Here we are. Final edit. Five minutes. No prisoners. What have I done? Why did I do it? Much like the 30 second cut, I expanded on the things in the semester I was most proud of. However, unlike the 30 second cut, I left my work in chronological order for the semester. It basically functions like an extended cut of my 30 second screener, or perhaps my 30 second screener is a truncated version of this.

Most importantly, I managed to recover the footage from the first day of shooting through a nifty tool in Premiere called ‘camera warp’. This stablised the shake of my camera, and through its smoothing process, actually leant the work a languid and dreamlike quality that I would have found impossible to achieve without mechanical assistance. I love computers.

This let me attempt to recreate the stairs in a way that seemed more pleasing to me as an editor and viewer. I also leant heavily on the glitch effect discussed in an earlier post and used it to facilitate cuts and changes of direction throughout the piece. As stated earlier, I really wish I’d had the time to glitch it to the next level and overlay many Justins into the same footage, recreating the Escher effect more effectively.

To give my footage one final spin, I lifted a track called ‘Wizard Motor’ from a band called Mogwai. I really like the song, and although I’m bringing external influences into my work, and distorting what people interpret from the piece, and I’m not sure whether this will affect their enjoyment, I really wanted that introspective vibe hanging over my work.

I’m pretentious like that. It’s art, and you will watch it as art.

However, it was while I was constructing this edit that my mind returned to the philosophy of media, and where meaning is constructed. I had spent some of my semester attempting to find where media breaks, and how distorted something has to be in order for it to become noise. I realised that invoking this musical piece actually resulted in some noise, in that it distorted my meanings, and this was a small insight that helped me reflect on my work over the semester as a whole.

Simply put, anything in the wrong place can be noise, but the right place is anywhere, and the wrong place is anywhere. Context and interpretation are half of any media artefact. Making it is only part of the battle. Perhaps we need a ways of deconstructing to go along with the ways of making.

Does this mean I believe in the death of the author? Yes and no. It all depends on the context. Everything is a process, and everything is a liquid. An ever-changing yin to yang and back again. We are so trained by culture and our own instincts to find patterns and narratives in things-they are everywhere, that we instinctively fill in the gaps or imbue a piece with meaning. However, our culture is like that because that is what we do. We watch, we learn, we adapt. We make. We make because we are compelled to.

Any piece of media is a schism in reality, it’s a distortion in the fabric of what we all agree is mostly real. Art and media help us make this fabric, but letting them into our minds and hearts also places us somewhere beyond the immediate and tactile. The author takes us somewhere new, with views we had never considered. We watch cinema with our dreaming eyes, and our collective unconscious processes everything, spitting out more art in an ever more referential yet increasingly subjective process.

So yes, I really want to find the maths under all this. There must be some predictable factor that I’ve missed. Facets of anthropology, psychology, sociology, media theory, physics, chemistry and every other discipline and human perspective. The things that tie us are the things we are made of. There is a greater shape to everything, it’s meaning all the way down. The way we see media might be the way everything is expressed. We obey the same natural laws that the universe does, wouldn’t our creations mimic the things we are made of?

Is art resistance to natural law, or is it acquiescence?

Perhaps its like energy. Art cannot be broken, it is merely transformed. And if art is like energy, there is a science to it. There is a meaning to it. There is a way we can make it.