Experimenting With Video.

A tutorial session with the brief to ‘make at least four 60 second films’ introduced video work to my otherwise quite analogue practice. Some initial brainstormed ideas for my film pieces included filming a stationary rock, playing with perspective filming a small rock close to the camera giving the illusion of it being a large rock, walking whilst holding the camera upside down, filming a rock boiling in water. I chose to explore lo-fi video with the use of my phone camera inspired by the feature film Tangerine (Sean Baker, 2015), where the entire film was captured on an iPhone 5.

I explored in camera cuts in my films by pausing the video, moving the camera to focus on another subject, and then continuing the video. My main motivation for avoiding post production editing were the time constraints for this particular task as I had only two hours to complete all four films, as well as a lack of experience working with video and editing software, though after completing this activity I have gained confidence in this area and motivation to explore video further.

I ended up making a total of eight 60 second videos, pursuing two of my initial ideas: filming a rock boiling in water and walking whilst holding the camera upside down. Both of these videos are aesthetically rather dull and the general activity present in them (walking, boiling water) is also mundane, however I have made slight interventions in each in order to disrupt the logic of the video and perhaps add an element of the surreal. Despite the simplicity of an upside down video of my shadow whilst walking, the outcome is rather disorientating and almost unpleasant to watch, something I found slightly amusing; how simple it is to turn an everyday activity into such a perplexing experience to watch back.

My other videos generally followed this theme of the mundane and explored subtle changes within a frame that are not possible to capture in a still image, such as flickering lights or events seen otherwise as boring, exploring the idea of creating a meaningless work and whether that is actually possible.

I experimented with the ideas of both a still and moving camera and filming both still and moving imagery. I filmed the rock boiling video twice; once with the camera held relatively still, and again whilst moving the camera around the pan, gaining different perspectives of the image, both whilst filming the still rock in a saucepan of moving (bubbling) water. I prefer the outcome of the still camera video as it allows for the viewer to focus better on the occurrence itself instead of becoming distracted by the movement of the camera and as the dullness of the stationary camera reinstates the study of the mundane in these works.

I intend to follow up this exploration of film in some of my future work, perhaps using it to simply record one of the walks that I go on to collect rocks, rubbings and photographs for my works, or for an alternative method of exploring location and a sense of place to my previous work on rock rubbings.