Final Project

This video project was an experience, perhaps with a proceeding adjective of learning, collaborative, transcendental? I approached this collaborative video with an intention to be truly collaborative, as I like to be a sole creator of my art. However, when I started considering what collaborative actually meant, I kept coming back to the notion that the work would automatically be lesser than what I could have done myself. And although our video turned out great, and has equal merit as any video that Kelly, Steph, or I could have done on our own, my personal vision was not realized. Collaboration essentially means compromise, which means no one gets what they want to the degree they want. Which is an interesting way to approach art. Early on, I decided to prepare for sacrifices, prepare for someone else to tell me what to do. So I did that. Now I don’t have to do it ever again.
The second issue was production. If this video was a first draft of a story, the second draft would be written in half the time and be twice as good. We ended up scrapping half our shots because the wind ruined them or because the microphone was too far away to hear me speak the lines. Oh, but it only begins there. I also discovered how hard it really is to act, to memorize lines, or even improv lines. If we did my vision of this project my delivery would have been completely different, with a fast-pace, rote quality to them, instead of the lazy, rolling delivery which my group preferred. Then when we got into the computer lab, we had to learn this program, which frustrated us for quite a while before we got the hang of it. Even then, Final Cut Pro can do a million things which we never figured out because we just didn’t have the expertise in using it. Finally, we started stripping away every extraneous clip and editing cuts because we couldn’t get the damn program to do what we wanted. So in essence, Final Cut Pro is our fourth team member, one with a lot of influence on how our project turned out.
However, I don’t want to sound like nothing turned out how we planned it. Since we were three fiction writers, we all preferred a project with a narrative. We all agreed on the progression and the tone of the piece, which is half the battle right there. There wasn’t a single part of this project that we didn’t do together. All three of us met for storyboarding, filming, and editing. The final product turned out well, although how well it turned out compared to what we each would have done if we had our ways is something we won’t know.

The Definitions of Apocalypse

Our group has come up with a concept of what we want to explore in our video, which is at least partly, the contextual inhabitation of space. If our world is changed, how does it affect our manner, our humor, our every day movement? If the apocalypse were to destroy everything we know, how does one reframe the world so as to regain authority over it?

Here are two videos: “Lumieres” from Putative Moment

http://dvblog.org/movies/02_2009/pm/pmtrain.mov

http://dvblog.org/movies/02_2009/pm/pmobscuredbyclouds.mov

They are categorized as documentary, so their style is one of capturing realism. The films do not have effects added to them, although they do remove sound, which is an interesting technique to disassociate the audience from the text. The train video especially has the viewer expecting noise but their expectations are not met. This doesn’t so much as move a viewer away from reality, but forces the viewer to experience reality differently. The light becomes more apparent, the movement of the train intensifies, the movement spreading in radial causality against the plants, all stand out more without the sound. The sound would dull out these things and simulate a “reality” which we are all used to. When sound is removed, the definitions of the objects we are looking at changes. This also happens because of the title, a literal renaming of what we are supposed to be looking for. It is not a train or a moon, but “Lumieres”. Calling them lights changes their prescribed function in the world, and therefore their possibilities are changed.

I think this is what our video will try to do. I don’t know since we haven’t filmed it yet, and these things have a tendency to change drastically to best laid theory. But interaction with the world in an unprescribed manner is our goal, something which most writers are trying to do anyway, only with words instead of video.