Jane's thoughts on editing videos
I just logged into the class blog to see if there were comments on our photo assignment yet, and I saw everyone’s blog posts about the editing videos. I had completely forgotten about that assignment. Dang. I blame it on being on CA time! Here it is…a little late.
There’s so much I could say, but here are a couple of things that stood out to me:
· It was fascinating to become aware of all of the editing techniques, like inductive editing, used by Aronofsky to create discomfort, confusion and disorientation in the viewer. Although this is a movie is in a genre that I wouldn’t watch, it was a great, clear example of how effective good editing can be to create emotion in the viewer.
· The cleverness of using a prop like a watch to create tension. This film on time drives that home, but even each individual clip makes the point that a clock often creates tension.
· I found “The Clock” frustrating because I wanted to know the story of each clip (the ones I wasn’t familiar with), even though I know that wasn’t the point . The scenes moved on before anything was revealed except the obvious tension.
· As I mentioned in class, I liked Rist’s unique take on camera angles and her desire to stretch both herself as a videographer and the viewers’ perceptions.
· I like Blu’s work. This animation must have taken sooo long to do. And he is drawing high up on a wall at times. (And I like the people walking by that blip in occasionally
- "Blue Velvet " set a peaceful, safe scene (picket fence, young school children crossing the street in orderly fashion), and then created tension through visuals of a gun and a tangled and leaking hose, which misled the viewer into thinking that there was going to be an incident with the hose, so that when the man fell to the ground because of something else, there is confusion. The opening ends up being an emotional roller coaster.
It's nice to get a sense for what stood out to you in this screening. I know there is a lot of material in an hour and half screening, but I think your written response would benefit from drawing more connections between the pieces rather than listing observations. While this is, of course, more informal than an essay assignment, the benefit of weaving analyses together and drawing connections is enormous to our own creative process, and the embedding of new tools and techniques into our own creative practice. One strong point that I would to expand on is the feeling that you had while watching Marclay's piece—a feeling that I think IS actually the point. Marclay is interested in the psychological influence of sequencing and editing tactics of continuity—the illusion of fluid action between disparate cuts. By using images from pop culture, however categorizing/sequencing them by formal and thematic relationship rather than narrative progress, he is necessarily frustrating and disrupting our engrained expectations when consuming time-based media. There is an applicable association here with ambient, noise, or tonal music in that it eventually asks the viewer to let go of these culturally ascribed expectations. So interesting! (To me, anyway, ha!) I'm looking forward to seeing how some of these observations find their way into your work.
ReplyDelete