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
Admin
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?