My video juxtaposes a melancholy sequence of portraits of older people with an aggressive effect that exposes their vulnerability to age. Wrinkles emerge from the background and over impose their authority on the physical integrity of the people.
This film (the film of my choice) utilizes a repositioning of sound to play with expectation. The sound used with each clip attempts to represent the reality of the experience of each activity rather than the actual physical reality. The juxtaposition of a “sermon” over top of clips of skateboarding and moving through traffic attempts to point out some of the dangerous absurdities of religion, which become further emphasized by the loud stressful noises used in the chapel scenes.
Note: When exporting this video 30 some seconds of black space where added to the end of the video. I am not sure why or how this happened as I did not add all that space myself. The film is meant to end after the roaring noise of the skateboard fades out.
This film depicts time moving slowly through the manipulation of anticipation. I wanted to make a film that was almost excruciatingly slow and borderline annoying to watch. The viewer waits for something exciting to happen, but nothing ever does. Time always seems to move slower when one is anticipating something, so I utilized the anticipation of getting to the top of an escalator to make time seem to move more slowly. The audio for this film is an attempt to recreate the impression of the repetitive and irritating elevator music that is constantly playing inside malls.
This film juxtaposes religious and commercial imagery to represent the overwhelming and fast paced world of consumerism. Consumerism has reached something of a religious status in modern society and I wanted to draw attention to this. The film compares and contrasts stained glass windows with advertisements, preachers with mannequins, and churches with malls. The audio enhances the sense of overstimulation with fast paced rhythms and strange traces of distorted music.
My film deals with the commodification of time and the organization of time into schedules. The watches and clocks spin, becoming more and more frantic, to represent the overwhelmingness of schedules. The soundtrack mirrors this feeling. Time, as represented by the clocks and watches, is invaded by the alien force of commodity, as represented by the jewels. This force is parasitic and utilizes time for it’s own means, using the watches to create it’s own progeny. Throughout the length of the video these symbols for scheduling and commodity build until the entire process implodes upon itself, illustrating the futility and absurdity of placing constraints and external forces on time.
My conceptualization of time relied on the ability to conceive of time in its most terrifying ways, its enormity and its continuous nature. The Event is a piece that shows how time can be cyclical while remaining unified. That time works beyond human control though remains as the basis for modern society causes man to be deluded in his quests, mapping his path through an abstraction that deceives him. The structure of time gives way to the loop, the cyclical repetition of an event that cannot escape its own beginning or end.
This film takes the ideas of cycles and transformation over time and applies them to motion. Time moves as a clock moves, in a circle. However, each round is altered by small transformations. Some of these transformations are caused by birth, growth and death, which all occur in cycles as time progresses. Each moment is but a small fragment of an endless and circular timeline and is significant only in the way in which it transforms the circuit and consequently future events.
The human body and the urban world we live in continually decay.
It is essential that we remain young-at-heart and create an enjoyable environment in such gloomy times. If our perceptions of our bodies and material reality are purely superficial, decay is something we dread; rather than something we should embrace as a natural progession of life.
When thinking of time, I was most interested in how what seems to be a random, crazy, and chaotic combination of incidents at the time it is happening can shrink to a single frame of picture in memory. While the reality can be ugly, hurtful, or even meaningless, we tend to take different fragments of the real events to come up with a ‘false’ memory (in the sense that it only follows one part of the sequence as in movies, as opposed to the reality where every sequence is happening at the same time) and put it in our sanctuary, all edited and sealed and disguised as beautiful and ‘whole’.
The descent into the unknowable and the traces left upon return.
My animation reflects my approach to time, which includes the notion of doing things at my own pace. This is my second version of the animation for the time unit, and I decided to depict a more personal issue. As a child, I had a very hard time learning how to read. My concept embraces the revelation I had, which was that I could not rush the process, and that if I just took my time and practiced, it would eventually click, and I could “dive in” to the adventures of reading.