Recently I have been obsessed with the way we relate to media, both in the sense of how media shapes the way we look at the world and how we as a society have become accustom to certain standards within media. In exploring this theme I like to take a distinct metamodern style. (Metamodernism can be described as a midpoint between the scientific descriptivism of modernism and the cynical deconstruction of postmodernism. The key idea behind metamodernism is that truth can be achieved by holding two contradictory ideas as equally true at the same time, a distinct both/and logic. Metamodernism is realizing the supposed cleverness of postmodernism is just as binary and insipid as the tropes it sets itself against.) This semester has been primarily focused on the later half of my thematic focus, exploring the way we view cinema.
Originally, I planned to enact this theme through a surrealist narrative film which displayed the artificiality of the filmmaking process, however with limited actor availability I had to pivot away from this original plan moving towards using music videos to display the possibility of non-narrative film. Movies are almost always considered a narrative medium first and aesthetic one second, but in cutting almost all narrative from my films I can display the aesthetic potential of video. Music videos are the perfect form to preform this mission as they already exist in a limited narrative space. Essentially, this was all just a very pretentious way of saying I wanted to make videos that don't have a story but just look cool. I made two films within this mission, the first an effect heavy video made from my video library and the second a medium composite video.
Music Video 1--Fire Race Car
Planning- Starting winter break 2019, every break from school I would check out a camera with no particular plan in mind. During these breaks me and Ed would go to various locations where I would find interesting shots and Ed would act in them. In this process I have collected A LOT of unused interesting shots which I call my video library. For reference on how much unused video I have, the library currently stands at 128 GB. Pictures of the library can be seen in this blog post. Taking from this library I made the first of my two videos. This video was produced over the course of an entire year, so commenting on the production process would be silly. Instead, I am going to talk about the editing process. My main inspiration for the editing of this music video was the TV show Fargo's transitions which I expanded out to a full five minutes and the trend of slow motion in music videos which I countered by speeding up my video. In choosing the clips I just searched for the best moments from the video library and imported those into the project as I edited. The main two editing ideas I centered the project around were playing with speed and layering in order to create interesting video compositions. Most of the choices made in this film were the product of me playing with the clips with no particular vision in mind ahead of time until it looked correct. The only scenes I "planned" before editing were the first two scenes. While editing the second scene my computer crashed and forced me to restart the project, but other than that slight setback this was a fairly smooth process.
Producing:
Evaluating:
This is my personal favorite of my films. While some of my other ones have greater technical or narrative merit, for reasons beyond my explanation this one just hits me. I think all the compositions are very good, all the shots look interesting. The acting was mostly me just putting a camera on Ed and giving him the mildest direction, which is effective in this film. I like most the editing choices, the only mistake I made was at 2:34 where there is a black bar at the bottom of the screen but this is not very noticeable so I haven't taken the time to fix it. I think the cold opening effectively sets the tone for the rest of the piece creating an ironic metamodern disposition, and quickly making the audience understand it is ok to laugh at Ed's buffoonery. Also, the song is one of our best so I think that definitely adds to the piece. With the exception of the one I identified earlier there are no moments in this film which I cannot completely justify. For example the glitch up at 2:28 may look like a mistake, but I did this to make fun of Ed pulling up his pants. Now, is that a great explanation for a thing that looks wrong to most people? Probably not. Do I find it a funny visual moment? Yes. Am I a very self indulgent artist? Also yes.
I want to base my future music videos more on this weird style, apposed to my previous ones which are a tad bit more traditional.
Music Video 2--Pretzel Pie
Planning: For my second project I was far more focused on the idea of incorporating different moving image mediums into one video, a filmmaking style I have been calling composite filmmaking. I came up with this idea last summer on one of my films called "Tennis and the Duality of Man"
In this music video I wanted to take this idea to a far greater extreme incorporating music, painting, animation, video, stop motion, and photography all into one Dadaist mess. My preproduction for this film was limited to thinking of the general video and stop motion concepts I would use in this project. For the video I had the ideas of having a constant spinning motion and me jump cutting between different locations. For the stop motion I wanted to show a chess game in which the pawns revolt against the back pieces and then start moving like the pieces they threw off the board. And I knew I would steal some animations from Zach.
In filming the video I just took a walk searching for interesting shots within the paramotors I set for myself. While walking I saw some flowers that I knew would look cool over-saturated so I got some video of those. Then half way through my video process Isabella Roy sent a message to the IB group chat asking for pictures to draw portraits which gave me the idea of using that as a transition into a flurry of famous paintings to make a music video about the history of art in a way that resists interpretation. From that idea I had the idea of flashing colors and tuning through music history.
For the stop motion I wish I had a tripod. I used a moving shelf and just held my phone down with one hand as I manipulated the pieces with the other. This worked out well enough that I included it in the video, but bad enough that it annoys me. This was the last part of my filming process.
For editing, I edited each scene by itself except the painting stuff and then combined it to the music. I don't think there was as much of a grand of an editing vision for this project in comparison to the last one.
Producing:
Evaluating:
I think this is a very flawed film. For the most part it looks cool so it is fulfilling my mission, but still I think it is poorly produced. The ideas in the video are good, they were just poorly done. The introduction is far to long. Each visual idea is overdone. The animations are poorly incorporated. The stop motion is not good. The paintings come in weird. And the overall compositional quality is poor. The only parts of the film I really like is the weird psychedelic tilted mirror thing at the end and some of the spin sequence at the beginning. The editing is also passable, but nothing to be particularly proud of. While I have had success doing films on the more improve end of the spectrum, such as the one referenced above, I would not qualify this as such a success. I both have too many ideas and not enough. Also, I was running low on good Babushka International material to base videos from which reduces the quality of this video. I don't hate this video, I just find it a disappointment. In actual terms I would put this near the middle of my films in terms of quality.
From this failure, the biggest two lessons I learned are: don't make a music video if you only somewhat like the song and don't make improve films without actors. Additionally, this film serves as an example of how you cannot section edit for a music video like you can for a regular film because the tempo is off just enough that the entire video is made off kilter. I think this will be my last attempt at a composite film for the near future since I think I have exhausted the idea.
Integrating:
This semester has given me a crash course on music video direction that I will continue to develop as the year goes on. I had previously directed two music videos and directed and edited three more, so I was going into these projects with some experience on the rhythms of a music video. I also had experience in editing improve films as that's basically all me and Ed do. But, the work I did this semester is the real beginning of my music video obsession. I think as my music video portfolio expands I may start reaching out to some of the medium-sized indie musicians I like and ask if I can make a video to one of their songs. These are some of the artists (and preferred song) I have started stalking:
I think I need a bit more practice in the Fire Race Car editing style before I make that ask. Also, from these films I have learned that planning needs to be binary, either complete planning or complete improve as doing a weird in-between just does not work. The greatest thing I learned in the semester, even though it does not show up in any of these finished products, was the impossibility of filming during Covid. Anything that takes more than one actor is almost impossible. So until vaccine roll out or the summer I am going to stick to projects that I can do by myself. In this, I will make at least one more video library based music video before this year is done. Probably to one of these songs:
For these I will want to take the video layering idea much farther. Also I want to redo the psychedelic stuff I did in Pretzel Pie but in a better context. However, for my next film in this class I will be making a video essay discussing objective V subjective critique that also proposes a new metamodern outlook towards criticism. After I get that out I will be more than ready to play with effects and make music videos again.
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