Bentley - DMA Portfolio

Hello. My name is Konrad Bentley. I have been a part of the DMA Lite Film program from October 2021 through to January 2022. This portfolio presentation is a digital display of the work that I have done in the past semester. The final result is a mosaic which shows a clear understanding of nature, life and human vision. I feel that most of my film work is greatly influenced by abstract art which you will probably notice in a few of my pieces. What I tried to show with my work was that the feel and the visuals of a project make for an everlasting impression on the viewer. 

Up Above: This was my first big piece of work in DMA Lite. In this video, a snake is seen slithering around grassy hills looking for food. The snake then finds a squirrel eating a nut, along with a rabbit. It perceives these two as prey, and advances towards them, ready to hunt them down. But as it turns out, he was hallucinating, and instead he saw a fox. The snake was afraid of the fox, and so it just kept moving along.

Having recently learned about blue/green screen effects at the time, this project was an amazing opportunity to showcase my abilities to connect background images to a CG render of some sort, and create a story from it. This was the first project in DMA Lite film where I was tasked with building a story. It builds up to the point in where the snake supposedly finds it's food, then encounters the fox. 

My inspiration for this was any scene in a movie where a kid gets made fun of, but then an adult (teacher or parent) stands up for the child. In particular, a scene in Spy Kids where the dad Gregorio tries to stand up for his son who's being made fun of by another kid at school. The whole bully aspect is really what makes this story work. Prior to reaching the climactic event, the film mostly relied on imagery. In my opinion, the imagery of a film only accounts for about 50% of what a film needs. The battery of a narrative film should of course be the story. Whether it's a loose or complex story, the audience should be able to follow it along. 

The film was made by finding several images from the internet and combining them with videos of a Computer Generated snake slithering across a blue background. The solid blue colored background allows for it to easily be changed or in technical terms, key lighted. 

Up Above: This is a montage of wake boarding that I made. To me, this montage project was a great opportunity for me to get into the habit of editing again. This time, I was editing footage into a montage that would go over a song of my choice. I hadn't heard much about Wake Boarding prior to editing the montage and I thought I might as well give it a try. For the montage, I chose the 'Lazy Eye' instrumental by Aesop Rock. To me, it gave the montage a tropical city kind of vibe. 

Wake Boarding was quite an interesting sport to choose for this montage, and I guess that kind of motivated me to make this project. The whole idea of wakeboarding kind of reminded me of surfing, which certainly gave me a good idea of what song to use. 'Lazy Eye' was originally a lyrical song made by hip hop artist Aesop Rock. The instrumental lines greatly with the kind of context of the 2012 Red Bull Wake Open, especially given that the event took place in certain beach cities like Tampa Bay, Florida. The footage and the song were edited on Adobe Premiere Pro, and used exclusive footage from the 2012 Red Bull Wake Open tournament.

Up Above: This is an example of a piece of work that I made on Adobe After Effects. In this short video, a man walks into an automotive shop only to be met with explosion. I thought that an automotive shop would be a great environment in which this would happen because cars can be very prone to explosion in almost any action film. My inspiration for this work is largely directed to the Fast & Furious movies where you would see cars, plural, exploding. To make it simple, I only made it so that one car would explode in this short video. I picked the proper background for the scene, then added an explosion effect and placed it on the yellow truck you see in the video. It made it so that it looked like the blast wave had hit the man, but he wasn't entirely hit by the explosion. I thought this made the whole clip look more realistic. 

Up Above: This is the film project that I worked on for a big chunk of my time here in DMA. I made this film in collaboration with student Vir Singh. The film follows a kid by the name of Alfred, who struggles to keep up in school and so he decides to cheat on a test. After getting caught by his teacher, he is kicked out and left outside to question his decision. During that time, he has a wild dream, in which his favorite celebrity arrives to deliver him a valuable lesson. 

The film is short but in a way, enveloping. It's a weird blend but in the end, it just kind of works itself together and creates a great experience. After watching this you probably assume the footage somewhat psychedelic, blurred out moments, tense music, fast upside down montages. These affects made the film somewhat random but that is what makes it unique and interesting. It's ultimately a weird watch, but it gets you hooked in the feel of it, and takes you on a wild trip through the dream of Alfred. 

