Also, making moving image is time consuming, and so when I make it, I prefer to completely consume myself in it and become completely absorbed, if not obsessed. It's extremely important to keep track of work, and video versions are easy to lose and mislabel, and so I think that's another reason I limit and discipline myself in allowing moving image time. I detest not having access to my own work and ideas, and came up with some processes in previous years to keep track. There have been times when I have been very prolific in taking footage, and so also know how frustrating it can be to have multiple unsorted clips.
Having provided all those caveats, I still have created for myself this blog page for video ideas towards 24 Hour Sibelius to be filled in later. I am unlikely to show unresolved work in progress, but hope to evidence various trial pieces in time.
1st May 2013
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As I have been completing the moving image piece, the data files are so big and complex that I have had to delete previous versions as I go along. Usually I try not to do that in case I lose anything or want to refer to earlier information, but just to keep my computer moving and to keep track of current work I have carefully done that. It would not really do me any good anyway to show working versions, and I manage to keep everything in my head most efficiently.
I have noticed that whenever I make a moving image piece it is important for me to be quite inventive - I need to figure out a new way of achieving something - usually the work dictates that, rather than me trying to find a home for a new technique.
I have certain underlying principles that rule me in making moving image - I never do anything that I couldn't do longhand, or analogue, if I really had to. Perhaps it is because I started out in darkrooms, but I only use the computer and digital technology as a faster sort of darkroom. I also see that I enact that quite literally, as the crossovers between stills, prints and film frames become increasingly interchangeable in my work. In the current piece, Construction, I have given myself a whole new raft of techniques and possibilities by printing out certain stills, filming them so that I can get a very hands-on creative control, and then reinserting and layering them into the movie files. Very time consuming! But I am so delighted with the authenticity of it. More and more I feel I can do anything in moving image that I can imagine, with enough slog.
I have been thinking again about my reasoning during my degree to really specialise in moving image, how I came to the medium, and how I still turn towards it as the best medium for my expression. There are many layers and aspects to it, but it is especially about the elusive nature of it - ideal for expressing elusive thoughts.
The lights layer in Construction is trials I made in 2006 which led me to my degree piece Contraption. They are a variety of situations with torches, mirrors and reflections towards manipulation and alignment of light. I never forgot that footage but hadn't had cause to use it since, and so I was delighted when I retrieved it and found that it was right - there are elements of light just being, and of signalling in and out, which I wanted for Construction. I always remember filming, what I used, what I was thinking and how I was feeling. It also feels great when the right time comes around for using work.
light layer stills, Construction
Construction has taken an enormous amount of editing and paring away. The lights layer had to lose all its colour so as not to compete with the bricks - and editing them! I'll just say that even though I kept the filming compact, there was still a lot to edit, choose, trim, fix, and so on. Much like the brick boxes themselves, that was nothing but a situation of my own making.
During the Reflective Practice unit was the making day - Found People Vermeer - works I'd like to develop and make in the future. Manipulating the shadows and layering that was also a significant addition to my moving image arsenal. This moving in and out of the computer and camera, using stills, drawings and photographs, gives me more and more creative control - in fact in the piece of 2012, The Future Past Tense, it was the drawings that moved, and the video stills which merged like stills. Not that is really matters, but what does matter is that I can take an image out of a video, manipulate it live through a camera lens, or glass, or whatever I want, and then put it back. It's so completely different to clunky computer manipulation, which is not really.....real, or art.
22nd August 2013
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