Materiality
I was given ‘Cats and Dogs’ and ‘Through the Past, Darkly’ by the Rolling Stones
My original intent with this video was to take apart and reorder it using only clips with Yellow and/or Blue. Destroying the linearity and breaking the footage up like a paint palette. I intended to make a seamless transition from blue to yellow. After putting them all together, the theme didn’t come through, obviously enough. After talking with Sofi, she suggested I look at thematic elements and mentioned that polar bears are quite a powerful symbol. So I attempted to use that to talk about animal cruelty in everyday life. And how it is not as distant as a zoo in China (where the second polar bear clip is from). This video is as close to that concept as I could manage. And I wouldn’t say I liked it at all; it was incredibly boring, disjointed, and with no clear theme. I needed to rethink it. I needed a…
BRainSTorM
- I could make the animals look like video game characters and give them different statistics and abilities.
- I could make animations of the pets running.
- I could print these frames on paper, cut them out and take a photo with a different, real-world background. (I didn’t do this because cutting all those frames out of paper would take too long).
Plan of action
I decided that cutting the images out was an interesting take on materiality, transforming the material back into something tangible and then back to film. I then decided that literally cutting them out of paper and taking photos would take a bit too much time but cutting them out virtually was a possibility.
The theme of removing the characters from the original footage and transforming them digitally still held the concept of altering the essence of the material and the director’s original intent. Which I thought was cool.
I took screenshots of each frame and then sent them to my iPad, where I cut out each frame using Procreate. I then layered different backgrounds behind them.
I chose for the cat to go through the Australian bush into Minecraft, into the nether (an area in Minecraft that you can only access by going through a portal) and out again.
I added the cut-out cat back into the original film and added the rolling stones music back into it to further the strangeness.
What `I feel was successful.
- The cat coming out and transforming was really unexpected, and I feel throws the linearity of the piece away.
- I think how I cut out the cat with chunky legs looked good.
What I could work on
- The timing of the music was really jolting, and I think it ruined the piece, to be honest. After I presented the piece, I figured out how to loop the cat, which was the reason for the original weird timing.
- The length of the shots for the backgrounds was probably too quick; I could also fix this by looping the cat to make the shot longer.
- I also would have re-recorded the VHS because I think all the fast-forwarding was distracting and didn’t necessarily help with the concept. unless I moved the cat through the fast-forwarding, that would be cool.