My personal inspiration for Adventure Of Alfred is a 2002 film called 'Big Fat Liar'. In this film, a Junior High student named Jason who is an avid liar has to learn that he can't get away with everything. Alfred and Jason have similar personality traits, being that they would both much rather get away with cheating rather than actually doing the hard work. But Alfred is much quieter than Jason, and in fact, when making the Alfred character, Vir and I took some inspiration from Mr. Bean. Mr. Bean is not the easiest character to understand, but most of his signature moments come from not caring all that much and wanting to do things the other way around. In that sense, we felt that cheating on a test would be an Alfred/Mr. Bean kind of thing to do.

We shot the scenes for our film at Argyle Secondary School in North Vancouver, British Columbia. We needed a school-like environment for the first and last scene, and the scenes in between were shot outside on school property. The voice lines from the scene where Alfred meets Vir Singh were recorded on a TASCAM recording device. All the scenes were shot with a Canon 1920/1080p video camera. The song we used in the film is called 'Flying' by The Beatles. The song comes from an album known as 'Magical Mystery Tour' which touches on a lot of themes of psychedelia and dreams. 'Flying' however was an instrumental track, and so it had none of the drug references mentioned in the lyrics. The song 'Flying' really resides with the context of our film. Short, imaginative, dreamy and thought provoking. 

Up Above: The main character Alfred, played by me, is studying hard for his upcoming test. This scene is key, because it sets up the somewhat ambiguous moral of this story, which is to study and to not slack off. I say 'ambiguous moral' because it remains unclear to us whether or not Alfred learned this lesson himself, and if he actually passed his test in the aftermath.

 As you can see in this scene, Alfred puts a lot of pressure on himself to succeed. The lighting almost completely resides with Alfred's feelings and emotions in this scene. The stress of not knowing enough in a given situation and the overall tension it creates. The lighting really gives the viewer an idea of the tone. Whether it's an establishing shot or a shot of a character in a certain mood. The heat and pressure of this scene are given a certain warm lighting which strongly affects the tone of the scene and the way the viewer interprets it.

Up Above: This image shows Alfred as he catches a light that leads him to another segment of his dream. The background of this image shows just how far Alfred had to travel to catch the light that he followed for so long. In his dream, he ran all across the globe, and been to many popular tourist attractions such as the Taj Mahal, the Stonehenge and the great pyramids of Giza. Hollywood marks the finishing point in his journey across the world, and where he begins to learn the compelling lesson he's been chasing this whole time. 

This whole scene leading up to Alfred catching the light can be described as 'wacky' since it was obviously filmed on a green screen and not actually in front of these famous locations. But this scene greatly demonstrates just how overly exaggerated some dreams can get. In this case, Alfred is still willing to believe that he actually went that far in the world to catch the light he's been chasing, despite how ridiculous it seems. And that's precisely what this is meant to show. 

Up Above: Vir Singh, who plays the role a faux celebrity named 'Vir Singh'. He is portrayed as sort of an inspirational figure for Alfred. This is a shot of him just as he appears in the inordinate dreamland. This scene was used to establish the moral and the purpose of this story. Up until this point, Alfred is still to believe that this whole scenario is real, but still, he would never believe that his favorite celebrity showed up just to tell him to stop cheating on his tests. Overall, this scene really underestimates Alfred's naiveté when it came to him believing that the dream was real. In the end, Alfred doesn't know what to even say or think about the whole situation, and he is left just standing there, baffled by the impromptu, and his fantasy quickly starts to fall apart. 

Up Above: Here's a shot from the fast montage near to the end of the film. It's the sequence in which the dream is almost entirely dissolved to the point of complete realization. 

This scene is meant to show how a dream just sort of flashes back at you as it ends, meaning that you can't really make much sense of the dream after it happened. So, what do you do once you realize it? You try to make something of it, and that's exactly what Alfred decided to do once it was over. This scene was inspired from a sequence in the film 'The Adventures Of Sharkboy and Lavagirl' in which Max the main character had to make sense of his dream that flashed back at him. He couldn't, not until he lived it out and realized the meaning of it all. In this case, the flashback would leave Alfred to make a move and change his learning habits for good. 

