Tag Archives: clips

Speed Clips and creative decisions

This week I’ve done something potentially limiting and may have made a poor creative choice. Unfortunately I won’t be in class to get feedback on it either.

However, as it stands I made the choice knowing it was unconventional and limiting, and made it anyway.

For the four speed clips, I have taken one, 1 minute long clip of my a friend of mine, and have used this for all four of the different clips and their different requirements. I did this by splicing and speeding up and slowing down sections of the one clip.

As a result all of the clips are almost identical both aesthetically and with their content. In each though the action of the subject is a little different, though in some clips I have used the same pieces twice.

Here is the slow clip, one shot.

Here is the slow clip, multiple shots.

Here is the fast clip, one shot.

Here is the fast clip, multiple shots.

It might have been a poor choice to have such similar clips for all four categories, but I made the choice because I wanted to explore the beauty and the aesthetics of the movement and expressions of the subject. As a result of having such similar clips I have really focused on these elements of the film and the way that the speed of the film alters our interpretation of these elements. And that’s what I wanted to explore and why I chose to do it this way.

Relations

The over-all theme for our Integrated Media mini-clips is ‘relations’. I feel like this is basically meaning ‘connections’, which comes up in my academic blogs posts all the time. It also came up in today’s Integrated Media lecture, where Adrian Miles commented that everything is related and therefore the world is a mess (obviously paraphrased). It is also discussed on the media blog here.

Everything is related. In the clips we are looking at the relationship between different things and the camera, and the frame, and itself. So far I have made six clips, three are already up and three will be uploaded to the blog tomorrow.

In these I have had to relate light, not light and shadow to the medium of the 6-10 second clip. Here’s a little info on my thought process:

Light: Here the frame is dark and the only parts of the frame that are illuminated are illuminated by the artificial light of an iPad. This is deliberate use of space. It casts light on the user, who is reading the iPad. He doesn’t move, in order to keep the focus on the illumination and the aesthetics of the light in the frame and not on him as the subject. I chose the settings on my phone in order to emphasise relationship between the light and the frame it is within.

Not light: This is similar to the first clip because it also has an illuminated subject but uses time and not space like the first clip. There is only darkness for many seconds until a light flashes revealing the subject for a moment and then flashing back to darkness. The sudden flash of light reveals what is there in the ‘not light’, or darkness. The relationship is between what is in the not light, and the curiosity of the user. It relies on this curiosity to be surprising and interesting.

Shadows: This is relatively simple in that the shadow is large and grows larger until is fills the frame and casts darkness on the entire frame when it becomes engulfed in shadow. The relationship is between the light, the shadow, the frame and the user, as the user is eventually engulfed by the shadow, when the light disappears, as the frame becomes dark.