Research / Motels

Motels are typically constructed in an 'I'- or 'L'- or 'U'-shaped layout that includes guest rooms, an attached manager's office, a small reception and, in most motels, a swimming pool, some cases, a small diner. A motel could range from a small single story to a six-floor high rise. form. The Post-war motels, especially in the early 1950s, sought more visual distinction, often featuring eye-catching colorful neon signs which employed themes from popular culture, ranging from Western imagery of cowboys and Indians to contemporary images of spaceships and atomic era iconography. U.S. Route 66 is the most popular example of the "neon era". Many of these signs remain fully intact to this day.

Motels differ from hotels in their location along highways, as opposed to the urban cores favored by hotels, and their orientation to the outside (in contrast to hotels whose doors typically face an interior hallway). Motels almost by definition include a parking lot, while older hotels were not usually built with automobile parking in mind.

The Bates Motel is an important part of Psycho, a 1959 novel by Robert Bloch and Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film, Psycho. Film sequels, Psycho II and Psycho III, also feature the motel as does the 1987 television movie, Bates Motel. The motel makes appearances in Psycho IV: The Beginning, but is not featured as much as in previous films. The Bates Motel returned to prominence in the 1998 remake of the original film.

The scenario of an isolated motel being operated by a serial killer, whose guests subsequently become victims, has been exploited in a number of other horror films, notably Motel Hell (1980) and Mountaintop Motel Massacre (1986). More recently, the genre has been revived with such films as Mayhem Motel(2001), Murder Inn (2005), Vacancy (2007), and its direct-to-video prequel, Vacancy 2: The First Cut (2009).

Several of these horror films also incorporate the sub-theme of voyeurism, whereby the motel owner spies on (or even films) the sexual exploits of the guests. This plays on the long-established connotations of motels and illicit sexual activity, which has itself formed the basis for numerous other films, variously representing the thriller, comedy, teen film and sexploitation genres. Stephen C. Apostolof's Motel Confidential (1967) and the porn film Motel for Lovers(1970) were two notable early examples. More recent manifestations include Paradise Motel (1985), Talking Walls (1987), Desire and Hell at Sunset Motel (1991) and the Korean films Motel Cactus(1997) and The Motel (2005).

Motels have also served as a haven for fugitives from the law. In the past, the anonymity and a simple registration process helped fugitives to remain ahead of the law. However, several changes have reduced the capacity of motels to serve this purpose. Credit card transactions, which in the past were more easily approved and took days to report, are now approved or declined on the spot and are instantly recorded in a database, thereby allowing law enforcement access to this information. Some motels that are located in low-income areas may be places of high crime rates, such as drugs, prostitution, or other serious crimes. These motels would have daily to monthly rates.

Picnic At The Hanging Rock Review

  

                                         

Figure One - Cover

Picnic at Hanging Rock is a 1975 Australian feature film directed by Peter Weir and starring Anne-Louise Lambert, Helen Morse, Rachel Roberts and Vivean Gray. The film is adapted from the novel of the same name, by author Joan Lindsay.

The film relates the story of the disappearance of several schoolgirls and their teacher during a picnic to Hanging Rock on St. Valentine's Day in 1900, and the subsequent effect on the local community.

•Directed by: Peter Wier

•Written by: Joan Lindsay & Cliff Green

•Genre: Drama, Mystery, Suspense & Classics

•Duration: 115 Minutes

Figure Two - Scene at the Hanging Rock 

Picnic at the Hanging rock starts at a Victorian school for girls in which the girls set off for a picnic trip to “The Hanging Rock”. Once getting there three of the girls ask if they can explore, they head of towards the rock slowly making their way up it becoming drowsy but finally go through a passage and not to be seen again, leaving behind suspicion. Throughout the film and at the end the audience is left wondering what the film was about and what actually happened to the girls, which makes you sit in your seat and puzzle about it for a few minutes.  

“We are left with an uncanny respect for the mysteries in life that can never be solved by logic alone.” (Brussat, 2002)

The possibility of what happened to the girls is unsettling to the audience who are so use to finding out what happens at an end of a film, but unlike most films “Picnic at Hanging Rock” doesn’t do this, it simply tells you a story and leaves it up to your imagination to decide – was it evil?, was the hanging rock possessed? or did the girls fall down the rock to their deaths?  

