Tag Archives: experiments

Research: Filming as Meditation

During this session of experimentation, I started off with a conventional perspective, holding the camera right side up and performing standard camera movements such as pans and tilts. But gradually my focus on such conventions dissolved, I started to ask:

– why do I need to keep the camera in the same position or orientation?

– why do I have to avoiding filming myself or avoid any kind of distraction from my subject?

I began to let my mind and my camera roam freely and separately, knowing that the camera is a free agent, capturing not my experience at the time, but its own perspective. I made turns and tilts that were mainly motivated by the simplest route to film from where the camera and I was to my next point of focus. This meant sometimes disregarding the camera’s orientation – landscape or portrait or on any other angle.

Without filming with any intention, my perspective and the camera’s starting to diverge. I focussed on my experience of being in the space, my physical and conscious interactions with the subjects, and the camera, in its own way, did the same without much of my direction (aside from loosely maintaining its perspective on the subjects). Doing so, instead of thinking about how to frame or what to film next, I was able to react to my surroundings as I filmed, experiencing several epiphanies during the process instead of after. Instead of discovering codes for how to film as I initially started out to look for, I discovered tools of how to creatively navigate or engage the world around me. The act of filming, when conducted aimlessly, can act as a form of meditation, an effective way to implement experimentation into the creative process.

 

 

Walk Scene Reflection

A conversation with Jess

 

Whilst piggybacking on Jess’s exploration of the walk scene, I have discovered how others have approached this research of methodology differently. Looking at Jess’s project and mine, our approaches are almost opposite in nature. She has set very clear goals and parameters in conducting her experiments as well as always being aware of keeping it simple; whereas my own experiments tend to revolve around an idea of aimlessness and curiosity, with no perceivable goals or perhaps even more questions. I think the most important discovery out of working with Jess was keeping a dialogue going between two minds, despite how different our projects are. In one way, this helps stimulate our reflective thought process, and have someone to give you more available feedback. On the other hand, we can provoke each other as we respond to each others’ discoveries or epiphanies with a fresh perspective along with our personal experiences.

After our first conversation, it inspired me to appreciate the dialogue more than just working with or assisting other filmmakers. This added a new tool for me to explore my topic with, and a new way of documentation.

Research: Walk Scene

A conversation with Jess

This week, I have decided to join Jess’s in her investigation of the walk scene. Although we will be investigating different aspects of the exercise, it is a great way to keep the conversation going as well as making the organizing of a shoot a lot more manageable.

Research: Movement

Following the first scene I posted that initiated this research, here are some of the self conducted investigations of movement:

  1. Dancing Pedestrians – This exercise was originally aimed to film the movement of the escalator.  It was one of the most uninteresting footage I shot when I first reviewed it on my phone. However, when transferred to the computer, the file was registered upside down. It suddenly became an amazing study of our physical movement from an unfamiliar perspective. We are so used to watching each step fall downward toward the earth below that watching this in any other direction seem almost like floating or defying gravity.
  2. Streetlights – an attempt to capture the movement and pacing of a car through its relation to its surroundings. The frequency of the streetlights provide a rhythmic indication of the car’s speed. The effects are also seen in the unstable handheld gestures of the camera as it is subjected to the physical vibrations of the cars movement.
  3. Sun Dance 1 & Sun Dance 2 – after 5 minutes of wandering around with a camera in my room to some music, I found something to focus on. The music, my movement, and the visual that was captured in the camera merged into one performance that felt like it had a purpose. The result was mesmerizing and meditative. One of the videos is played backwards. It surprised me how the music sounded just as melodic and emotional when played backwards and also provided another level of interpretation to the piece.
  4. Cat project scene – Over the week I also assisted on a project outside of class. The project was a story from a cat’s perspective. Although I was volunteering to act and provide location, I also participated behind scenes in working out how the ‘cat’ was suppose to move around. It was a unique exercise in trying to understand, mimic and capture its liveliness without showing any part of the cat itself. I chose to include this shot because it also captured an unexpected technique I may use in the future. When the camera is inside the box, it captured the pin hole image of the exterior world inside as I moved around. This was a unique way of capturing movement that we accidentally discovered.

As I am investigating movement in these exercises, some of the videos have been muted so that the viewer can focus on the visual movements in frame.

These exercises may be inspiring and creative endeavors, however, they are no more useful than poetry. I hope that in my next lot of investigations, more methodological process will be discovered.