Restoration Processes.

In advance of my tutorial with Simon tomorrow I tried to build up my ideas further to something a bit more conceptual. My base idea in my last post was ok, but it needed a lot of work. I started looking at some multi-screen work based around the topics I wanted to explore within time and I came across these:

This one was quite similar to the ideas and themes I was looking at in the sense that it focuses on nature and modern industrial society in conjunction with one another. It starts of by showing beautiful footage of nature and juxtaposing it with industrial footage, and supported by sound clips regarding climate change. It gets its point across very simply, and I found it quite effective.

This second piece focuses more on elements of sea ventures across time. It includes periods of happiness, and war, destruction, and construction as well. It is clear that it focuses mainly on the sea and is a very engaging and interesting piece.

By this point I have an idea of what I could do to develop my piece further. My piece wants to mainly look at architecture and natural processes which lead to the eventual destruction of the things that humans construct over time, despite our attempts to preserve this. However I didn't want to present this in a confrontational way, rather as an observation. As such, I want to try and give a sense of natural cycles within the piece as well. I feel it will make my work flow and loop quite smoothly. To do this, I had a look at my starting point landscape, which is the desert if I am to start with the pyramids.

http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html

Looking at the link above you'll see evidence of greenery growing in the desert due to increased rainfall. It happens in a natural process, eventually it looks like it will become a rainforest type area, then possibly changing to Savannah and back to desert. I was very interested by this and thought I could incorporate this into my piece. However, I also wanted to of course demonstrate humanity in all of this too, since this all stems from a distaste of human arrogance.

So after all of this, I have come up with a development of my idea explained below:

Left

Begins the piece with desert and pyramids (animated still)

Pyramids dissolve/turn into dust (particle effect)

Dust travels off-screen

Desert changes to rainforest/greenery

Middle

Black for a couple of seconds, then a person walks on and starts hammering a piece of stone with a tool (you can only see hands)

As dust particles pass across, the person changes (changing eras)

At the end of the piece, the person also dissolves in the same way as the monuments do

Right

Starts as just a landscape, then a monument forms as dust particles come over to that side.

The monument then also dissolves and travels back towards the landscape on the left.

The landscape changes similarly to how it does on the left with natural processes.

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That's essentially my idea. I've had a look at a couple of tutorials to see how I could achieve this, which I will post as well.