Experimental Film- 'Materiality and Abstract'

'STRANGE'
An Abstract look on a place that was once familiar to you

Final Film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB3SyC4Hy2A

Filmed in Faversham, Kent

'The Unilever Series': Tacita Dean

 "It acts as a window into an almost forgotten world"-  Ben Miller, Culture24

My inspiration for this project was Tacita Dean, due to the way she layers film over one another to create an almost other-worldly effect. She puts completely contrasting objects together to achieve this. One particular image that resonated with me is the one shown above- one part of an 11 minute installation presented in the Tate Modern's 'Turbine Hall'. We have a vast window display covered by the peak of a snowy mountain. Then just beneath the mountain is a very constant and rhythmic flow of clouds. This installation is rather memorising and technically unique, so i wanted to try and manipulate her work into my own. I decided to take an area very familiar to me (Faversham in Kent) and manipulate its imagery in such a way that it almost becomes alien to me instead. I would do this by placing contrasting images/objects over one another to open up a new world. For the audio, i was thinking that i could find sound effects that completely juxtapose the image they are put under- Just to alienate the video even more. I wanted this video just to be more of an experiment rather than a finished and final piece- something that i could use as a work in progress. I had a lot of fun experimenting with effects on Premier to achieve this effect of a different world. I played around a lot with changing the opacity, layering footage, split screen and adjusting the intensity of certain colours. 

In my video, none of the shots really correlate with one another- it's a rather random array of footage. But, I rather like that because it adds to the idea that this world is completely unknown. Tacita Dean also showcases a range of varying images in her installation. They are wonderfully vivid and varied. I like the idea of a jumbled journey. There isn't necessarily a narrative in her work and neither is there in mine, which i feel is precisely the point of this project. It's allowing you to take the audience on a journey without a clear structure and letting them interpret the images for themselves. 

It's also interesting to see the reaction in people when an object they feel they are familiar with, like a mountain for example, is manipulated to become a colour we just don't associate with it at all. We see a mountain as the colour of the earth- brown/grey, possibly snowy depending on its location. When we see it in a reddish tint, it throws us off at first but, then instead of dismissing it, we just accept it as a kind of 'new normal'. We accept that it's aesthetically pleasing, as well as poignant.