Week six. I really really enjoyed the learnings of this week. Although finding archival footage is extremely challenging, I find it is a great contributor to film. I find it important to be inspired and find ways to creatively use archive footage that others have created. The concept of using found footage, whether it be audio or visual, it can be used to create a story line which parallels your own footage. I find that archived footage adds a sort of vintage effect. Through resources such as archive.org, you can find plenty of footage that is years old. Of the videos we had to watch, I thoroughly enjoyed ‘Afraid So’, by Jay Rosenblatt, the audio was somewhat poetic, with the slowness of the mans voice. The found footage is a reflection of what is being said an tells a seamless story of things that society is ‘afraid’ of.
In a sense, I like to view found footage as ‘stealing like an artist’. Already created footage can be reused to create something new, something different, and have an entirely different meaning.
Archived footage is considered to be ‘orphaned’ (Prelinger, 2016), which I love the use of. These works can be reproduced and rejuvenated into something else to create a story line. This week I experimented with the visuals of music creation, however paired it with a rocket going off. I wanted to create the sense of the build up of music. If you think about it, music is such a minuscule complexity within our world. With music you can create emotion, and a build up. I used the sound of my grandmother singing as I thought it paralleled the aggressiveness of the rocket. Like a vinyl record going around, our solar system spins in orbit. I used the archive footage and music to enhance variety and create chaos. After watching ‘The Voyager’, I liked the concept of using space shuttles to coincide with a story line.
I do believe I could of been more creative, experiment using a further voice over, maybe even sound effects but I wanted to keep the video simple and easy to follow. I thoroughly enjoyed scrolling through and looking at other peoples works. It’s extremely satisfying using ‘orphaned’ work and recreating it into something entirely different.
Reference:
Kleon, A., & Ebrary, Inc. (2012). Steal like an artist 10 things nobody told you about being creative. New York: Workman
PubPrelinger, Rick (2016) Contents Magazine, http://contentsmagazine.com/articles/on-the-virtues-of-preexisting-material/ (Links to an external site.)
Videos:
‘Afraid So’, Jay Rosenblatt (200)
The Voyager (2010)
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