Reel Time
People are always running around, trying to catch something which might not even exist. When you stand still, you capture “certain excitement out of what can often seem the banality of nothingness”. Is this what people like about this video?
In making timelapses, the perfect speed finds a strange and contrasting balance;- The longer you take, the more you relax and the more you meditate on a moment, the more frantic in actual-fact the pace of the final piece of work becomes. Clouds move frantically, cranes, grass, people etc move erratically.
Timelapses break the boundary between the still image and the moving. What is basically 13000 photos shot by remote, becomes undoubtedly video. I think the viewer somehow becomes trapped in this area between the 2 mediums that they are used to. Focus is both intense and lucid, you see something, it attracts your attention, you concentrate and then it is gone, out of your control.
I often think the reason people like this film is because we have become completely caught up in having our visual stimuli dictated by others, the MTV generation is transfixed on music videos and adverts. What I like about having made this is that it turns things full circle. People are attracted to this unstopping, heavily-cut piece of moving image, but if they just stopped for a while and looked around they would see the same thing, albeit at a different speed.
You might also like the film Baraka. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtiqrzmuWbw.
I suspect the principle here is quite close to some of the work that I do with photography / mixed media; that is, exploring different time-scales from what our rather limited eyes have been trained to see.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/objetpetitm/sets/72157606864148284/
I have done a few experiments in time lapses but should look into it again as a technique. Thanks for the video.
Having watched this now for the first time, I am amazed at the beauty of the breadth of this film and the images in it.
A friend was telling me about a workshop where they looked at animating still images; I think this film does that, whereas it has captured the essence of the still(ness) and made it alive, active, ongoing.
It’s amazing that although urban parts are chaotic, it seems that the clouds and smoke and motion of the air (the motion of ‘nothingness’?) are the more surprising and beautiful.
You’re right, we can sit and watch the world go by and it would be similar to this film which is probably why the film is so awe inspiring. But I think the amazing thing is that it brings all these aspects together into an 8 minute view making us (me), the viewer, feel closer to it all: the tininess of the people, their similarity to the animals, the chaos of lights and the movement of air.
I’m very happy to have seen this film. Very beautiful.