Real life has, as it is prone to, intervened over the last couple of weeks. I had to complete some extra-curricular chores which took up a lot of time, along with my mother having an unpleasant turn and my uncle being blown up in a Parisian restaurant (gas, not bomb!). Mother is improving, uncle is in shock, but relatively ok (no pun). During this period, Andy asked us (2nd year PT students) to build a presentation around our work thus far which happened last week. I felt I would have to rush this through lack of prep time but felt it would be an ideal opportunity to get feed back from the new FT students and thus achieve, with their help, a return to a more objective view-point. I have felt a little too buried in the process to really be able to see the work for what it is as the process is addictively mechanical. Unfortunately, attendance at this presentation was very low so feedback was limited. I was pleased with my presentation though, and felt I held ownership of the work and that my fears were somewhat unfounded, and the feedback from Andy and the other attendees was succinct, relevant and extremely helpful. I now feel able to progress with fresh eyes and conviction.
I still have to complete my essays, hand-in date imminent, and no amount of head-burying will help!
I am back in training at the gym, albeit tentatively and this has improved my mood somewhat.
As for including some moving footage of my recent pieces on this blog, the file sizes are too large to upload so will try to amend this. A breakdown of the 3 pieces referred to in my presentation follows:
Moth
This piece is the result of cropping out all spacial context from the footage of one round of boxing and just leaving 2 boxes around the heads of the fighters. The boxes follow the “heads” around the ring as the fighters attack and defend. The result gives the impression of a magnetising and a repelling of forces, never quite reaching a goal. This, i found, was very reminiscent of moths to a flame.
Tango
This piece involved a similar process of frame-cropping as Moth. (incidently, as referred to in prvious blog entries, the editing process involved frame by frame cropping of a 3 minute piece of footage. To enable there to be 2 cropped boxes, the footage had to be layerred. This equates to 9000 individual frames). It required there to be 4 layers of same footage as it involved cropping down to leave just the feet of the boxers. i then slowed the piece down and allowed the “feet” to move out of the “boxes” which left an abstract screen of boxes showing glimpses of shadow from the out-of-view boxers and a (once again) powerful audio.
9 lives
this was a quick experiment with filling the screen with multiple moving images of different aspects of the boxing environment (9 in total), all running at different speeds but all lasting 3 minutes. Interestingly, only certain images drew the eye at different times and i feel the piece is lacking in certain ways. Importantly though, is the layering of all the audios from each of the pieces when played simultaneously create an audio that reflects the audio from a huge crowd, similar to the sound one would hear at a live event.
