A Film I Made

I've long since given up on the idea of one blog focusing on one thing only. So, welcome to my artistic experiments outside of the video game.

My final work for Editing Media Texts: An Audio-Visual Self-Portrait... except forget the "self" part.

RULES:
You are to make an audiovisual project using the sound, image and video editing tools that have been used through the course. 

The completed project must consist of the following public domain material gathered via the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org) or Wikimedia Commons (http://commons.wikimedia.org/):


1. seven still images

2. two video images


3. no more than 50 words of on-screen text


4. two sound tracks, one of which can be ambient sound/music or effects, the other sync sound or voice over NOTE: (I tripped up on the second sound track because I didn't really consider it until the very end. I was fixated on matching the edit to the music track to my own detriment.)

I LIKED:
My efforts to explore non-narrative filmmaking inspired by Stan Brakhage. What I ended up creating was a sort of visual poetry, particularly in the first 13 seconds. I wanted to 'KNEAD the linguistic material... through cuts and incisions into the very texture of signs, through substitutions, and interventions into the laws of word formation and syntax' (Olsson, 2011, pp.276). I felt I was successful in this regard.

Embraced Sergei Eisenstein's Montage of Associations. Practically stole the pairing of a man's face intercut with rats crawling out of a box from the infamous German propaganda film that compared the Jewish people to disease-ridden rodents. Oh, and gave Satan a wife who mourned his plunge from the cliffside - watch out for that one! Or was the woman actually the God who mourned man's fall from grace? ~ALL UP TO YOU~

I HATED:
The last "act" of the short film. It repeats itself for no real benefit and could have used a lot more work.

The lack of a substantial second sound track because I was silly and tacked it on when I had finished editing the entirety of the piece instead of using it concurrently. Whoops!

Minor problems: keyframing is hard, noisy image quality because I wanted to zoom in and use close ups of specific images for various effects at the expense of clarity. A worthy trade.


Olsson, J. 2011, 'Kneaded Language: Concrete Poetry and New Media in the Swedish 1960s', Modernism/Modernity, vol. 18, no. 2, pp. 273-288