https://youtu.be/QBmyb1hN_lk

In order to observing the rhythms of my chosen environment. a saying from Carlin: “A sat low to the earth, listening, exuding her usual air of calm. Nearby fell a rain of leaves.” (2018) The best way to feel the environment is to integrate yourself into this environment, to detect the parts and changes that are ignored. In the reading, Carlin acknowledged “my intention with settling is to pay attention to the place” in 2018. It’s necessary to takes time to observe the environment, so that you can find things that are ignored or minor changes in the environment. In the video, I try to show the qualities of flowers, lights, streets, rain and so on. I spend a lot of time looking for them, repeating the shots, just to achieve the best rendering. Limited people have limited ideas is the limitation of observing the rhythms. The best way for our group’s question is to ask for more people or do the survey before I start to shooting. Everyone is concerned about something different, maybe he is paying attention which is exactly what you have neglected, so the more people I asked, the more inspiration I could get.

The successful capturing of rhythm is I captured how different two environments are and the changes of environments. The environment itself changes continuously, there are many factors that cause environmental changes. In 2011, Ingold expressed that : “It’s a field not of interconnected points but of interwoven lines; not a network but a meshwork.” Human and things that exist in the environment are connecting with each other. With the activity status of people, the increase and decrease of the number of people, wind speed, time, weather, season, all of these have different degrees of impact on the environment. I am very pleased that in the final artefact, I have successfully demonstrated these factors that affect the environment. Throughout the film, I recorded my daily life, the way to uni and in campus, what I saw and heard along the way. The film captures the clear skies on a sunny day, the dark clouds on a cloudy day, and the heavy rain on a rainy day. Comparison of outdoor and indoor at the same time, comparison of different weather and same place which is present in the video as well. The limitation of capturing the rhythms is lacking electronica equipments and the use of equipment is not skilled, it causes the limited footages. Sometimes what I seen could not be shown in the camera, such as I want to present the ceiling However, long-distance shooting like this does not guarantee the pixel (sharpness of the image) and the stability of the image.

What I successfully sensing the rhythms is that I use two kind of forms (one screen and split screen) to represent the video. And I try to extend the length of the segment so that the viewer has enough time to capture the changes in the environment. As “Lasting nearly half An hour and composed of mostly long takes with minimal camera movement, the video allows ample time for the viewer to observe processes of slow environmental change as they occur across a series of landscapes. ” (Lam, 2015). For instant, in the final artefact, there is a video shows raindrops falling on the ground, the frequency is getting higher, which requires giving enough time to capture. The challenge of sensing the rhythm is lacking of good background sound, although I have record some sound of elevator and use the voiceover for the directivity role, the original background sound could not combine with them in harmony.

Reference: Carlin, D. (2018) Fieldwork, Sydney Review of Books.

Ingold, T. (2011) ‘Rethinking the Animate, Reanimating Thought’, in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London: Routledge, pp. 67–75.

Lam, S., 2015. It’s About Time: Slow Aesthetics in Experimental Ecocinema and Nature Cam Videos, in: Luca, T. de (Ed.), Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207–218.

After three weeks, I shot more than 100 footages, but I underestimated the time of editing. I tried my best to find the relationships between the different pieces to make them better connected. In this 6-minute rough cut, using the elevator as the transition effect is a good representation of the transformation of the scene, making the segmentation of the video more clear. But some of the fragments in the rough cut are not working well. For instant, the lens of the shooting light is too swaying, which affects the smoothness of the viewing. In addition, stairs and floors are too common, their colors are too complicated and confusing, and the beauty of the image is lost, so the deletion of them will be considered in the final artefact. From the reading, “Playing with the tension between stillness and motion, James Benning’s 13 Lakes is a carefully crafted film that encourages a practice of simple looking.”(2015) Trying to keep the composition simple is what makes the audience to capture the information on the screen. From the feedback, I use the split screen in the second half of video, which is a good representation of the difference of two locations and the different conditions in one place.

