Triptych!

Yesterday we were set our first mini brief - to produce a short triptych film about anything that we wanted. A triptych is a split screen film - when there are 2 or more different shots shown on screen at the same time. It allows the audience to view all different aspects of a situation, and gives them the choice of focusing on one particular element, if they want to. it is a much more creative way of film making than I have ever done before. I was very interested in producing this as I had never done it before. As with everything I have learnt on this course, I always feel impressed with myself after learning how to do something which I always see on the TV!

An example of a triptych painting

An example of a particular triptych is this:
Memory Sixteen
I like how there is a wide variety of different clips that the audience can watch, allowing them to create their own viewing experience. I also love how the simple clips actually create a fascinating film of city life.

After getting in a group with Elicia and Gemma, we started to brainstorm ideas and what we wanted to achieve with this project. We wanted to create something that was visually pleasing rather than focusing on telling a story. We set out with the aim to use a range of creative camera angles to ensure that the audience’s attention would be kept throughout it all. This interested me as I had never focused on this before as, by my own admission, I don't have a creative eye when it comes to deciding what looks good on camera so I was excited to delve into this a bit more.

We chose to do our film about the season of Autumn as we felt like we would be able to go out and film a lot of relevant footage. It was important to us to use our own material so that we could get the effect we wanted to. After filming a range of shots such as the fallen leaves, cold days and warm fires we set to work with editing it together into a triptych. It was quite a simple process for us however we found that due to rendering and export times, we had to cut some of our desired shots out as we didn't have time before the deadline but I still feel that we produced a hgih standard of film.

Here is our film:
Autumn Leaves

I felt that our triptych was very aesthetically pleasing and some of the shots that we got were visually strong. I definitely would like to develop it to a longer film about all 4 seasons because I feel this would be a great film to watch. However if I were to do another one, I would focus more on sound as we just used a backing track and I feel that if we used a selection of sounds, it would help the viewer’s attention get drawn to different shots as I don’t think we had any poignant shots to attract attention. I quite like the idea of all different shots trying to ‘fight’ for the viewer’s attention with clashing shots and sounds.

One of they key things I liked about using and watching triptychs is the ability for the audience to select whatever piece of film they want to watch, allowing it to be a more user focused and personal viewing experience.