More Jabberwocky Work, Colour in Film

Lots of work on Jabberwocky today. I started by filming some synth playing outdoors. It was -2 degrees outside, so I had to be quick! I brought a tiny portable sound player with me so that I could play in time to the music (and rehearsed the right notes!)

Also recorded some scenes of a Queen of Hearts playing card, torn, destroyed. The elements I wanted were then complete.

The final change was/is the colour, which is often the key difference between 'cinematic' looking films, and digital-looking ones. Most contemporary films are very beautifully photographed and coloured. In the pre-digital era, it took filters and film stock and other techniques to colourise, but this is now done to a painterly degree digitally and with great ease. I say painterly because the key use of colour in film is to avoid white or black, as in painting - this, perhaps for the first time, truly distinguishes colour films from black and white films.

Colour massively changes mood and there are so many choices, all manipulations of contrast, chrominance (strength of colour), and the hues themselves. Here is the raw footage I shot of Deb, lit with yellow and cyan spotlights, with a good degree of ambient light too:

Most of the colour needs removing so that it can be bent towards a common range. Here it is when lightened and with less chrominance/saturation:

Then colourised, only very slightly, yet this tiny tweak drastically changes the mood and feeling.

The same goes for later on. Here is the plain footage of myself near the 'Tum Tum' tree. It looks like any old photo, like a polaroid perhaps...

Yet a few tiny tweaks to the colour transform it into something like a painting:

I used colour to broadly match the mood, with cyans and blues for the night, story-teller scenes, inspired by the overrated romance The Shape of Water (Guillaume del Toro, is he the new Tim Burton for being so instantly stylised, or the new Peter Jackson by managing to tell a 45-minute story in 3 hours?). I used insipid yellows and odd pinks for the 'brillig' outdoor scenes. And strong reds, and black and white scenes too.

Colour is best used like musical tones; just as Bergman used red, white, and black so boldly and brilliantly in Cries and Whispers. Generally it is rarely used as a story telling tool at all. Cyan with yellow/flesh tones are overwhelmingly used in all films; not only in The Shape of Water, those colours dominate the Marvel films, and the His Dark Materials TV series, for example.

So many changes to the video today. It nearly complete. I now need to watch it several times to finalise the timing of various aspects.

Jabberwocky Animation, and Hausu

Great progress on the Jabberwocky video today, though at times dogged by dead ends. All creative work has dead ends and lots of time wasted chasing unusable dreams. This phenomenon particularly seems to plague the film maker.

First, I watched the Japanese film Hausu ('House') last night - an amazing film which I'd not heard of until two weeks ago when Deb gifted me the DVD. Sadly, the creator, Nobuhiko Obayashi, died last year, which is probably why it's undergone a bit of a renaissance. Made in 1977, the film was released on DVD (and had a limited cinema release, apparently) in the US and Britain in 2010.

Technically a horror film, Hausu is really a surrealist Romantic film (Romantic like a 19th century symphony), making use of every emotion; even great tenderness for the ghost at the end. One of the most inventive, and best, films I've ever seen. If anything, it reminded by of The Holy Mountain, but far superior. As a horror, it's hardly scary and contains a lot of comedy. The sounds and special effects reminded me of Chinese classics Zu Warriors of the Magic Mountain, Mr Vampire, and the old Monkey series, and the initial bright colours and constant pop-music-like background reminded me of The Monkees show or The Banana Bunch, but an endlessly captivating film. I must look up more work by Obayashi.

The imagery was exactly the stimulation I needed. Hausu is the sort of film I would make. So many films now are all pretty photography (all modern films are lit and framed beautifully) but have no story or emotion. Hausu is the opposite, a breath of fresh air.

I started the day by working on the animation sequence for the climax of the music. I wanted at least a jabberwocky image torn or destroyed, and a spiral of Alices, and I spent a lot if time creating a 3D model of a plane in lots of segments to use in my bespoke software Argus:

I had to work out how to texture the plane as one object, but save out little shards of it as individual objects. Fortunately my software Hector can hide or show specific polygons, storing the visible arrangement in something called a 'vision state' so I used that. After all of the time hiding and showing and saving these shards, it didn't look particularly good, so the first hours of the day were wasted. I scrapped it and simply created two polygons with a zig-zag edge. These still look very digital. I might go back and make them look more organic.

Then, Alice, which went more to plan. I had a few seconds to play with (the whole animation is 387 frames) so I added a spiral of love hearts and the white rabbit... chasing love. The Jabberwock of anti-love is slain and love is pursued... then lots of Queen's of Hearts' appear... (Liddell's mother?)

The result fades to the graveyard where I'm playing synthesizer. Getting this to work wasn't that easy because what appears to be a stationary shot has some hand-held quiver which I couldn't fake, so I had to use the actual video frames in my animation.

