‘Living as a creative act’
To start this project off, I didn’t have a set direction to go with considering I’ve never focused on media based art before. So instead of forcing myself to choose right away, I experimented with video by creating three different 1 minute movies; POV, static and structured. Although I didn’t have a set theme for my project, I wanted to focus on ‘the everyday’ in regards to footsteps and its various surroundings.
STRUCTURED
POV
STATIC
Each video portrayed some form of nature to city aspect. From audio, objects to surroundings. I particularly liked my structured movie and how I managed to make the transition as natural as possible, by obstructing the camera as I walked past and repeating in the city setting.
During Christmas break I had the chance to explore this project further. To do this I captured multiple clips in various scenes during random moments of my daily life. From here I noted every thought or idea that came to me in the form of a mind map. Each clip varying in scenarios, as well as the mind map inspired me to try editing with audio, visual and light relating to a persons attention or emotion during a task or event.
FIRE
RAIN
CAR
DOG
DRIVE
FIRE
MUSIC
Although there doesn’t seem to be any flow to each clip, I can say I thoroughly enjoyed the experimentation with editing and pleased with how each turned out. Seeing the difference in atmosphere and attention from each individual clip, got me thinking about how I could use that to my advantage for my final video.
This led me to sketch out a rough story board as well as record a POV journey to buy groceries. I chose this specifically to capture the chaos of a simple task, the chatter of people, the noise of vehicles and the lack of personal space.
Although the weather wasn’t on my side during this, I believe it adds to the chaos as well as creates a more down cast mood. When editing this video I wanted to maintain a sense of distance more specifically when I “stare into space” and loose focus. Gradually becoming more blurry and slowly making the audio lower and less easy to understand shows this. During editing I also decided to divert from my storyboards and only cut to black between clips. as well as this, I chose to saturate the colours making the space around seem less real linking to the sense of disassociating.
After having this video reviewed, I decided to change a few things. Such as the font, colour, editing, spaces between clips, audio and the overall flow. I’m happy with its edited audio however think I should keep it at its original tone and just edit its volume instead. Changng all this will make the video seem more natural and realistic when trying to depict the mind lacking focus.
Finally done with this project and happy to say goodbye to it, I can at least say I learned a lot during the process. Developing skills within audio and visual editing, I managed to push myself completely out of my comfort zone. Although personally I’m not happy with how the video resulted, I’m definitely happy with a few of my short clips specifically the umbrella and fireplace ones. it was also fun to work with storyboards as I now hope to work with the concept in later projects. If I were to approach this project differently, I think I would focus on single subjects more as well as emphasise my story more clearly with more thought put into it, by making the gradual editing more pronounced or phasing in and out between clips.
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