Initial Ideas & Drafts

Initially, for this project, I had two ideas I wanted to explore – and they both dealt with the mismatch between measured time and experienced time.

1. Dissociation – detachment from immediate surroundings, like during a bus ride when you ‘blank out’. The experienced time feels unquantifiable although measured time is still running.
2. Night-time – experienced time is stretched out at night because of its stillness and constancy of lights – we feel that time is passing slower than actual measured time.

I decided to go with the second idea as I felt it was a clearer investigation into the two types of time I had chosen. For me, the experienced time in the night feels stretched out because of two things:

1. The lack of movement of people/cars/objects that are present in the day
2. (Especially in the city) the consistent nature of all the lights at night

I was especially inspired by Bill Viola’s video work, titled ‘Reflecting Pool’. I thought that his use of visuals was an effective way to bring out my concept.

In his video, there is no other movement besides the rippling of the body of water,  and the constantness of the only motion in the video makes it hard for the viewer to keep track of how much time has passed as the video goes on. At this point, I decided that I wanted to create a video using this same technique, but with objects in the night.

I took a walk around my neighbourhood at night and I came across many constant lights that looped throughout the night.

Idea 1: Street Lamps

One such constant was the yellow street lamps at the zebra crossing which blinked at a constant rate. I took videos of different street lamps and then pieced them together in Premiere Pro by matching the positions of the circles.

Overlap clips → Adjust opacity of top clip to 30%

Adjust the position of the top clip to match the light up with the bottom clip

 

In Viola’s video, he also adds a freeze frame at the midpoint of his jump into the water – effectively ‘stopping’ the motion and hence the passing time associated with it. I thought it would be interesting to experiment and try that out in my video as well.

Adding a ‘Frame Hold’ segment, which takes the frame the playhead is at and lengthens it into a freeze frame.

This is the first draft of my video:

Idea 2: Night Objects

My second idea was to piece together the different lights from all the night objects that I found, like lights from cars and LED panels at the front of shops (click for gif).

   

However, during consultation, I realised that unlike the street lamp clips, which were unified by colour and form, these clips had nothing much to relate them to each other. Serena suggested that I go with the street lamps as it felt more like a coherent piece.

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Refinement & Experimentation

After the consultation, I received feedback from Serena that the draft video was lacking some explicit indicator that it was an investigation into time/a measurement of time. After that, I tried to brainstorm for ideas by doing some more research on video artists.

One artist that inspired me a lot was Nam June Paik, who was a Korean video artist (considered the father of video art). I was interested in how he cut and edited various clips in some of his artworks, like Video Flag (below), and Electronic Superhighway (which I compared with another work in the first process post). The rapid editing creates a very accelerated sense of movement and compresses experienced time. 

I thought that I could contrast this sense of compressed time with the lengthened time of the night to establish that I was trying to investigate experienced time. And so I decided to add on a day segment to my initial draft video.

My initial idea of how to work the day into the video was to compare zebra crossings in the day and in the night, with movement of cars and people in the day but stillness in the night, left with only the blinking of the street lamps. I went to Orchard Road on a Saturday to film.

However, there weren’t many zebra crossings, mostly with traffic light crossings. The zebra crossings I could find were away from the crowds and I thought there wouldn’t be enough action to bring out a strong sense of motion.

 

I decided to film the day portion along the main road connecting ION Orchard and 313 Somerset, where there were many crowds and cars along the road as well. 

Initial day sequence:

1.  Cloud timelapse 
   1. Light changing, clouds forming and moving → time passing
2.  Traffic light changing from red to green
   1. Transition to people, roads, cars
3.  Timelapse of people, people, cars
   1. More movement, more rapidly → compressed time

Final day sequence:

1.  Cloud timelapse (removed)
   1. I felt that there was a mismatch between the clouds and the other clips, which were more man-made and ‘unnatural’ in a sense – cars and people make up the rhythm of the city, while the clouds felt more natural and organic. I decided to jump in to the clips of people and cars straight.
2.  Traffic light changing from red to green
   1. I decided to introduce the traffic light (red) with a wide shot first, lasting about 2 seconds. This acts as an establishing shot to all the elements in the video after – people, footsteps, cars. Then, it zooms in to the traffic light, which turns green.
3.  Timelapse of people, people, cars (3 seconds) → Close-up shots of people, footsteps, cars that are cut more rapidly as the video progresses
   1. Wide shots of people passing acts as sort of introductory shots as well – like an ‘overview’ of all the elements that follow
   2. Increasingly rapid close cuts of people, feet and cars feel more imposing following the timelapses that feel more ‘detached’ → visual compression to complement compression of time

Night Sequence

Previously, I filmed the zebra crossings using my hand to hold my phone. It resulted in videos that were slightly shaky as it is practically impossible to get a completely still video filming it handheld. I felt that stillness was key to the night clips in order for the audience to really focus on the lights. So, I refilmed all the videos for the night sequences with a tripod with a selfie stick head attached to the top.

Final Sequence 

After editing the day & night sequences together, I focused on sound and colour.

Sound – Day

I decided to further intensify the sense of compressed time by adding in a non-diegetic sound on top of the diegetic sound of the clips. The non-diegetic sound would be a reminder of sound passing. I recorded two sounds: one of the second hand ticking in an alarm clock, and the bongs of a grandfather clock. I chose the ticking in the end as I felt that the bong is dragged out as a sound due to the echo after. The ticking is better able to create a sense of haste.

I added the ticking sound every time there was a cut in the day sequence.

I also decreased the volume of the diegetic sound of the clips, and increased the sound of the ticking as the cuts got more rapid.

Sound – Night

For the night sequence, I wanted to remove the ticking sound to further deepen the contrast between the two segments – the contrast is felt not just visually, but also in terms of audio. At first, I wanted to just leave in the diegetic sound from the clips themselves, but while there were no cars in the clip, there were cars passing by at the back, which contributed to the noise.

I decided to record my own white noise at home to make sure it was just pure white noise – to match the stillness of the clips.

Colour

For the day sequence, I added a filter over the clips which increased the saturation of the colours in the clip. This reinforces the overwhelming quality of the day sequence, making it more jarring and almost unsettling visually.

For the night sequence, I wanted to do the opposite – to reduce visual noise. I lowered the ‘Blacks’ setting for the night clips, which made the shadows darker, and this turns a lot of the midtones in the background black, which would have been vying for attention with the street lamps originally. This helps to narrow the viewer’s attention to focus on the street lamps only.