Video Story
The video story was extremely difficult, and I don’t feel like I succeeded. Not to be dramatic, but I don’t even know if I have the will to recall all the steps in the process, but I will try to be honest, if not thorough.
I wanted to tell the same story as with Audio, about the astronaut in space, and I wanted it to be more atmospheric and moody than narrative. I tend to not like narratives in my work. I had a pretty strong vision to start with: I always liked the dreamy, quiet polaroids of Tarkovsky and the feeling of being in static room with layered moving images.
I also was looking at Michael Snow’s short film, La Région Centrale (1971), where he takes a camera to a remote location and films a 360 degree tracking shot of the landscape. It had this really mesmerizing and eery quality of zooming in and out, and changing perspective, all in one shot without ever actually zooming or changing lenses, it was all just where the camera was on the dolly.
I wanted to see if I could recreate the feeling without copying the concept or execution, but I really loved how the film sort of showed a bit of everything in just one shot: light, dark, warm, cold, close, far, etc.
My idea was to get a lot of stock footage and see if I could start building little relationships between them to show the audience that were sort of related to space…maybe it just reminded them of space? The kind of feeling where if you squint long enough, it just might be space…below are some screenshots from the stock footage. I basically just searched around for any footage that felt useful.
My favorite image that I did not end up using is the one of two oranges. I thought it looked like traveling between planets, but ultimately, it wasn’t the right tone. I think it would have been funny to try to make a space video from household objects, but I wanted to strike a different tone. One that did work though was the thread being pulled through the needle’s head. It felt like string theory, specificity, one in a million chance, it felt rare and both small and large, which is how I feel about space.
I put these together in a format that was more like one piece of footage after the other, and what I ended up with was a terrible sequence that you could use for a karaoke video. All I needed was to add song lyrics at the bottom. It was pretty bad. I did learn from this, though, that it’s actually really hard to fake spinning things, even with a camera in space where there is no up or down. The camera is really key and it’s not possible to take a flat plate of footage and turn it into a dynamic movement. I did a bunch of experiments with layered videos, spinning and rotating footage, scaling it, etc. But ultimately, the effect was more comical than moody, and the amount of control I did not have over the footage was frustrating. So I scrapped both tries.
In pulling apart what I did like about Michael Snow’s film, I realized that it was the feeling of my mind trying to “keep up” with what was going on, despite the stillness. It’s a sensory overload because it’s so unfamiliar. So I decided to try to “overload” the viewer with imagery and connections by splitting the screen into 2x2 (also making a little window) and playing different cuts of the stock footage at the same time with staggered timing. There’s a little pattern within it of relationships, whether its shapes, colors, spinning, movement, etc. I organized this with the little storyboard you see above.
By this time, the assignment was quite late, so I didn’t get around to the amount of editing I wanted to do on the timing and color, or scrubbing more footage to add to the length. I just had to get something out, so you see a moderately successful try at my vision. Some things I would do differently the second time around are:
Try to capture at least some of my own footage
More color correction
More scrubbing footage
More timing editing (creating conflict/tension through timing)
Maybe some effect layers or textures
Sound/audio
Playing with the composition format
I think another major thing I think would have been cool to try that I didn’t think of, was to play the footage on screens in a dark room on a projector against a wall, and to just film that to get a “watery” effect. That might have been cool.