Links to original Posts

Identity and Place – Part Four: Assignment Four
Identity and Place – Part Four Assignment: Image and Text – Research, Handwritten Text, Duane Michals and Jim Goldberg
Identity and Place – Part Four Assignment: Image and Text – Planning and Creation
Identity and Place – Part Four Assignment: Image and Text – Research, Diambra Mariani and Maria Teresa Salvati

After some great feedback from my Tutor on my original piece (below), he suggested experimenting with lots of different options which was a great eye opener for me. After playing around with no sound, which I found a bit uiniteresting and overlapping images, which I quite liked but seemed to create tension (not what I was after) , I decided to make some very minor changes to the amount of time the images were being shown. He had suggested I look at how long each image was visible and when listening to the poem again it made sense to give this a go.

Original Version

Originally I hadn’t thought about this at all. My only thoughts were to equally space the time the images were on the screen with the length of time that the open took to be read. It really never occurred to me that the speed the images were shown could have any effect on the piece. I can’t believe this never occurred to me but, I think this is just another example of my habit of being too focussed on one area and not allowing my mind to open up to other possibilities.

Coincidentally another student on the next unit had asked for some feedback on a piece he had done where there was a ticking clock that ticked for about 10 seconds faded away, paused, then started up again with the images sliding in from the right and out to the left. The feedback said

“My personal taste would be a slightly less hectic clock… and the pages moving a little slower but I also understand that the faster clock matches more  the pace of a city… 

I think the stopping of the clock creates a good effect.: the stopping  could be a little bit longer; that way it would give the viewer a bit longer break to think about why it stopped. (again my personal taste…)”

It made me wonder if I should speed up the image changes towards the end where the poem talks about things “happening very fast”? I don’t want it to create a feeing of things getting out of control, just a gentle increase to match the poems feeling of gathering momentum

The feedback post also led me to a short stills film by Andrew Fitzgibbon called “Drifting by the Leeds & Liverpool. 

“The work celebrates the diversity of meanings and experience found in the everyday condition, along the waterway’s journey through marginal and affluent space. A strength of photography is that despite photographs being heavily mediated, through their indexicality they offer the experience of looking intensely at the subjects represented. Something often missed when walking distracted through the landscape.” (Fitzgibbon nd)

The film is longer than mine and has more elements to it. As with my piece there is a poem being narrated throughout. But there are also background sounds such as someone crunching through leaves the sounds of a football match and sounds that would have been heard along the canal before much of it became run down, which accompany matching images. We hear birdsong and clips of people talking about working or living around the canal from as far back as 1969.

I don’t think I want to add any more elements to it at this stage (my learning curve regarding the creation of the stills film was steep enough). I am going to stick to a subtle change to try add to the experience of time passing at a different rate as we get to the end of the clip.

Updated Version

It was interesting how much I had to reduce the time before it made a difference. I didn’t want the last few stills to fly by but for it to be more subtle than that and almost a feeling rather than something people are very aware of. I think I achieved this but wether it has helped the piece or not, I’m not sure. I think I need to get some external feedback and see if it is having any effect.