Reference: Lam, S., 2015. It’s About Time: Slow Aesthetics in Experimental Ecocinema and Nature Cam Videos, in: Luca, T. de (Ed.), Slow Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207–218.

From the reading in 2010, “shot more than 13,000 photos in an attempt to capture the city’s unnoticed nuances,” If I want to discover unnoticed nuances and qualities, the first thing I need is collecting plenty of materials, enough video clips to help me capture the theme better. “Structurally divorced from one another, image and text struggle to find affiliation absent the power of…” The final work will be presented in video form, so the combination of clips and sound is an important factor. I have been thinking about whether the use of background sound is to choose the original sound or voiceover. Using the original sound will make the whole video look natural, but the noise is too much and uneven. If I use voiceover, it may cause a dissonance between video and sound, but it has a directivity role. For the idea of video, I refer to some creative work, like a creative advertising called “trying to find you” (2019), which is a split screen creative advertising. The sub-screens sometimes present the same place and different moments, sometimes present the different place and same moments, and sometimes present different locations and different moments, but the two screens are always perfectly blended. In the second half of final artefact, I will choose to use a split screen to represent the difference between the two locations, or their changes at different times.

Reference: Ferrell, J. and Van de Voorde, C., 2010. The decisive moment: Documentary photography and cultural criminology. In Framing crime (pp. 48-64). Routledge-Cavendish.

In the two-minute test video, I tried to use the elevator as the transition effect, along with the opening of the elevator door to show different scenes. Among them, the ideas of the footages which are shooting pedestrians crossing the road, playing table tennis, the uni’s sky garden are working. In the busy life on weekdays, people always walk with “purpose”. For example, when I want to walk from building10 to building12, I will choose the same route every time, the purpose is to reach building12 quickly, and as I am too familiar with this route, so I didn’t pay special attention to and discovered some things on the road. The tram, the chair and the traffic lights are not working because they are easy to notice and people always use them in the daily life. From the reading, “Different facets, different networks, all relations. These are some of the relational lines that might run with an ordinary teaspoon.”(2018) There are certain connections in any different things. It seems that there is no correlation between these footages taken so far, but in fact they have some relationship and commonality. This gives me lots of inspiration in editing, and I will connect them together by finding and discovering the relationship between them, rather than bluntly splicing them all together. In the final media artefact, I will still use the elevator as the transition effect to show different scenes, while also showing a timeline from going out during the day to going home at night. From the feedback, I need to collect more clips from top, look up and other different perspectives, find and grab more unnoticed qualities.

Reference: Miles, A., Weidle, F., Brasier, H., Lessard, B., 2018. From Critical Distance to Critical Intimacy: Interactive Documentary and Relational Media, in: Cammaer, G., Fitzpatrick, B., Lessard, B. (Eds.), Critical Distance in Documentary Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, pp. 301–319.

How to find the unnoticed thing from daily life and common thing by using the idea from finding the nature is the question that firstly come up from our group, and we chose flagstaff park and Carlton garden as the potential environments. This question and the choice of place is obviously the existence of an issue. So after getting the feedback, we changed the initial idea to how can we notice unnoticed qualities in our daily lives and common things? In later works, we will focus on unnoticed qualities and daily lives. As a full-time uni student, my daily life is study in uni, and I live in an CBD apartment that close to the uni, so I set the potential environments to the way to campus and in campus. From the reading, “ ‘That’s an interesting tension,’ she acknowledged, ‘because my intention with settling is to pay attention to the place.’”(2018) It presents an environment needs to takes time to observe in order to find something that is ignored in the environment or a small change. For example, in order to find the qualities of lights, the different shape, color or brightness of the lights, I need to spend time to find and observe to find out. “A sat low to the earth, listening, exuding her usual air of calm. Nearby fell a rain of leaves.” This is a good expression, telling me that I need immerse myself in the environment to feel the environment and feel the bit of change and things that have not been noticed before in the environment.

Reference: Carlin, D. (2018) Fieldwork, Sydney Review of Books.