No. 8 - Mentor: Stock Footage and The Accidental Effect and Commodification of 'Bruce Conner'

 Here's where my project is at: compilation format - montage of TV news animations/audio and set images, mixed with a bit more media such as stock footage clips and audio either derived from the sources or recreated altogether (both maybe). It needs to mutate and fold over itself and end in a eventual slowdown into stationary hyperdeath (whatever that means, I just made it up). 

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Stock footage is commodified video clips sold for the most banal uses but is sewn into the fabric of entertainment and advertising so well that it does not matter how stock footage it looks because it is a tool for association rather than making a film itself (it is pure filmmaking, with intention broken into predictive tags relating to the association it could apply to). Stock footage is film in its purest form under a late-stage capitalist society which is at least partially-aware of the hyperreality of its own things. Stock footage (especially the free kind) is spotted immediately -- It knows it fools no one, so it welcomes its use in advertisement, as well as parody. In a filmmaking sense, stock footage is more powerful in the hands of the comedian, rather than the advertiser. Its parents are methodology of filmmaking, advertisement directors, and the application of both vertical and horizontal mass production (thousands of subjects and thousands of options for each), birthing now the opportunity for free stock footage. 

free stock footage is found footage commodified -- Very eerie standing next to itself

In another sense of parental figures, one could argue Bruce Conner is partially to blame for stock footage's proliferation. His approach to found footage was unheard of, creating movies without a camera and salvaging footage reels like a collage artist, but today this is so common (music videos, tropes, etc.) that his real significance is washed out by the commonality and ease that replicating it is today (we are disregarding artistic qualities at the moment, only medium matters). This is where stock footage comes in. 

Free stock footage is a pure thing, free of any association with another filmmaker (not even including its own), its content alone is its existence built solely for use as commodity. Yet even this is debatable since stock footage (particularly the free kind) is so noticeable as a pure commodity--free to be inserted into any context--that it has become its own monster. 

The stock version of tv news animations are just as real as the 'real' ones on tv

Stock footage is a commodity, symbol, and commodified symbol all in itself. My project is not a recreation of stock footage but a hyper-aware use of it. I want to use footage from the capitalist hyper-fictive realm of stock footage, as well as the capitalist hyperreal realm of tv news animation and sets (weird desks and colors). I want all context but itself gone, for both tv news design and stock footage are hollowed of everything and stuffed with content for the association alone (a symbol). 

Very eerie when no one is there to say things at the camera

TV news set in stock image mock form

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Very loose stuff I know, but it is coming together enough in its anti-process that something is finally producible, which is the first step. Expect changes.