Shooting these 10 second clips of artificial light sources was honestly out of my comfort zone. I felt really odd standing around filming mostly motionless light sources whenever I did it in public. I suppose that’s a good thing though. It’s always useful to bend what you’re comfortable with in film-making.
It’s interesting what the phone does to focus attention. Often times, I found myself drawn to the shadows/what the light was hitting rather than the actual lights themselves. The overhead lights on the train and the kitchen light with the COLLINGWOOD ST sign in them were prime examples of this. Even though the entire purpose of the exercise was to focus on the thing that I would usually ignore (artificial light sources) I still found myself not actually focusing on the lights. Though the camera was squarely on the lights, the entire time I was filming I watched other things like subtle movements and reflections in the window nearby, or flickering of another light source in the background.
Upon re-watching the video, I would often notice things that weren’t really “there” (or at least detectable) when I was shooting. This is most blatant in the audio. The sounds of the traffic is obviously something that draws the audience’s attention in the video of the traffic lights. The sound of the train jolting and the sudden beep of the doors is another. But even more subtle than that is the creak of a floor board at the very end of the Hallway light video (around 50 second mark). The video of a bathroom light that starts around the 2 minute mark also has a very loud fan in it, that is barely noticeable in person, but the phone speaker picks it up and elevates it to the point where its really difficult to focus on anything else in the video.
As for the actual film-making process , it’s very…different. It’s going to take me a while to break out of the preconceptions I have concerning what a “film” is. I have never really considered experimental film-making as part of “non-fiction”. I always thought of it as just sort of its own category until now. I never really thought I would enjoy this kind of thing, and even though I was a bit uncomfortable while filming, I did actually surprise myself in that I enjoyed watching it back, especially the clips filmed outdoors. I like that it was still daytime when I got those shots, because there’s something oddly interesting about completely focusing on small, artificial light sources, while there is still the light from the sun illuminating the entire shot.
One last thing I’d like to touch on is the second last shot in the film (2:10-2:20 in the film). It was the only shot that had a camera movement in it. I think this is because it was the first shot I took chronologically. I’d actually only just woken up. I liked the idea of shooting the light first, and then bringing in the natural light for contrast. I thought about re-shooting it and getting just a stationary shot, but then just sort of decided that wasn’t really in the spirit of the project and kept the original in the video.