Dragon Fly

Our project Dragonfly was based on forced perspective. Dragon Fly is a song by Nick Batterham. Luci Schroder made a music video for it that humorously plays with forced perspective. The video can be found here. There are a lot of movements in this video that Luci Schroder creates. Some of the movements included a llama being stroked in the front room, pushing a woman into the sea, touching the big wheel. I think that my two favourite movements are when he is pushing the guy into the house through the wheel and when he is touching the mans abs. The way in which Luci plays with the forced perspective is interesting because it gets you laughing at all these things yet none of them are real. Although forced perspective is rarely used nowadays I think it would be nice to see films use it again. 

My two favourite shots from The Dragon Fly music video. 

Forced perspective is a technique that employs optical illusion to make an object appear further away, closer, larger or smaller than it actually is. It can be used in photography, film making and architecture. The way in which my group used it was through film making. An example of how it can be done is in a scene in an action/adventure movie in which dinosaurs are threatening the heroes. By placing a miniature model of a dinosaur close to the camera, the dinosaur may look monstrously tall to the viewer, even though it is just closer to the camera. It's a really clever way that film makers do it because it works so incredibly well. The most common movies that these are used in were the B-movies from the 1950s&60s, the reason for this is because they had a very limited amount of money and therefore used forced perspective a lot. Two very common films that used forced perspective are Attack of the 50 foot woman (1958) and One Million Years BC (1966). 

I think that forced perspective works well for low budget films, the reason I think this is because they don't have the money for the technology that is used to create forced perspective. I think that the reason why many films use this technique is because it is an easy way to trick the audience into thinking that something is bigger than it actually is. I think that forced perspective can add a lot to a film, I think it can particularly add to the ones that don't use a lot of effects due to the cost of money. However this costs nothing to do and it looks really good if done properly therefore it is a clever technique to use. 

We worked in a group of four, my colleagues were Scott Friday, Sam Shaw and Olivia Searle. We were given five different shots that we had to done. We managed to get one each of the shots.

The first shot we got was inside of the bombed out church, this was the architecture shot, the way in which we got the shot was by Sam standing quite close to the camera with just his hand in shot. Scott is then a good few feet behind him stood up on the wall so it looked as though he was standing on Sam's hand. This shot was relatively easy to shoot because the idea worked really well, although the only problem with this shot was that the lightening wasn't particularly brilliant due the amount of darkness that that there was in the church. 

The second shot that we did was of people being still, this was probably the most fun of all of the shots; myself, Olivia and Sam were all lying down on the ground on our fronts holding onto a bollard each. The shot was fun to film because it was something a little bit different. I think that this shot turned out really well because we pulled it off by making it look as though we were failing in mid air. 

The third shot was using using cans of Red Bull, the way in which we did this was by standing on chairs and making it look as though we were dancing inside the cans and then we would jump out of the cans to make it look as though we were falling. For this shot the cans of Red Bull were right in front of the camera with us being really far back. This shot worked well because we were able to use a big space which meant that we could fit each of the cans in the shot. 

The third and fourth shot were very a like in the fourth shot we used four different skittles and focused on the skittles. The way in which we used the skittles was to make it look as though we were standing on top of the skittles. Then one person would jump off the skittle and onto the floor and hide to make each of the skittles look like stepping stones. Similar to the third this shot only worked well because we were in a large space. However this shot turned out a lot better than expected. 

Finally the 5th shot we had was of Sam's wallet which we stood up and made it look as though Olivia was lying underneath it. This shot was definitely the hardest to shoot, this is because it was so low on the ground and therefore the tripod wouldn't get anywhere near it. Therefore getting the correct angle was really hard, especially as it was incredibly windy which meant that the wallet kept falling down. 

Three of our shots. 

When it came to the editing part it was relatively easy. We had the shots from all the groups. I decided what I would do for my edit was to use at least one shot that each of the groups did and for the better ones used two or three, this way I would get a variety of shots from all different groups. I was going to keep the colour the same but I decided for this one to do it in black and white, the reason for this was because as it was a lot of different shots to do it in black and white to make it look professional. I also cross dissolved each of the shots because I thought that this would make the video flow a lot better. 

The two editing techniques I used. 

My final edit. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_perspective - 26th February 2014