Work reviewed: ‘Bright Splinters’ by Sunniva Sollied Møller, Michael Lincoln, Katrina Varey, and Scott Huang (http://vogmae.net.au/classworks/2012/BrightSplinters.html)
As an interactive documentary, ‘Bright Splinters’ is a journey that plays with the role of colour and light in our world. Taking the viewer on a trip through different locations in Melbourne, with varying times of day, types of shots, subjects, and special effects, the work draws attention to how colour and light affect things, or more specifically, our perception of things, in everyday life. It achieves this through the combined effects of the content of the individual parts, or ‘SNUs’, to be more faithful to the Korsakow program’s technical language, as well as the way the interface shapes the viewer’s experience, and the patterns that arise from the work.
The first step that the documentary takes in toying with light, colour and perception lies in the content of its clips. The building blocks for this project, the SNUs, are a collection of videos depicting various objects and locations in and around the Melbourne CBD. Some SNUs show dark settings, others bright; some show relatively still scenes, others with a lot of movement; most clips are single takes, but some are edited, and may even have special effects; some contain close-ups, some are sweeping wide shots; all are visually interesting or peculiar in some way.
For example, a lot of the SNUs are extreme close-ups of objects that aren’t easily recognisable from the outset, the viewer may take some time to recognise something before realising that it is the reflector of a bicycle, or a household pot plant. The shot is unconventional and intrigues the audience, and the way they come to recognise what they are looking at often, if not always, has a strong connection to light. The reflector briefly shines some light at the camera before it zooms out and we can see it completely; the plant comes into focus and we can recognise its shape, before the lights turn off and it disappears into darkness again.
Other ways that the SNUs play with the notion of light may be more subtle. For instance, there is a shot which takes a sweeping vista from the vantage point of the Princes Bridge in the evening. While lighting of course contributes to this clip, it does not comes as much to the fore as when the same shot later appears in another SNU. However, this time the shot takes place at night, and the difference in the scene made by the light is made starkly clear.
However, the most striking method that ‘Bright Splinters’ utilises for underlining colour and light is mentioned in the makers’ description: the interface. ‘Clicking a video thumbnail should make a difference and this does.’ The difference made is simple, but very effective in getting the viewer to notice things about their visual perception. While most high resolution SNUs are presented in full colour, the thumbnails for the connecting SNUs are in black and white. This detail becomes important, because it draws attention to how an image is defined by its colour. In comparison to the main SNU window in the middle, the seven thumbnails across the top and along the right hand side of the screen all look similar in their low resolution and desaturated state. It is only when the viewer clicks and navigates to the next SNU do they realise how different the next clip is, based on its colour.
An example would be one SNU depicting a line of alcohol bottles at a bar. In the thumbnail, it is clear that they are bottles, but it is impossible to guarantee what colour the bottles are, or what the lighting is like in the shot until the full SNU is viewed. In the full SNU, we see that the bottles are actually bathed in a fluorescent red light, which completely changes the feel of the picture that appeared in the thumbnail. Now the image is livelier and full of energy.
It is after exploring the work for a period of time, using the interface and observing the SNUs, that patterns become to be clear. The overarching theme of light and colour gradually comes into focus after repeatedly clicking on a black and white thumbnail and then seeing its SNU in full colour. However, despite this simple thumbnail-to-clip pattern, there does not seem to be any clear links between any two SNUs aside from the general notion that binds all of them together. The clips that appear as thumbnails are not restricted by time of day, type of shot or type of subject, and thus it can be gathered that their links are more abstract and broad.
However, that is not to say that there are no relationships of any kind between the SNUs of this work. As stated countless times already, the clips are all bound by the notion of light and colour, and in this way it can be said that the documentary lends itself more towards ‘associational form’ than ‘abstract form’, according to Bordwell and Thompson (2013). The SNUs initially do not seem to have any form of connection (how does a close up of a fountain connect to a time-lapse taken from the Eureka Skydeck?) , ‘but the very fact that the images and sounds are juxtaposed together prods us to look for some connection – an association t that binds them together’ (pp. 363), and that is where the pattern emerges.
The way content, interface and pattern combine for an effect becomes clearer the more ‘Bright Splinters’ is viewed. It does not just draw our attention to light and colour, but plays with how it affects our universe. By viewing city life as a series of fragments defined by light, constantly being presented as both without and with colour, the work illustrates the quote from which its title is derived: ‘Life though…flies at us in bright splinters’. The documentary offers its own perspective on life, breaking everything down into a collection of objects which light flows through and plays around, and in getting the viewer to leave with this new way of noticing things does the work achieve its full effect.
References:
Bordwell, D & Thompson, K 2013, Film Art: An Introduction, McGraw Hill, New York.
