The following is a piece I wrote after last week’s workshop, but forgot to actually post!
Editing with help from Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy and Walter Murch
In this week’s workshop we were given a small task; to edit a short montage compiled from the footage of at least seven different shots on the theme of colour, movement or shape. Being a compulsive video editor, I was excited to get to work on it. I was allocated movement, so I immediately began scouring through my footage collections for interesting examples. After just having viewed Ballet Mechanique` (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s post-cubist alternative art film which features the disjointed nature of machine routines with human movement) in my cinema studies class, I was inspired to explore motion created by both humans and machines, as well as natural occurrences such as the path of waves or the flicker of flames. What surprised me is just how many examples of movement there are around us- almost every piece of footage I have contains some form of action. As I work on it, I use Ballet Mechanique` as an example of incorporating the rhythm of footage with that of music, while flicking through my copy of Walter Murch’s “In the Blink of an Eye”. “Start a conversation with somebody and watch when they blink.” Murch writes, “ I believe you will find that your listener will blink at the precise moment he or she ‘gets’ the idea of what you are saying, not an instant earlier or later. Similarly — in film — a shot presents us with an idea, or a sequence of ideas, and the cut is a ‘blink’ that separates and punctuates those ideas. At the moment you decide to cut, what you are saying is, in effect, ‘I am going to bring this idea to an end and start something new.” With this in mind, I aim to take the idea of movement and cut between shots that will (hopefully) juxtapose each other and highlight all the various examples of movement, both man made and natural.
Both manmade and natural motion in comparison through the portrayal of human legs and an otherwise mundane clock.
One of the close framed human shots used to juxtapose robotic movement.
Here we see an abstract shot of moving industrial machines. Without wider context, only the robotic motion of the subject is what tells an audience that it is some type of machine.
Numbers flicker as their abstract shape echoes that of other objects used in the film.
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