This last month I've been playing around with some of the footage Cynthia and Sandra shot at the Salaach River. These are just two little experiments I made by layering two videos on top of each other, and playing with contrast, brightness, saturation, and a negative effect. I was inspired by what Sandra and Cynthia were saying regarding the concept they had come up with called "Back to Beautiful." The original footage is so beautiful and aesthetically pleasing, and yet I didn't feel like it should ONLY be that. So in post-production, I've been mainly playing with ways to interrupt or manipulate the original beauty of the videos. I would eventually like this to be layered and/or juxtaposed with some documentary photography/journalistic images of this same river with refugees. Maybe even words scrolling over videos as well. I started looking for news footage online specific to the Salaach but only found a few things (and Sandra posted some local news articles during our research right?). I haven't had chance to play with that yet. Of course I've had some technical difficulties. It all just takes time and lots of hard drive space...but I'm having fun and would like to keep playing with this stuff.
https://vimeo.com/232076213
https://vimeo.com/232096063
https://vimeo.com/232076213
https://vimeo.com/232096063
At first it does seem pleasing/beautiful in both videos. Probably not till the very end of each did it start to shift for me. In the first one, the black dot felt ominous and in the second one it seemed like the bottom of a water fall where the waters were splashing higher and higher until the screen was engulfed. Metaphorically the black dot felt like the ugly spot that was trying to be ignored in the midst of all the beauty, but I couldn't help looking. The splashing up of the bottom of the waterfall felt like things were overflowing, containable, and moving into the dangerous aspects of nature.
ReplyDeleteI am excited about the idea of layering images of refugees as well.
ps. I meant "uncontainable in the second to last line above, not "containable". And I am just also thinking about the possibility of layering text from articles too, not just images. Also, I am just making sure that there's no sound here? I'm pretty sure my sound is all the way up! I'm curious what sound might be useful to use with these images as well.
DeleteThese are great! I love how your video manipulations were inspired by our conversation about the notion of interrupting the beautiful.
ReplyDeleteI’m interested in how your manipulations sometimes make the water look like static (television “snow”) or like dirt – especially given Sandra’s reaction to mixing the clean, “pure” Salaach water with that of the San Lorenzo. It reminds me of Sanjoy Roy’s writing about migrant others as noise and dirt in his article, “Dirt, Noise, Traffic: Contemporary Indian Dance in the Western City; Modernity, Ethnicity, and Hybridity.” Or, as I say in my freewrite that I posted on Aug 13, “whom do we think of as disposable, as dirt? migrant bodies, homeless bodies, refugee bodies? as I tread through the plant-life, causing small quivers tremors disturbances beneath my feet, picking my way between mud and slime and scrappy wildflowers, what keeps me from seeing this river -- and its people -- as beautiful?”
I don’t find the edits too jolting or ugly, personally – they are defamiliarizing, making the water look somewhat unrecognizable as river water flowing over a dam, and sometimes unexpected in how they shift (the water seeming to flow backwards, or to suddenly switch to negative). I do miss the sound – often sound can create really visceral responses that support the visual imagery, and layering and distorting and interrupting the water sounds could produce really interesting effects.
The journalistic photos that Babli shared are available here: https://postnatyam.blogspot.com/2016/12/resurfacing-borders-assignment-1-bablis.html. As an in-between type of imagery, it might also be interesting to integrate the footage of the fire-pits used by refugees along the riverbank.
I would also love to see a remix that integrates both water imagery from the Salaach and the San Lorenzo!
ReplyDeleteFrom Babli: I agree these are great! I love the manipulations/distortions, they make me look at the water "twice" - double check what I see. I love the disruption of the beauty/but at the same time adding a magical quality. I love how in the second one my eyes were not sure after a while which direction the water is flowing. Surreal.
ReplyDeleteI love the progression of them and can't wait to see more.
And yes, I would be curious to see a remix of different locations.
I am curious to see what it will look like with images of people- and words.....
For sALZBURG themes/motifs are: feet, fences, words and dots....
dots are already there.
I have made some recordings from two rivers in India- sadly I could not carry water for there for several reasons.
Reply to Cyn's comment: My concern with mixing the waters was not actually that I thought the Saalach was more "pure"