Final Project - Experimental Video

 

(I suggest freezeframing it occasionally and seeing what you get.)

My video is a video and a video first, and a video only. 

  Somewhat branching from my photo series, I went back to the trees for my video project. The video consists of layering various slowed down or sped up footage, with a gradual ascending into the complete stack of footage and a somewhat mirrored tapering off of layers back down to the most slowed-down footage. 

    I had many ideas for the final product, all consisting of the same sort of footage and continuing my interest in the qualities that throwaway media has (such as blurry images and footage). Once I had enough shots to work with, I tried at a few different ideas, ultimately ending up where I've done videowork before: on my phone. The entire product was completely edited and finished on my phone across three different free editing apps, which resulted in a unique degredation of resolution and quality (this or something like it is how I've worked with video before on my instagram). Each layer enters just as you begin to comprehend the previous layer, putting you at a more and more severe disadvantage until the layers begin to leave and the chaos starts to settle down again. 

    I ended up not adding any additional sound, letting each layer's own distorted sounds add onto themselves as the laws of digital distortion and my own creative decisions interact. I had a whole finished product with different sounds and clips of "music" in the video, which last minute I decided to scrap. Deciding to work with just the video and each layer's original audio, the interaction between my explicit manipulation of the imagery and the corresponding result in the audio became a delightful game to me.

  If I were to continue at this project, I would like to have better control over the quality of the footage, which would mean a different camera, as well as high-quality editing software. I would love to see that finished product and I hope to come back to this idea later, but the janky process I've worked with before on my phone works well and has produced some very unique levels of distortion (my own interest in distortion has surely evolved alongside and partially because of this). 

My video is a video and a video first, nothing else.