“It's all pretty overheated and under explained but this arty, vague, and possibly supernatural movie lingers on in the memory.”(Guide, 2010)

                                           

Figure Three - The lost girls 

The Australian setting for the film is beautiful place, the school and the girls are also beautiful, which makes the beginning of the film peaceful and calming but once they head to the hanging rock, the presences of evil and horror starts to creep in putting the audience on edge and then the girls start to act strange and camera angles from bushes, plants and insects which alienates the audience from the scenery and making them fear for the girls.  

“His visionary camerawork keeps resting on plants, animals, hives of restless insects, the screen almost bursting with wildness. Weir’s emphasis is on nature’s alien quality, how these prim girls are set against unknowable forces.” (Nathan, 2010)

Illustrations  

Figure 1 - http://mermaidscloset.blogspot.com/2011/08/blog-post.html

Fig 2 - http://youthquaker.blogspot.com/2010/05/picnic-at-hanging-rock.html

Fig 3 - http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000368291

Bibliography

Brussat Review - http://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/films/films.php?id=1313

Guide Review -  http://movies.tvguide.com/picnic-hanging-rock/review/109197

Nathan Review - http://www.empireonline.com/reviews/reviewcomplete.asp?DVDID=118434

Unit 3 - OGR

Unit 3 – Environment final

Unit 3 Influence Map

Ideas -

1. A motel scene were the motel sign is the main focus and the background is a motel in a desolate area.

2. An apocalyptic scene. (not to sure on this one atm)

3. A street view like 28 days later, were there's no one about to give that weird fell to the scene.

Maya - Pirates Treasure Stage 2

The second stage (Part 3 video) of the priates cove video, simply adding coins bump and design mapping to the coins. also adding mapping to the goblet.

PhotoShop - Signs / Textures

Research Into The Uncanny Valley

 
Mars Needs Mom Screen Shot

The actual "valley" refers to a precipitous drop in "likeability" as onscreen characters and humanoid robots step too far towards being human-like. As in, we enjoy Pixar's Wall-E and Nintendo's Mario, but we get the heeby jeebies from the ultra-realistic faces of The Polar Express or the upcoming Tintin movie.

So far, the phenomenon has been described entirely anecdotally, but an international team of researchers, led by Ayse Pinar Saygin of the University of California, San Diego, wanted to find out if the sensation was actually caused by something deep within our brains.

The team picked out 20 subjects, aged 20 to 36. They had no experience working with robots and hadn't spent time in Japan where there's more culturalexposure to androids.

When viewing the real human and the metallic robot, the brains showed very typical reactions. But when presented with the uncanny android, the brain "lit up" like a Christmas tree.

When viewing the android, the parietal cortex -- and specifically in the areas that connect the part of the brain's visual cortex that processes bodily movements with the section of the motor cortex thought to contain mirror (or empathy) neurons -- saw high levels of activity.

It suggests that the brain couldn't compute the incongruity between the android's human-like appearance and its robotic motion. In the other experiments -- when the onscreen perfomer looks human and moves likes a human, or looks like a robot and moves like a robot -- our brains are fine. But when the two states are in conflict, trouble arises.

"The brain doesn't seem tuned to care about either biological appearance orbiological motion per se," said Saygin, assistant professor of cognitive science at UC San Diego. "What it seems to be doing is looking for its expectations to be met -- for appearance and motion to be congruent."

In the paper, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the team writes, "as human-like artificial agents become more commonplace, perhaps our perceptual systems will be re-tuned to accommodate these new social partners."

"Or perhaps, we will decide it is not a good idea to make them so closely in our image after all."

Thumbnails 1-25

Photoshop Tiles

If you look closely enough you can see there is nine tiles together I did in a Photoshop lesson. 

Life Drawings Week Eleven

                          

The Drawings above are quick sketches to warm up.

The  two drawings above are the two sketches we spent roughly 30 minutes on each one.  

Dont Look Now Review

                                       Fig One - Film Cover

Don't Look Now is a 1973 thriller film directed by Nicolas Roeg. Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland star as a married couple whose lives become complicated after meeting two elderly sisters in Venice, one of whom claims to be clairvoyant and informs them that their recently deceased daughter is trying to contact them and warn them of danger. It is an independent British and Italian co-production, filmed in England and Italy, and adapted from the short story by Daphne du Maurier.

         Fig two - Scene of death.

“Boiled down to its simplest elements, Don't Look Now is the story of John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie), whose daughter Christine dies in the film's opening scene, drowned in a pond behind their home in Britain while trying to retrieve a ball”.(Brayton 2008) The film starts of as calm with a little girl in a bright red coat playing outside while her Mum and Dad are inside talking when John has a six sense and runs outside towards a lake and finds his drowned daughter picks her up and screams and tries to revive her but it is too late, for a start of a film what was calm and then to have a scene of a drowned child captures the attention of its audience with a firm grip.