Then lots of timing changes and little flickers, memories, reminders. There is still a lot to do, but for the first time, I'm starting to like this video. There are flickers of emotion... love, the loss of love, death. These are always the ultimate themes in art.

These 6 minutes have taken me at least a week so far. I think Hausu took two years.

Climbing The Jabberwocky Mountain

A full day working on the Jabberwocky video.

Last night I had a dream that I was in love with Alice Liddell and afraid of her mother discovering this. This is the perfect thing to include, that the feared Jabberwock was somehow Alice's mother, or guilt. This must be handled carefully.

Before bed, I formed a plan was to use Leonardo da Vinci anatomical images for the 'Beware the Jabberwock' sections, so I assembled lots of these first, but then thought that I'd probably need permission to use them, and I wasn't convinced of their relationship to the whole, so the first hour or two produced nothing.

I then decided to use some clips from the ancient silent adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. A lot of the video will tell the story of Alice in Wonderland, the background of the story. These silent clips seem to add a lot, and I've broken some of the modern footage to look like these, like a memory. The first half of the song is a slow growth, almost organic and dream-like which will build to the climax of the 'One Two One Two' line, but I have nothing yet for that climax, except that it must be bright and white. It needs to be a confrontation of this love-guilt, something shattering...

Day Three

Very long and frustrating day working on the Jabberwocky Video. So much wrong with it, but there are a few nice sparks. I feel I'm hammering away at it, hour after hour, yet hardly making any progress... but very slow, achingly slow, progress is being made.

One thing added today is a montage of images from the Alice books and the life of Lewis Carroll to signify the approaching Jabberwocky. This works well. I have two main areas that need attention now including the main climax. This film is so difficult. It's nearly 9pm. I'll get back to hammering away at this adamantine rock-face tomororw.

Jabberwocky Video, Otamatone Modification

Day two of working on the Jabberwocky video. I want to get it done as quickly as possible but this stage seems achingly slow. I've made two more drafts, noting the bits that are good enough and bits that certainly need redoing. I filmed some of the Jabberwocky itself. I need to work on the transitions, fades and flickers. Rather than listing possible ideas it's usually more efficient to instantly do them... I must remember to do this! But there are always cases of trying things that don't, in the end, work.

My latest idea is to have a montage of 50 to 100 images about the history of the Jabberwocky and Lewis Carroll and text from the book.

In the middle of the day I listened to the BBC Radio3 new music show, the only good exposé of cutting edge music around. This inspired me to thing about composing a concerto for Theremin or some otherworldly instrument, then I remembered that I had an Otamatone; so I decided to dismantle it and fit it with a 1/4 inch jack plug so that I could plug it into my guitar amp.

The procedure was very fiddly - the whole device is so cheap and shoddy. The compartment for batteries is held there by a screw and a very high tension spring. But after some soldering I attached a couple of wires to the exact same terminals as the tiny speaker. I then drilled a hole in the case and threaded them out.

The downside is, it's so loud through headphones that I'm afraid of plugging this cheap toy into my £400 amplifier. So I'll wait until I can try it on something cheaper first... the Otamatone really needs a volume control itself, but it hasn't got one.

I must pull myself together and work at full speed on the video tomorrow. I've also been rather chilly, coughy and sneezy today. It feels like a regular allergy, chill, micro-virus that inflicts me every 10 days or so. On we roll!

Jabberwocky Video Editing First Day

A full busy day. Started with website updates and have now filed my writings in order from recent to old; it seemed silly to have the same old ones at the top.

Then started the process of working on the Jabberwocky video. We have shot about 50 clips. The first job is to review them for useful parts, name them, discard any that aren't suitable, and convert them to avi for 'hand' editing using AviSynth. Then it was a matter of going through the tune section by section, adding clips to match the mood and reviewing these often to make them all fit neatly. Speech and voices need to be synchronised at times too.

This process took until about 8pm; 6 minutes is so long for a music video! Doubling the length of a video seems to quadruple the time to work on it because of all of the countless watching and re-watching, but now a first, very rough, draft is done. This is only a mix of the clips so far. The colours are inconsistent, there are no nice scene changes and I probably need to shoot more footage. It would be nice to include the Jabberwocky model in there at some point. This is a much more complex piece of music than most of my other music videos, there are lots of areas for contrast and emotional crescendi.

Here is Deb, as the Jabberwock approaches...

The result is very rough at the moment, almost like lots of paper pages sellotaped together in a chain, but there are one or two moments that grab the attention. Next I need to watch it a lot and build on those moments, and try to work out what new footage is needed.

I expect this will take all week. I hope that by the 13th I can have a first draft complete enough for a 'taster' video.

In the evening I played electric guitar to Histoire De Melody Nelson, which was great fun. The amp has revolutionised my guitar, as did my Chicken Pick. My playing today sounded at least as good as on the record, well, of course, I added a lot more. It was good to use a lot of staccato in there, stabs of chords and notes. Jazzy music like this is such a joy to play.

