Little figure in a jar

Playing with sounds and images again!

In the last week, I decided that I’ll try to restage my solo “Like they were laughing” as a film. To understand more about the mechanics of making a film and to experiment with the images I would like to work with, I’m giving myself some mini-projects. This first one is to film a small figure in a glass container of water, which is what I imagine as the first scene in the film. To represent a person floating in the deep ocean. I used an audio recording I made many months ago and tried to fit it to the images. That was challenge #2 – how to set images to random audio. And here is what I ended up with!

 

Some of the things I’ve learned:

  • * how filming from different perspectives can make a viewer feel more or less involved. Looking up at the jar is very fun, looking down feels very personal, and looking from the side is just like an audience.
  • * I think I need to make a better figurine that is more clearly a person…
  • * quality of laptop camera = shitty
  • * sometimes when the audio does not match the visuals, it can become overbearing. I added some breaks in the recording so that there were some breaths of fresh air for the ears
  • * it’s hard to isolate just the figure in the container. hands and body and string are visible. also jar is far from the ideal shape. Ideally, it would be a very large round glass bowl. Anyone have one?!
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Diethild Meier
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Diethild Meier
3 years ago

Huh! That’s creepy! ;D
Here is some feedback on the technical aspect of your try-out:
You are right – I don’t recognize the figure as a human-shaped figure… what I see (without reading your description), is a light on a string. Only at the very end, when the light is indirect, I can guess that there is a figure at all. I don’t think that the figure is not clear enough, I think that the laptop camera can’t handle the contrasting light so that the figure is merely overexposed. Try the same in a less dark space and with a less direct light source, and it might already look different! Ideally, you would need some close-ups of the figure to give it a bit of personality – but you’d need another camera for that.
I like the little jar – it creates a kind of claustrophobic feeling (probably this is what makes it ‘creepy’, or at least mysterious). I understand from your text, though, that you are probably looking for a different effect?

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Lauren Fitzgerald
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Lauren Fitzgerald
3 years ago
Reply to  Diethild Meier

Hm ok. Thanks for the feedback. Good point about close-ups to give the figure a personality. And, yes, I’m not going for super creepy, just kind of contemplative and lost in dark vast ocean. The jar, darkness, hand, sound…yeah kind of everything in this lends to this creepy voodoo doll quality. 😛 will continue to experiment

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