These were my submissions for the Video Art and Synthetic Layers of Pixels assignments. This was the treatment I wrote for the Video Art assignment:
| Idea: A collage film set to Nora Brown’s song, “The Very Day I’m Gone”. For the next two or three days I’ll film in a few locations, mostly outdoors, at around sunset. I have a few images in mind that I’d like to shoot, but ideally I’ll find other, more interesting things when I’m there. There’s a few themes I’m interested in: transience, resignation, and isolation. Subjects: Birds, water, leaves falling, sunsets, graffiti, boats Shooting locations: Brooklyn Bridge Park, Prospect Park, Red Hook waterfront The piece should have a consistent, slow rhythm. The footage might be played back at different speeds. I might try some time lapse stuff if I get around to it. I’m hoping that the music, the images, and editing could convey the comforts and the loneliness of withdrawal, surrender, and of cutting your losses and starting over. Maybe it’s a little ambitious. |
This took me a while. It was mostly experiments that led nowhere, but I learned a lot and enjoyed the process. Except for the Roto Brush tool – I didn’t enjoy that. It might take the tedium out of rotoscoping, but it’s not always very accurate, and it takes forever to see the results. After rotoscoping the first scene, I stopped.
My favorite part is the waterfall, which looked surreal and claustrophobic to me in a way that the original footage didn’t. Sort of like a zen garden inside of a black hole.
This is my Synthetic Layers of Pixels assignment. I spent a lot of time trying to get Runway to do aaaanything I asked it to do. Eventually I made peace with it: it’s a happy accident machine, a hallucination generator, but it will never do what I say.
I used Adobe Firefly to generate three static images, based loosely on the three shots in the original video. Then I used Runway to animate them each into a 10-second clip. I edited the three 10-second clips together in After Effects, slowed them down, added some zooming and panning, and some color correction.
For the singing, I uploaded isolated vocals from the original track to a sketchy website that promised to “convert” Nora to Taylor Swift. It sort of did. Then I added wobbly bass, arpeggiated synthesizers, an altered chord progression, various effects. The music was inspired by Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s “Ever New“, Oneohtrix Point Never’s “Meet Your Creator“, and the Durutti Column’s “Otis“.