“1973 film remains one of the great horror masterpieces, working not with fright, which is easy, but with dread, grief and apprehension” (Ebert 2002) this plunges the audience into lives of the married couple who are in great grief over the death of the daughter and how the couple go about dealing with it. John and Laura move to Venice as John is being contracted by the bishop the church he’s rebuilding. 

“Arguably the subtlest giallo ever made, it's a film to heighten the sense”s.9Croce 2010) Most of the film is set in Venice where it has a gothic and depressive feel about the place, helping the audience feel the grief of the couple. Laura finds peace in two old ladies who tell her about their deceased daughter and trying to contact them to let them know she’s happy and with them, while John doesn’t believe in the two women and becomes slightly detached from his wife and deals with it in his own way becoming insane, and starts to see things such as his wife on a boat with the two women who got a plane back to England to see their son was unwell and after finding his wife is fine and is on her way back to Italy, he ends up following a little girl wearing a bright red coat like the one his daughter wore at the beginning of the film into a trap where the little figure of a girl turns round and isn’t a hallucination of his daughter but an old woman who strikes a killing blow to John. The hallucination John had of his wife on a boat with the two old women in black was not a hallucination but a vision as it was of his funeral.

Illustrations - 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069995/

http://www.phinnweb.org/roeg/films/dontlooknow.html

Bibliography –

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19731220/REVIEWS/312200301  http://antagonie.blogspot.com/2008/11/tspdt-163-dont-look-now.html

http://www.cinepassion.org/Reviews/d/DontLookNow.html

The Innocents Review

                             Fig One -  Film Case

The Innocents is a 1961 British horror film based on the novella The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The title of the film was taken from William Archibald's stage adaptation of James' novella. Directed and produced by Jack Clayton, it stars Deborah Kerr, Michael Redgrave and Megs Jenkins.

Miss Giddens applies for her first position as a governess for a wealthy bachelor, he is not concerned with her lack of experience and she gets the job. Once Miss Giddens arrives at the estate she starts to learn about the place and what has happened in the past.

“an angelic little child with a beguiling smile who appears to have a mysterious foreknowledge of her brother's imminent arrival, though he is not expected.” (Scheinfel 2007)The two young children in the film, Miles and Flora are smart young children, who are very misleading a the beginning of the film, but slowly through the film become more evil and cunning towards Miss Gidden.

 Fig Two - Scene from the film.

“Wonderful adult horror, stylishly well-made and frightening on a couple of levels”. (Euker, 2005)The film suited black and white with the atmosphere of the film going well with the creepy soundtrack and laughs and cries of a little girl. There’s a few scenes in the film what capture thriller as well or even better than today’s thrillers, such scene were Miss Gidden is playing hide and seek with Flora and Miles and Miss Giddens searching down the corridor and a figure of a woman just walks past or when Miss Giddens is hiding behind the curtains and Quint comes from behind in the garden towards the window, simple but effective scenes what spoke the audience and leave them asking more questions.

“She was also suspiciously frustrated and sexually repressed. In short, she was what would be quickly labeled psychopathic in this more knowing day”. (Crowther, 2005) The sexual undertone in the film are small and often make the audience ask whats going on, but it feels as the director wanted this to throw them off, the scene where Miles kisses Miss Gidden but the kiss becomes more intimate, this gives the impression that Miles isn’t himself and in fact Miles is possessed by Quint and this is why the kiss is intimate and also the bird he shows be before the kiss has had its necked snapped. Quint was an intimate but brutal man and this shown in this scene through Miles. Miss Gidden’s sexual frustration is obvious as her background is told in the film and Quint knows this and tries this through the film with Miss Gidden. 

Illustrations - 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055018/

http://www.avforums.com/movies/The-Innocents-review_9071/dvd.html

Bibliography –

http://movies.tvguide.com/the-innocents/review/102105

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9406E1DC153DEF32A25755C2A9649D946091D6CF&partner=Rotten%20Tomatoes

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/critic/jake-euker/

Pirates Treasure Part 1

Simply adding a few sand images and bump tones to the texture.

Pre Viz Camera

Unit 3 Influence Map

Generally looking at abandoned interior to start of with, thinking about interiors like hospitals or old house with furniture coverings all over the place to give a sense of creepiness.