My initial research into impressionism and influence drawn from film such as Sans Soleil had me planning to make a largely static and slow-paced film and I had a collection of shots mostly filmed on my phone of planes flying around in the sky, shoes hanging from power lines, traffic at night in the rain and birds flying around with some kind of dialogue to accompany it. I had worries however about this idea coming off as half baked in the end. I think that simplicity and minimalism in films such as Agnes Varda’s ‘Les Dites Cariatides’ is actually something that takes a lot of forethought and vision to pull off, I didn’t have as much clear direction on what I wanted to specifically do so I shied away from this idea and ended up doing almost the opposite in creating a film where there’s more often that not, loads going on on-screen.

I found myself very quickly with a few different segments to the overall structure of the edit, as I’d started putting a few random things together more for experimentation then anything else and ended up liking what I had. Then of course Premier crashed and wouldn’t open properly for a few days until I’d updated my video drivers so I went and made the animated part on Photoshop. The rest of the sequence came after that but up until a day or two ago I had no idea how I was going to piece it all together with any sense of continuity and in the end I almost reversed the order of segments within the larger sequence and it went alright, the main point that actually had any reference to another segment was at the end of the first audio clip in which some guy’s talking about controlling your destiny on Earth. This was overlapped with the alien popping up to smell the planet the Earth and I also saw an opportunity to create juxtaposition between the optimistic empowering dialogue of the first segment with the nihilistic notion that we’re nothing more than over-mutated bacteria with no greater reason to life.

The French life question bot and the actual music video part I think are aimed to just kinda say “best not to think about it, just try to enjoy yourself” after presenting the two ends of the spectrum on life meaning and the role of the individual within the world around us.

Bertrand Russell, Philosopher and author of ‘In Praise of Idleness’ is famously quoted “Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”