My thesis has really evolved over the semester, and at this point I am in the final stages of putting the whole project together. Originally my goal wast to set out to create a narrative fictional piece, using friends to act as the main characters in the story. I soon realized however, that my friends around me could tell the story without me setting things up. I started taking photos during my every day interactions with them, and began capturing the essences of the conversations I was having. I have been capturing these moments and conversations now for several weeks. They have been interesting to put together next to each other, because they all have one common quality in that they are through my perspective. The people featured in the project are people who are very close to me so it is easy to get them to have the real emotion and truth come out in their expression. The stop motion technique is enabling me to highlight this, because it allows the eye to linger on specific moments in time. In video and film, the images progress so fast that it gives the illusion of fluid motion. By slowing down these frame rates, I have attempted to draw out certain moments, which really take these normal conversations and interactions to the next level. It breaks them down to a more fundamental level and when placed with others they begin to tell a story.
An interesting turn came in this project when I decided to integrate some setup situations into the timeline. I have a moment when I myself appear in the sequence, and I sit down to watch tv at the end of the day. As I flip through the channels, my friends from earlier appear, each doing something different, and acting as if they were a television program. The sequences are very basic in setup and obviously staged. I wanted to do this because it plays of many levels of my interactions with them and my interests. One of my goals was to break up the forced reality that most motion picture presents in television and film. The name of the game is deception, and people spend their lives working very hard to create an alternate reality on television. In actuality, this is a precise "scam" of sorts. The audience is sucked into a completely false and constructed world, and for a period of time accepts this as true, more or less. In my setup "tv programs" I made it clear that this is a setup, and these sequences clash with the original sequences that I shot in my day to day life.
My final piece will be just over 4 minutes long, and will be void of dialog. The only words that may come into play are inaudible mumbling, that in earlier attempts enhanced the overall look by giving another level of depth in audio. I have my daily interactions building up to the eventual staged interactions, and then at the finish things get smashed all into one until a finish at the end of the score. I am very excited about this piece, because the subjects are very close to me. It is a look into my life from a unique perspective, and even the process and method of presentation is a statement on my interests and passions.
My original goal was to explore the gap between still imaging and video. The challenges of working stills into motion has been interesting and very new to me. It actually was a very different process from what I was expecting, and my project's evolution from the beginning is evidence of that. I'm very excited about what I have learned from working on this piece, and hope to do similar work in the future.
