Link to video experiment: https://vimeo.com/1002361426

With the form of video, you can capture everything with in the shot moving together, eliciting a sense of coherence and unity within the environment. My video captures the movements of the river and things that surround it. By doing this experiment, I came to appreciate the way things and animals navigate and flourish within their environment. The ducks bathing in the river together, taking refuge there, for example. With video, you can encapsulate the way everything interacts and interconnects with their surroundings, how they are situated there and belong there.

MacDonald puts forward that, “if we cannot halt the ongoing transformation of the natural environment…we can certainly use cinema to honour those dimensions of what is disappearing that we would preserve if we could”. This certainly rang true of how I felt when I was conducting this experiment. Filming the river and all that inhabit it felt bittersweet because it was so beautiful and raw and peaceful, and yet I know it is “disappearing” and it is hard not to feel helpless in preserving it. Thus, I agree with MacDonald’s idea that ecocinema is an important medium to capture the environment and “valuing and conserving what seems to be on the verge of utter demise” (MacDonald, 19).

Now that I have experimented with photography, sound and video, I found that the way I attune to the same environment is different when working with each respective form. With photography I found attuning to be very intentional as I was looking for things I would not usually notice to take a photo of. In order to attune to the sounds of the environment, I would close my eyes and stand in one spot and focus on what I could hear in the foreground, middle ground and background. For this, I found that I noticed all the sounds afterwards, when listening back on the recording. With the video form, I attuned by placing my phone close to what ever I was filming in order to capture their movement. I found that the longer the shot was, the more intimate the video felt.

Reference:

MacDonald, S (2012). Ecocinema theory and practice. Taylor & Francis Group.