoping I had done it..

Here’s the email I received:

That’s looking so awesome! Really don’t change it anymore, apart from one thing, at 2:20 the clip slows down (appears a bit jerky), can you make it run at normal speed?

After that – it’s a triumph, add your titles then, DON’T TOUCH IT AGAIN! it really is very cool, I love it. 😀

Great job.

Yay, I fixed the jerky part now I just have to do the titles and I’m done!

On Monday 3rd Nov I met with my tutor Will for the final time get him to check the credits.

All great… but one more quick thing.. lengthen the credits so they hold for about 2 secs to read them. Also have a white screen with title fading in at the beginning.

Phew those things are easy to do. Now just to finish my contextual statement, set up for marking and the exhibition then 604 is completed to the absolute best of my ability.

Making adjustments to footage in Adobe Professional Pro.

Once I had added all the re-shot footage to the timeline and I was satisfied it was flowed well, I went over every frame and tweaked the hue/saturation, output & levels.

Here is a screen shot of adjusting the levels/output:

and the hue/saturation:

The Adobe link I used to teach me how to do these things: http://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/using/color-correction-adjustment.html

Re-shooting.

First of all I went through the entire video in Professional Pro and deleted everything that wasn’t up to standard or wasn’t necessary. Once I had done that, I could then see what I needed to fill in the gaps.

I wrote out exactly want I wanted so when I went to re-shoot I could do it efficiently.

I asked one of my friends to drive us around in my car while I re-shoot the car scenes. I also got my daughter Eliana to practice her acting skills and pretend she was asleep.

Title Brain Storming.

I needed a title for my video, here is a list of possibilities I had thought of evolving to the chosen title – A Dream by My Children.

• Unconscious Dimensions
• Dreaming
• Childhood Memory
• Childhood Memories
• Dreaming of Childhood
• Dreaming of the Day
• Dreaming Today
• Dreaming Children’s Day
• Daily Childrens Dreams
• A Dream by My Daughter – A Dream by My Children!