Medium Specificity

Artist Statement: Medium Specificity

I chose to explore the medium of digital video. There are many things that are specific to photography that are similar to film or video, but one of the major things film does have is motion. I think some of the simple processes and details of life are so beautiful, but go unnoticed because they happen so fast.

            A perfect example of this is water. Because water changes shape so fast, there are so many details that go on in that process that we never see. This could be like when water comes out of a faucet into a glass, and the initial impact it has in the glass and the shapes it creates. Because of technology and the ability we have to capture movement and slow it down, we can now see the tiny details and processes that happen really fast that go unnoticed but are so beautiful. To show this, I played with the various speeds of the film in post-production. The original footage is waves, which was shot at 120 fps. When played back at 24 fps, the new amount of video gives me 5 seconds of footage. So what took one second to shoot the water – when played back is stretched out to 5 seconds giving me beautiful detail in slow motion. To play this back at a normal speed I would have to increase the raw footage (120 fps footage) by 500% to make it look normal. I instead increased the footage by various degrees of speed – like 200% and others as well. One of the issues I ran into, was that because the original footage was shot at such a high resolution, it was somewhat difficult to work with the raw footage without it being transcoded to 422 – so this particular footage is an export of the proxy files created rather than an export of a nearly uncompressed codec.