The most difficult thing I’ve had to do this semester is construct this 30 second video. This is partly due to my own hangups over my work, and also the fact that I had spent a lot of time thinking, and perhaps not enough time making. However, I have made it, and there’s a lot of stuff in there worth reflecting on.

So, Initially I faced with some troubling questions. What should I do for my 30 second cut? How could I make this work? I honestly wasn’t sure where to start, especially given that anything being screened in a public arena makes me exceptionally nervous. I have real problems looking at my own work on screen, especially if I’m unsure about its quality. However, you’ve got to start somewhere.

I had been musing on the nature of time and movements through time over the semester, and I felt this was a great opportunity to really explore this in a technical sense. I decided that mathematical cuts between segments were the right approach, either in an exponential sense or in an equal sense. Initially, I divided it into 3 segments. The poetics of the stairs, some footage of the stairs, and finally the poetics of my house. I had decided these were the 3 segments of my semester worth showing and talking about, both in a personal and narrative sense.

However, I needed something to tie them together. 30 seconds is both a remarkably short and long time. I needed propulsion beyond quick cuts, especially if I wanted something mathematical. Music sprung to mind as the obvious choice. Its dictated by timing and gives shape to things that are sometimes a bit flabby. Rather than using an established piece, however, I decided to try some new things.

I had a host of ambient sound lying around from recording earlier in the semester, and I really enjoyed the mechanical and abrasive nature of a lot of the sound I had acquired. Of course, I wondered if I could cut this into something simulating movement and pace, and then overlay it over my 30 second cut. It would be a marriage of my audio and visual efforts over the semester, and I thought it would work out.

Who’d have thought that music is actually really difficult to make? And that you can’t just cut random noise into a 30 second piece over the course of a couple of afternoons?

Well, I thought I could. To be completely honest, it turned out okay. It was far from what I saw it ending up like, but I genuinely enjoyed suffering, listening and combining elements of stuff I gathered round the city in the simulacrum of music. I managed to make it reach a crescendo through speeding it up, but I didn’t have the right sounds or know what to do in order to hit the feeling of tapering off after the fact. I have some further thoughts of how to achieve that, and I really want to spend more time with ambient sound and noise in the future, I think its a really good way to explore properly representing and marry what appears on screen with a soundscape that fits and enters the piece. Using established music is often just too dangerous.

Despite this, I spent ages in the edit, matching cuts of visuals to the ambient sound that slowly increased. I hoped to marry tension between the two. Once again, it didn’t quite work out. The cuts weren’t right, and the beat hadn’t matched up properly. Better call Paul.

After consulting with Paul, I reversed my video. Yes, Justin ended up walking backwards throughout the whole thing, but this also leant a more organic feeling to my work. It started with photos and walking, and lead into the more theoretical aspects of my work. This also meant that the music started slow, and the cuts were fast, with the two components eventually meeting and switching speed, with the cuts slowing as the music sped up.

I really liked this effect, and I wasn’t unhappy with the end result. However, I really want to go back and try to glitch out my footage outrageously. I think there’s something to be found if I overlay Justin over Justin over Justin, each seconds apart, walking up and down the same set of stairs in the same shot. It would really have helped my 30 second cut to have that particular effect in the edit, and it’s perhaps my biggest regret for the semester, that I was so close to the next cool thing, but didn’t get a chance to show it.

Of course, there’s always something else.