AMBIENT RHYTHM – Project Brief 2 – Samuel Harris from Samuel Harris on Vimeo.
In terms of communicating something about myself, I set out to provide a fairly broad scope of my life. In a holistic manner I attempted to convey a contrast between young and old, the memories of old and new, the concept of time. Artefacts range from photos of my pets, to home video, to footage that has been flipped, removed and overlaid. Audio tracks feature candid conversation between my mum and my 8 year old sister discussing birth and the friendship between my brother and I, while video footage attempts to differentiate between the past and the present; where I was and where I am now.
The mound of dirt (deemed in my youth as ‘the castle’) down which I ride my bike has now been removed and we’re now living in a house built in its place. The flash-forward sequences which interrupt the grainy home video show where I am now in my life and location, the concise and polished look of the now juxtaposed with the word recording (now upscaled and plastered on a HD TV). To have asked the young Samuel in the footage about his future would be a question to which you would receive no definite answer; my grandma tells me I used to tell her I wanted to work on computers when I grew up (in fact I can still recall a memory of me telling her that). And in that sense, I guess the whole video is deeply meta, here I am doing what, in a way, I longed to do in my youth. Computers. Editing. Creating. And maybe in a way the contrast between where I was and where I am now isn’t teeming with complexities.
Hightlights for me include the timing between cuts and the ticking of the reverberated ticking of a clock, assisted by the ominous and existential nature of the audio. In this way I attempted to envelop the video in its entirety with noise and clutter, in a way alluding to our memories; an explosive and jumbled string of echoes.
Lowlights are without doubt my poor incorporation of images.
(Would write more words if I could but 350 is unfortunately the max (and I say I have trouble writing)).