My mood is good. A long and full day of work is perfect.

Poems and Song Filing, Snowballs and Singing, Jabberwocky Pre-Order

Slept fine on this New Year's Day. A glance at the news and social media filled me with despair and sadness at Britain leaving the European Union, not so much because the E.U. is a perfect institution, it has many flaws, but it is based on moderation and order, and those who champion and have championed Brexit are, speaking only from those few I've encountered, exactly the nationalistic, selfish, unsympathetic, racists that they are stereotypically portrayed to be.

My sour and unhappy mood stuck with me for too long, but I got to work on something rational and useful.

It's a new year and I realised that I used to be more productive when my website was ordered in sections year by year. The new, blank, year page was like an empty wall in a gallery, waiting to be filled. My website used to order everything by year, but this wasn't ideal because it created a huge quantity of pages and made it hard to find or browse art; the website looked and worked more like a phone book that anything artistic. So I've wondered how to balance these forces.

In 2020 I re-ordered all of my poems and song lyrics so that they use the same filing codes because my poems and song lyrics had started to merge and overlap, so today I've merged both online too, and created a master list of all of them, with a page for each year from 2002 when I started to file everything. In a second section I've created pages for published works; books and albums which include songs, and on those pages, each poem (from the corresponding poetry book) and each song with lyrics is listed, linked to the words.

So poems and song lyrics are, again, shown by date, but also by product. This took many hours.

I could do the same for paintings, as the galleries, at one time sorted by style or general period, have evolved to be broadly based on year once more, and a year-by-year display might encourage me to paint. The books and albums/singles/ep releases are more difficult, as they are generally released only one or two a year (or none!) but sooner or later I'll probably have to divide them up too. The album page is already a little too big.

I went for a walk and had a snowball outside with Deb; the cocktail, that is - I did not create a sphere from ice crystals. I returned and had a good 20 or 30 minutes of vocal training. The key is to really open the back of the throat in a relaxed way, turning the mouth into a sort of floppy gramophone horn, where all of the sound shines from the larynx alone. I felt this truly for the first time today. I really need the time and space to train more often, but any training is better than none. After training daily since mid-November, I aim to record the Sisyphus vocals this month.

My next job is the Jabberwocky video, I have lots of source footage. We've done quite well considering the lockdown and other restrictions on contact. The single is, today, available to pre-order in various places. It's a good single. Far better, for example, than Donovan's version. It will mark a moment of destiny in any account as the poem is so famous and remarked upon. Jabberwocky could be for Fall in Green what Ticket to Ride was for The Carpenters.

Detecting Race/Gender Bias: A Psychological Experiment

I had the idea of a psychological experiment for detecting race or gender bias, or any other sort of psychological bias about people's appearance whether conscious or unconscious. The experiment compares a human distribution that should be random and meaningless vs. a computer distribution which is actually random.

1. Assemble a group of 100 images of faces which are categorised by a particular race or gender. Face #1 might be Afro-Caribbean Male for example, face #2 South-East Asian Female.

2. Create more groups of 100 faces like the above. This experiment must be repeated several times so it would be best if different faces were used each time.

3. Importantly, the order of race/gender sorting must remain the same for each group and always fixed for all participants and for every round of the experiment, so, in the above example, face #1 would always be an Afro-Caribbean Male. Faces should be chosen to eliminate race or gender ambiguity.

4. Choose a number of subjects and divide these into 3 groups. Those in group 1 are told that the experiment is to test racial bias. Those in group 2 are told that the experiment is to test gender bias. Those in group 3 are told nothing (or, for example, that the test is simply about reaction time and spatial awareness, or some other such thing).

5. For the test, the subject is tasked as an employer and is asked to distribute roles to employees. 10 employees must be assigned a management role. 20 employees are to be assigned a technical role. 70 employees are to be assigned a worker role.

6. The subject either uses a computer or picture cards and is shown each of the 100 faces in order. A count-up timer is present to add a feeling of time pressure; this either appears on the screen or the researcher should visibly use a stop-watch. The subject must assign each face to either management, technical, or worker. Subjects can swap around faces; they can change their mind and shift the roles as much as they want.

7. When all 100 faces have been shown and all roles have been assigned the test is complete and the time is stopped and noted.

8. The experiment is repeated by the same subject several times because an average result from many rounds is taken. There can be a time gap (hours, days) between rounds of this test, and this is perhaps better as it stops fatigue and any memory bias.

9. The fixed order of the faces is necessary to stop simple tricks; eg. if a subject put the first 10 faces as manager, the next 20 as technical, the rest as worker then this would be apparent in the data, whereas it would appear as random if the faces were shown in random order.

10. The experiment is also completed by a computer using a purely random distribution. It comparison of the human distribution to this random distribution which will reveal any bias in the average choices of the human subjects.