As part of a new project, entitled Time, I've been working in a group to source ideas and media to create a short one minute film inspired by the high concept ideas of sci fi films like Snowpiercer, The Matrix, Planet of the Apes and, of course, Blade Runner - again.
I can't say I'm a fan of the process of group projects. Shedding parts of all of your ideas to incorporate everyone's into something that would have been much different individually. But you get there in the end, with an idea nothing like the one you started with, but better developed because of it.
What I'd hoped to explore, the relationships between tradition and change, evolved into an exploration of the memories we leave behind; what a legacy means in a modern age where we cultivate a digital impression of ourselves, made from moments that no one will care about in 80 years, when Facebook is a directory of dead people oversaturated with indicipherable moments in a million people's lives.
It's certainly high concept, and it opened up so many options for presenting those ideas visually. We collected visuals of error messages and loading screens, the digital hunt for things that refuse to be found.
But then I stumbled across an SD card that I'd meant to return, full of other people's discarded photographs, visually as interesting and as obscured as their history. I didn't know where they came from. I didn't know their context, outside of what I would use them for. That's exactly why it made so much sense to share what I'd found with the group.
Those images formed the core of my film, alongside a photo that I'd taken of two statues in contrasting states of upkeep, and one of a balloon, ephemeral by nature, obscuring the identity of the person stood behind it.
As we'd decided to make four separate edits between us, using the same set of images, I found myself drawn back to Roy's speech at the end of Blade Runner, about the ephemeral nature of moments in time, to use as an audio accompaniment to provide much needed context to the images, especially considering that the first set of images are almost too fast to register (intentionally of course, but having lost that clarity, I felt that the meaning would be too obscure without another layer of meaning in the form of that audio clip).
That combined with Panic At The Disco!'s Far Too Young To Die (which I used for it's name, mostly, and the way it just seemed to fit the video) made up the audio track.
In my edit, at least. Which is this one here.
I can't say I'm a fan of the process of group projects. Shedding parts of all of your ideas to incorporate everyone's into something that would have been much different individually. But you get there in the end, with an idea nothing like the one you started with, but better developed because of it.
What I'd hoped to explore, the relationships between tradition and change, evolved into an exploration of the memories we leave behind; what a legacy means in a modern age where we cultivate a digital impression of ourselves, made from moments that no one will care about in 80 years, when Facebook is a directory of dead people oversaturated with indicipherable moments in a million people's lives.
It's certainly high concept, and it opened up so many options for presenting those ideas visually. We collected visuals of error messages and loading screens, the digital hunt for things that refuse to be found.
But then I stumbled across an SD card that I'd meant to return, full of other people's discarded photographs, visually as interesting and as obscured as their history. I didn't know where they came from. I didn't know their context, outside of what I would use them for. That's exactly why it made so much sense to share what I'd found with the group.
Those images formed the core of my film, alongside a photo that I'd taken of two statues in contrasting states of upkeep, and one of a balloon, ephemeral by nature, obscuring the identity of the person stood behind it.
As we'd decided to make four separate edits between us, using the same set of images, I found myself drawn back to Roy's speech at the end of Blade Runner, about the ephemeral nature of moments in time, to use as an audio accompaniment to provide much needed context to the images, especially considering that the first set of images are almost too fast to register (intentionally of course, but having lost that clarity, I felt that the meaning would be too obscure without another layer of meaning in the form of that audio clip).
That combined with Panic At The Disco!'s Far Too Young To Die (which I used for it's name, mostly, and the way it just seemed to fit the video) made up the audio track.
In my edit, at least. Which is this one here.