8 Aug

It is already the end of the third week of Semester 2 and I have been flooded with assessment! All three of my subjects have an assessment piece due at the end of week four: fml. In On the Frame this week, the central idea was the notion of movement within (or outside) the frame. Breaking down movement into its constituent parts is fundamental in understanding the illusion of movement within film. These constituent parts, or ‘frames’, are each screened one-after-the-other which tricks human eyesight in perceiving movement across still frames.

After a class discussion on L’Avventura, we watched The Matrix’s famous first ‘bullet-time’ action sequence, where Trinity KICKS SOME ARSE! After watching this, we viewed a short documentary on The Matrix’s famous bullet-time shots which proved to be very interesting as still cameras are responsible for the illusion. After the ‘learning’ part of the three-hour long class, we were off to each film a less-than-one-minute investigation of movement in the frame. Inspired by Trinity, I chose to film movement within the frame, whilst the camera was itself moving in the space. Edited in post-production, I played around with frame duration and altered the speed of each shot.

I am going to be brutally honest to both tutor Dan and myself: the finished product is shittier than ‘Black and Gold’ products. There is, however, the matter of personal perception that needs to be applied to my short film. Through my eyes, I see: an intentionally-constructed sequence that’s on-the-surface awfulness juxtaposes its pedagogical purpose in investigating the effects of shot duration. In everyone else’s eyes: is Zac twelve years-old and using Windows Media Maker?

Judge for yourself!

P.S. The audio is copyrighted and is now in silence… yay. You must view this alongside Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy playing for the video to work.