As I’ve been editing my raw footage outside of class, several problems have become quite apparent, all of which tie heavily into the idea of responding to site.

Firstly, there is the significant time constraint of 8 seconds, as outlined from our Project brief criteria. Originally, my idea had been to emphasise the grotesque qualities of a hand crushing fruit through editing techniques like slow-motion and extreme zoom. However, given the limited amount of time our projections will appear, every second needs to be information rich in order to be appealing as well as visually cogent / succinct.

During editing, I realised that slow-motion in the traditional sense was not going to be an effective tool to visually transmit my concepts across. It would take far longer than 8 seconds, and the footage itself was not optimal for extreme slow frame projecting.

Secondly, I noticed a sort of Brechtian alienation / awkward meta-awareness that was arising as a result of my editing. For example, keeping the original temporal qualities of the raw footage resulted in a strange composition involving a disembodied hand struggling to crush a fruit. The pacing of this “stylistic naturalism” was quite bizarre and watching it, one was struck with a general feeling of embarrassment and awkwardness, as if the footage was playing back poorly.

As a result of both these constraints, Robbie and I agreed that speeding it up / using editing techniques like intercutting and glitching would help to both communicate my idea more efficiently, as well as reduce the strange audience paradigm that was arising from the raw footage.

Furthermore, despite not being able to use slow-motion in the originally conceived sense, I was able to intercut slowed-down footage with faster intercuts to balance the pace of my films.

Overall, this process has been quite important in my idea refinement, as I am realising more and more the importance of taking into account the audience, the projection site, and the context / impetus for visually communicating ideas. Chiefly, there needs to be a recognition and collaborative dialogue between the artist-in-process and their intended exhibition site in order to ensure a congruent experience of abstract concepts.