A 2 minute video for the semester 2 week long project.
Right now, I’m in Chinnor. It’s a fairly large (and growing) village in South Oxfordshire, on the boarder with Buckinghamshire. It rests beneath the Chilton hills, which I can see from my window, and it’s not far from the M40, which severs the hills in half to expose it’s chalky flesh. Perfect if you’re heading to London. It was once a fairly industrious village, with a cement factory that was destroyed the year I was born. The remains of this can be found in the chalk quarry. Broken and disused pipes and beams of meatal poke out this unusual quarry – come – nature reserve, and the limestone that was once harvested has turned the water which fills the pits a beautiful toxic blue. It feels like the kind of location that would have been used for an old episode of doctor who, when disused mines were a prime spot to film an alien landscape.
My experience of this village has also been shaped by the stories I’ve heard about it since I was a kid, and the traditions I would partake in. On Good Friday, the three churches carry a cross atop the hill, then take it back down Easter morning. According to some of the older members of the church, local witches used to burn the cross down – “Chinnor used to have a really bad problem with witchcraft”. One night, after my bus hadn’t arrived, I’d accepted a lift from someone, but when I’d reached home my mum told me about a hitchhiker who’d been dragged into the hills and murdered. She’s also concerned about the ‘rival drug gangs’ in the village. A friend once told me about an old lady who used to sunbathe her wrinkly body completely nude in the front garden of the block of flats she lived in, but after a police raid she was never seen again. In some contexts, maybe incidences like these aren’t so unheard of, it’s just not exactly what you’d expect from a rural village though. These were the kinds of stories which influence the narrative of this video.
Since my return here for Christmas, I’ve been trying to get out and walk regularly for exercise, and to clear my mind a bit. I tend to leave at 5pm, which is dark, so the poorly lit streets become abstracted, and looks even sinister in the foggy weather. This abstraction is taken even further if I decide to walk without my glasses.
In reaction to the title of this project – were are you now – I wanted to capture some of my routine walking around the village as a literal interpretation of it, whilst portraying some of the feelings I have towards it. The uneasiness I felt when I returned after living away for University, and the disorientation I get when I find a new street to walk down.
One of the videos featured in the project brief that I particularly liked was Ever is Overall by Pipiloti Ristht. I loved the sudden smashing of car windows, and how the subject and the flower she used to break them looked so unsuspecting. The slowed music and signing in the background gave made it see somewhere between mystical and a horror movie.
Other media I’ve taken influence from include the short film Possibly in Michigan by Cecelia Condit and the TV series Twin Peaks, directed by David Lynch. Both of these are great examples of surreal horror, in which something twisted is hiding under the nose of a respectable and normal looking town.
Linking back to something I’d explored a bit in the previous semester, I wanted to see how the limitations of the hardware and software I was using could be messed with to produce some interesting results. The lens of my camera would flair in the bright light to create some unusual lines and circles in the video, but I found these could be emphasised further by increasing the footages exposure level on After Effects to an extreme level. This would also alter it’s colours and make the poor resolution much more apparent, creating blocky textures similar to old experimental video games such as LSD Dream Emulator. Games like these also influenced the perspective in which I filmed this work – I filmed it in first person because I wanted it to be immersive, no just a series of abstract shapes and colours.
Most of the sound used in this piece is the original audio, which has been mixed slightly using Adobe Audition to give some sequences a binaural effect. I used used some sounds generated using the website Melobytes, then applied some effects to them to how I felt best fitted the visuals. I’ve found through previous experiments that stretching the time of digitally produced (or compressed) music can make it sound harsh and jagged, which I used this work’s advantage.
Overall, I feel like there were many parts of this video I could have refined if I had some extra time, especially towards the end. Despite this, during group tutorial feedback it seems as though the narrative I’d wanted to portray had come through. One interesting comment I got was, due to the dark screen, the view can see a reflection of their own face in the video, with the lights appearing on their face. This is something I may try to work into digital art intentionally in future.
