The first experiment was only done to get accustomed with the tools at my disposal. With these videos I wanted to push past the limits of what I’ve made previously. One of my biggest passions outside of film-making is Cosmology and Astronomy. The universe is such a strange and incomprehensibly grand place, beautiful really. But it is also terrifying. I’m a big fan of cosmic horror as a genre because of this. With the first visual i wanted to create something that resembles things you’d see in deep field astronomy pictures. If I was to be completely faithful to this then the image would be static, so I decided to include movement in the image. I started with a video of a river flowing violently, distorted it till appeared abstract enough to be malleable artistically for me. I didn’t want the colours to be too saturated, but i didn’t want it to be too bland either. previously I’ve talked about how blues and reds weren’t really visually appealing, so hear i shifted it to a more teal and aqua colour palette. There are still blues and reds, but I think they give a nice accent to the softer parts of the image. I kept some sharpness in the fragments flowing through the video to keep that punk aesthetic, and it reminded me of how gas appears on an astronomical scale. I am emulating how black holes behave in the video, I didn’t add an Event Horizon because it would have detracted from the movement in the image.

With the third video i wanted to try and merge video one and two. My aim was to try and make something that was reflective of the imagery seen in cosmic horror. I’ve tried merging videos through fades and exclusions in the past, and did with this one initially, but it just didn’t feel right re watching it. I have used strobes as well in the past, but they’re tricky to get right, too slow and it feels sluggish, too fast and it is disorienting. instead of strobing a solid white screen, i made the layer transparent, and with that also had two strobes that operated at two different time signatures. I believe it has worked out better than previous iterations, but there is still much room for improvement. I increased the contrast too, it gives a more violent aura to the image. I added grain effects to soften transitions in parts though, otherwise it would feel too disjointed from each other, and be more of a collage than a singular image.

https://vimeo.com/444021954

https://vimeo.com/444019388