For this scene, we recycled the shot from the beginning of the film, flipped the image, and altered the lighting. This was done in Adobe Premiere Pro by Vir. As you have seen in the film, this is just one of several original shots that were flipped and re-lit to give the effect of a fading dream sequence. The lighting was given a greyscale kind of tone that made it look like the dream was quickly falling apart as the imagery lost it's color. We made it so that the whole sequence would be mysterious and even a little bit uncanny to watch. The sequence also came at the right time, as the ending part of the song 'Flying' quickly began to fade away as well, ultimately leading the dream to fall apart. 

Up Above: This film is called 'The Great Faraday Forest' and it's a project that I worked on with my friend Erik Adie. The film takes place in a dense forest which has been labeled as 'supernatural' since several people have mysteriously gone missing there. It follows an explorer as he studies the forest and accidentally unravels the supernatural meaning behind the place. 

I made the film with the intent that it would have a massive visual appeal. Meaning that it would be eye catching and impressive to watch. I put my focus on the experience and with that, it would follow a loose but interesting story about the strange journey of a lonely explorer walking through an even lonelier forest, searching for answers. It can be up to the viewer to decide the meaning of this story as a whole. It's already laid out, and they can always search for the deeper meaning within the dense forest. I almost feel like I should credit the forest in this film as another character. It's very comparable to such movie settings as the mansion in Parasite or the flying house in Up. It's a great setting that definitely played it's role spot on. 

My inspiration for this film initially came from the 2007 film 'Into The Wild'. The film is about a young man named Christopher McCandless who leaves his past life behind to make a daring trip into the wilderness of rural Alaska. And I think that the whole feeling of being alone in the wilderness was also a daring thing for me to try as a student filmmaker. The cinematography style that I used in this film was inspired by a Hungarian film called 'Sátántangó (Satan's Tango). I find this film's style to be very compelling, as it puts just as much focus on the people as it does for the nature, imagery and ambience. And how it only takes a small number of shots to showcase that in a film.

The film was shot in the forests of the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve Park, right besides the Baden Powell and Richard Juryn trails in North Vancouver, British Columbia. The forest was big enough to call dense, and so it was the perfect kind of forest that we needed to make the atmosphere of the film seem real. In other words, to make the audience feel more enveloped in the experience of the forest film. I directed and starred in the film as the explorer while Erik played the mysterious shadowy figure found in the forest. Both Erik and I did the cinematography/camera work. The scenes were filmed on a Samsung Galaxy A21 camera. The film was edited and exported through Shotcut. The tense noise that played as the explorer was walking past and discovering the shadowy figure was made and mixed on BandLab

Up Above: This might be the most overlooked part of the great Faraday forest film, and for multiple reasons. It shows the same explorer walking in a direction, but in a more distinctive color arrangement. As a matter of fact, it's actually the RGB color arrangement for the preceding scene. This is supposed to show a transition between a snowy forest and a warmer, damper forest, which the explorer then finds himself mysteriously waking up in. This scene could be interpreted to some as the explorer crossing dimensions or time travelling. In a way, it could mean that the explorer has crossed into a deeper, more unknown part of the forest that holds a lot more supernatural value.

This was meant to serve as a sort of colorful transition to a new segment of the story. It should seem ambiguous in a way that the viewer can never fully know what happened in between, but they will surely know that the story has been affected in a way because of the transition. It also adds to the visual appeal that this film has in general. 

In making this film, I was partly inspired by the film Predator, where the predator itself has infrared vision that can detect any living beings around it. I decided to get a little bit creative here. If we're taking into account that someone in the forest has this kind of vision, it must be the shadow. It can't see that much color, but it is instantly intrigued when it finds itself being in the presence of a glowing red light, which is the explorer's jacket in this case. The RGB video was screen captured from Shotcut's RGB color pattern display screen. 

In conclusion, this portfolio was a brilliant show of my greatest works from the DMA Lite film program. I think my style of filmmaking was excellently shown in this portfolio, and this is surely a very interesting cinematic dive. The part that I liked the most about the film program was the near infinite creative control that us filmmakers had in making our pieces of work. We were all master story tellers in our work, and we showed that we could make something special. From the blue screening to the Adventure of Alfred film to The Great Faraday Forest film, the portfolio gets more and more intriguing every step of the way. It truly demonstrates the best of my creative thinking and abilities. I was especially satisfied when I was finished working on my cream of the crop piece, because that work is what best describes me as a filmmaker. Thank You.