WORKSHOP:
During this workshop we were given some seeds and whilst eating them we were prompt to make an idea germinate and phisicalize during the workshop, related to time of course. I observed that by focusing on the seeds anad our sensorial perception of them we gave back artistic answers much more based in the materiality of time and our sensorial perception of it. My personal response was to take a paper roll, of those used in cashier machines, and with stickers create a sort of envalope which would enclose in a translucid rectangle a bunch of seeds. I thought that this was a wonderful idea of creating a negative for a film made of seeds, but that I would be able to construct a film with only one negative, as the seeds are not fixed and therefore can move around on the negative and create a moving abstract film, never an equal fotogram to the one before. Once I had created the negative I tried to find a projector to project the film with but I couldn’t find anyone with the keys to the projector storing room, so I had to improvise and only test it against the sunlight. This was in itself interesting as I found that the similarities between the seed shapes and the clouds on the background were very interesting, but I am still hoping to produce the film with a projector one of this days whe I get a hold of it.
EDITING PROCESS:
During this week I have continued editing the morning scenes. I have integrated into my editing practice to keep a diary of the process and ideas that pop up about the process, as well as doubts that I want to seek external feedback on. For now, I am focusing on the rough cuts, but I keep a diary to come back to in other moments of the editing, mostly concerning transitions and sound effects.
I am aware that being just one person doing this whole process can make my movie narrower than it can be because I might not be able to see certain things due to my immersion on the project, so I asked some friends for feedback on what I have till now and my current editing choices. The answers were:
- Outer scenes are less powerful and have less quality than the indoor ones
- The begging scene finding the nut is weak, there is not enough build-up of the character being stressed
- The script lines over the images take the edge of the visuals, and they would prefer leaving a more open message
Since then I have been thinking about how I can start the film by building the character better, and I have come up with some ideas in terms of music and changing my approach to the begging doing a collage of new footage that I would have to record. What do you think about the actual entrance scene?
During this week I have mostly focused on the bathroom scenes when Abidish washes his teeth and showers. I really like the angle in these scenes as they are recorded all through the reflection in the mirror, which I feel like its a very cool effect but at the same time in order for the camera not to appear in the reflection of the mirror I had to record from an parallel angle, which has taken a lot of editing of the video to compensate. Through distortions of the proportions of the video I have managed to create frontal compositions, but after this long process of editing I am not as happy with the outcome as I thought I would be, firstly because it crops the image a bit more than I would like and secondly because I feel like the quality being distorted decreases.
These are some screenshots from the process, where it’s visible the original crooked mirror images and the parallel edited ones:
This is a short example of the edition of the teeth-washing scene:
I have come to the conclusion that eventhough I really like some effects from the bathroom scenes and have spend a long time in their editin, maybe they are not actually needed and necesary in the movie and i should just strip them of because they don’t really have a focus on the nut, and they might just add some confusion to the message of the movie. Perhaps is not needed to have a whole mornng routine with the nut as I had deviced in my initial story board, perhaps the scenes of streching meditation as well as reading to the nut are already sufficient representation of the morning routine. I have also realised that if I erase the bathroom scenes the film’s indoor scenes only happen in that one room, and I think that making the whole movie just in that space adds force to it and the depiction of space in it, it somehow makes the cropping more relevant, as well as creating a bigger metaforical nutshell.