Videos « see, look

but what about the videos?

December 9, 2009

I really started out in photography through making little movies with my friends. I wish I had some of them to show on this blog because my fourth-grade-filmmaker self really wasn’t half bad (highlight: A stop motion paper animation film called “Wereduck”, you can probably figure out what that was about…). Anyway, I want to eventually apply what I’ve been learning in school studying photography to cinema and the moving image. I took a class at the New School called “Fiction to Film” which studied the differences in storytelling when a book is made into a film. It was much more than just “hey, I imagined that character to be way chunkier, why are they so slim??”. A big difference I found was, very basically, in the presentation. A book allows the reader to take their time, re-read, and move about while enjoying the story. A movie theater is really pretty abrasive to a story, blaring it in the viewers face, forcing them to immediately ingest the information thrown at them from the screen (it’s maybe not this violent…).

Another phenomenon I really enjoy is the music-VIDEO. With the music video, the song generally stays exactly the same while the artist (or the director) creates a visual world to accompany their song. This is another situation where the interpretation of the work is changed between artist and viewer (in these cases, it is by way of the director) Sometimes they’re direct narratives of the lyrics of the song (for instance, if the singer sings: “oooh, I’m flying in the sky” , the video will most likely feature them flying… in the sky) Often times they are what I like to call “Artistic Expressions of the Inner Visual Narrative of the Song” (which I’ve just made up) Either way, they’re ALWAYS entertaining.

Here are some highlights: