Final Video: 4.30 minutes long. Looped.
My final piece is a four-and-a-half-minute video on a loop, consisting of several edited images and one blank edited image to separate them out. The images started as simple tableaux photographs, posed and acted out as desired. Then I created a story and selected the best images for this. It starts with you entering ‘alternative reality’ of Story Island and you’re slowly watching as this creature ‘the Pooka’ notices your presence and slowly creeps into your focus. The video ends and goes back to the start and carries on looping.
The editing was done on Photoshop at first, I removed all colour and started as black and white, added a red tint and started to layer the images with dark reds, blacks, added scratches and blotches. I manipulated shadow and highlight until I got to my desired appearance.
The first idea was to create a GIF that was the same group of images but trying to create a ‘jump scare’ effect. As it would be displayed all day, it would have lost that feeling. So I started to look at how to make it as interesting as possible without adding or taking away from the story. This is where the idea of ‘transition’ came in.
I really liked the idea of things appearing in my peripheral and disappearing again. I wanted to incorporate that into my work. Supernatural things just out of sight, illusion, the more you stare the more your mind creates figures out of unfamiliar shapes and shadows and then they would evade you.
I wanted to view my work like a play with a dark twist, dark fairy tales such as the likes of The Brothers Grimm and merging play and macabre fairytale together to show my interest in both of these types of things. I feel they worked incredibly well together within my art work.
The Pooka seems to have crept into all my work, from my 4D sensory installation last year to my Night Walk this year in Digital Practices and now in my Art in Context. I like how it just happened and then became the focal point of my entire body of work, displayed at mischievous, unsettling and haunting without going into cliché horror.
I played around with sound too. At first I wanted to add white noise during the blank transition and have birds and a gentle breeze when each image came into frame. I used a similar technique like this last year with my installation and the subtle sound really helped narrate the feeling I wanted to try and manipulate.
However, when I did a test run on screen it was too much noise, it was confusing and took away a lot of what I wanted to achieve, absence. The feeling of something missing, when things are quiet and unfamiliar it grabs your attention if it catches someone’s ear.
I decided to remove the birds etc. and just use the white noise but I added a quiet scratching over the top of it. A dummy run of this allowed me again to look at how it would be viewed by the public and the white noise just wasn’t working. However, the scratching did so I kept it.
The creation of the ‘scratching’ noise was actually made by me dragging something (my e-cigarette) across my computer desk, scraping and tapping, then adding a reverb and selecting and clipping it to get small audio sounds which I then stitched together and created something I was really happy with.
When finding a suitable place to display my work I came across not only visual issues but audio. The one screen was too big and it was too in your face, it would have sound but it would lose the effect I wanted. My desired space was in the children’s area, on the promethium screen, but as is the way of working with a public space, it has its routine and they used the TV for ‘story time’ for the children so I had to move. It was disappointing as it linked my work with stories and it was right next to Story Island so it looked like a ‘window’ into an alternative reality of that area
I had to compromise and look elsewhere to put my work. I did like the idea of the ‘catalogue’ computer as it was small, a little out of the way and easily missed. However, I would have to take into consideration how the display around it would affect my work. We then looked at the screen on the wall by the entrance.
This turned out to be the best place for my work, it was small and the colour display was perfect, emphasising the depth of my work. It also had sound. It was in your face but could easily be missed. I loved the idea that as people are walking past it could appear at any point. This is why the timing was so important.
Not only did I have to make sure the video was long enough to keep people interested but I had to make sure it was short enough for the same reason. It had to work in sync as the public themselves became part of the work. Their interaction with it and the area is what makes the work successful.
The Strengths of this work, I feel is the delicate consideration of colour and pose. Also the movement. It had to have a length in the transition of images and well as a shortness of the video as a whole. I feel that a six-hour film was way too long and a two minute was too short. A four-minute video with longer transitions really worked and that meant that people would never see the same images and passers-by may never see the video at all. It gave the work strength in what it was aiming for.
Another strength would be where it was placed and the quality of the screen it was displayed on. A vibrant, smaller screen not only brought out the colours but also the distortion in pixels. It complimented the appearance, more so than a larger screen would and that gave my work power.
The screen placement held more, the fact that it had sound. During the dummy runs and even the exhibition. The sound added a ‘surround sound’ feel. Not knowing where it was coming from if you weren’t aware of my work. It felt like a piece on its own and it gave a synthetic kind of movement to my still images. This was also emphasized with the use of ‘noise’ effect which looked like static which played over my entire film.
Within the strengths were also the weaknesses. If I didn’t have a screen with sound that would take something away from my work, meaning I would have to think of something to add to my work, it would have been difficult towards the end as I’d already edited and grouped the images together. This was a bad choice on my end, I should have considered all possibilities when I first became and thought about the visual pros on display and how to get people’s attention even if it was subtly. This is something I can think about in future work when working within a public space. I could have added a ‘double vision’ ‘slow motion’ effect that gave it the illusion of movement. I could have added a ‘flicker’ effect sort of like a glitch, I’d done this in other works and it worked well. Flickering between images would have added another level of interest to compensate for no audio. Something I will look into in future art work.
Even though it was, in my mind, a great idea to use my little sister as the Pooka character, it was also a disadvantage due to her patience and that the weather was very cold and she was becoming restless. I could have taken more image and had a larger video with more a bigger story or at least thought about a few groups of images that had their own short stories. I wasn’t very organised at the beginning of my work and it took my awhile to come up with an idea which left me less time to really concentrate on it and there could have been so much more. However, on the contrary, sometimes less it more and finding success in my work has given me an insight to how work performs within a space out of my control and how I work it around the public place.
The exhibition was a whole new experience. From planning, working as a group, organizing an event for invites, getting the event spread around and also the catering. I feel I worked well within the group, helping set up. I had to keep count of how many people were coming to cater for. Also how much people would need to pay to make it happen, such as the food/drink cost. I kept tabs on who had paid, this also involved the tour book created by another student. I had to make sure when we went to the printing place in Malvern that we knew exactly who had paid and needed to also consider additional copies for the Hive/Garage etc. I had to consider the food that would be at the exhibition too without spending more than I already had. I decided to do something small but quirky. Then I had to organise how to transfer the drinks and food. I was lucky that a student who drove was willing to drive them to the Hive, but I had to carry the food myself to the Hive. Being a caterer for this, such as pouring out the drinks and setting up the food, meant I wasn’t present to discuss my own work, which was disappointing but I think maybe my work didn’t need explaining as it’s supposed to be ‘accidentally’ noticed.
The work in display worked great. Everyone’s spaces for their work added a new element to each one, the digital work was a little trickier at first but during the exhibition they all fell into place, with Robyn’s live performance on display first. Then Tash’s beautiful foil performance to finish it off.
In regards to my work, listening to everyone’s opinion it was apparent that I did need sound just to draw people, not so much to focus on my work but to notice something subtle. Some people said it made them itch, some said they didn’t even find my work until I told them where it was. There’s advantage and disadvantage in that statement but I really liked the idea that it wasn’t seen by everyone because of the concept the work is.
Future improvements stem from what I know now, I know that sound holds an important place with my work even if it’s subtle and if I cannot have sound I need to look into creating another dimension with my work whether it be false movement, more visual story or effects like I mentioned previous. I need to think outside the box when it comes to displaying in a public space, having backup plans such as additional TV’s, screens of some sort etc. in case my work cannot be displayed on specific screens or screens that really don’t work with my art. Organisation, planning an event in good time and making sure everyone is contributing and are working effectively, also my own confidence in creating an event, becoming more professional and presenting myself better.
