Ben Wray DFSA

Because 2's character is an intangible being, one of the big questions surrounding the visualisation of our initial documentary was how we should, or if, we should visualise her. As she is the main character and the entire narrative is focused around her monologue we realised it would be quite difficult to create a visually compelling documentary where you didn't see the main character. As her voice would be the tool that viewers would use to create their own mental representations of her, I thought an interesting way to visualise her in some scenes would be to play around with audio waveforms, as this is the most common way of visualising audio. Within After Effects I found the audio visualiser effect and found that you could use a mask path instead of just a conventional straight line. This opened up a limitless way to visualise her words by having the waveforms be produced in different shapes, such as a human, her 2 logo or just from the words she'd be saying. Thes...

This is the storyboard I spent far too long on for 2. Arrows in red are usually camera directions but can also be directing the movement of characters in the frame. I have chosen to just link a Google doc instead because the way Blogger formats images actually sucks, it feels like I'm using Microsoft Word '97. https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FhuMlTsWIrF41kdpbfdSpF8QgE4U5qAi

I have an unhealthy relationship with productivity and efficiency. I find myself obsessed with output and optimum performance and at a loss when I don't surround myself in an environment where I can let these feelings flourish. This passion for eudaemonia has its fair share of positives and negatives. On the plus side I have developed a skill for maintaining concentration on one task for an extended period of time, and find that I am happiest in life when I am working hard. On the down side in the past I have let my love for productivity control my recreation to the extent of dreading holidays and always feeling subtly guilty that whilst socialising that I'm not at home bettering my skills and self.  To gain a better understanding of healthy working and to hopefully incorporate some lessons into my own practise I decided to read Deep Work by Cal Newport. The book taught me that the way that the majority of people work is inefficient, harmful and backwards to their larger ...

This is a research document I never thought I'd have to write. During the initial research process of 2 I watched a number of online documentaries about illegal raves and the process of orchestrating them. When I watched Vices 'Britains Illegal Rave Renaissance' documentary I learnt that the way rave conductors go about their illegitimate business is by abusing the flimsy squatting laws and their respected loopholes. In the documentary, the man hiding behind a mask teaches viewers that by printing out Section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 and sticking it on the entrance of the raves non-residential location, you are effectively informing authorities that there are squatters present that cannot be evicted from the premises without a high court order. I found these legal loopholes fascinating but knew that Vice wouldn't outright tell their millions of viewers exactly how to exploit the law to throw illegal raves, so I did some r...

Back in August I read an article in The Times Magazine where the columnist's was recounting her recent experience attending an illegal warehouse rave in London. I found the article really interesting as it shared a similar narrative to my hedonistic summer of festivals, day parties and recreational activities. Learning about this underground culture that was beginning to come back inspired me so I decided that when I moved to Farnham in September I would attempt to orchestrate an illegal rave of my own. This year I attended one of the UK's biggest festivals called Boomtown. Despite it being one of the most fun weekends of my life I found that the festivals theatrical quality of it really made a difference when comparing it to other festivals in the UK. For one weekend in early August this 8km stretch of rolling hills gets transformed into a city divided into different districts that all culminate within one overarching story that is added to at the closing ceremony of each ye...

When I first thought of the idea back in August for a rave in Farnham, with there being an abundance of students and a distressing lack of nightlifeI knew it would have a good reception from the student population as the rave would refreshingly fill the gap in the recreational market that Farnham has so many holes in. So with this idea in mind I got to thinking about how I would go about promoting this rave. Initially I told people who I thought would be interested in the rave about it's potential future fruition, the reaction I always got from people was positive and in some cases ecstatic. But word of mouth and collecting peoples phone numbers can only go so far, to achieve the largest market possible I knew I would have to incorporate social media into our promotion strategy. Unfortunately our inclusion of social media was responsible for both our fleeting success of relevancy within the conservations of Farnham students and also our terminal fate of establishment intervention....

As our documentary was initially going to be a hybrid between a short film and a poetic documentary, deciding on the language style was a question that needed to be addressed with careful choice. I didn't want to make the script boring by simply listing the problems social media caused and then listing how we planned to overcome them but I also didn't want to use conventional film dialogue to tell the story as we only had one main character (2). In the end it seemed apparent that the only way to effectively and interestingly tell this story through verbal language was through a monologue spoken by 2. Monologues are quite similar to a block of marble. Through careful planning, a degree of skill and a lot of time they have the potential to perfectly convey an artists vision. But with a lack of a clear vision and a misunderstanding of the medium, a viewer can fall into the cracks of it, not understand the message and lose all momentum of experience. Because I identified that w...