#video-assessment

[thesynhawkproject]

Draft Machinima Supercut, with Archived private footage from webcams, Datamoshed to obscure the ‘Truth’, because in the digital world, what really isn’t just a construction?

[thesynhawkproject]

The ideas behind the scene of my video

I went through a whole series of iterations of ideas when I started this project. Well, rather I spent three months knowing it was coming up - and I was going to do a sword-fighting super-cut or something of the like - but, when the project hit and I had been exposed to so many different styles I wanted to do something that was a little bit ‘more’. So, I went back to the drawing board, keeping with the super-cut idea, I had an idea to take something from a TV show that already lent on the fast-paced construction of super-cuts. My first idea was Gilmore Girls - if you have seen the show you know their obsession with coffee. I wanted to do a super-cut of the two leads saying coffee over and over and over - which also lends itself to the speed and jittery-ness of a caffeine high. But, it also had the bonus of being a very fast spoken show - most 45min segments of TV have maybe 50-60 pages of script per episode. Gilmore Girls often racked in 80-90 pages of script from just the insane pace of the banter dialog - so, multilevel super-cut. But in my head, it was still just a super-cut, and as my wife did this unit in semester 1 I felt like I was still riding on her coat-tails in thinking I should do the same creative medium. So, I decided to stick to my strengths - I am a gamer at heart so I should do ga - OH NERFGUNS. The day Andy was talking about the GoPro cameras and a fixed perspective I thought of the idea of making a pseudo-multiplayer replay video with a split screen video, couple of Nerf rifles, phones and duct-tape, so that you have the two perspectives in sync and it could be kinda cool with some moshing and effects... until I saw that, man, nerf gun footage is way overdone on YouTube. But I stuck with the game-play idea. I’ve been playing Watch_Dogs recently and I had the thought that, I wanted to mosh something, supercut something, and I wanted to have a meta feel, or multiple layers to it. So - since Watch_Dogs is about hacking and being able to watch camera feeds, I took some of the more comedic/personal moments that are voyeuristic from the game - watching people in their own homes and I made my video. My video turned out to be a Machinima Super-cut, of Archived footage, Datamoshed and distorted. The distortions - aside from being a cool effect - also wanted to build in the message that, in all digital footage, what is really happening isn’t always The Truth, and that the images we see, even if it seems private and raw, can be constructed and altered.