When creating I have always found that boundaries can be a good thing. This is a way of working that is constructed by boundaries. It’s a way to make a hopefully inspiring video essay with a low budget and a small team of workers. Theoretically you could make it all on your own. It’s about allowing the post-production to be the center-piece of the creative process. The post-production is the production, everything else is pre.
This is a prototype edit I have made using the Tears in Rain monologue from Blade Runner (1982). Taking visual parts from different films and musicvideos that I am very familiar with. This is the way I want to work using produced and archival material that I will start collecting for the upcoming year.
My Research
I have always found joy in editing films in an associative way. Making the film in the editing room. Having no preconceived idea of the continuity of the pictures. It's the closest way you can come to painting through editing. Starting out with nothing, a blank canvas. Using different types of visual material as your paint, hopefully ending up with something inspiring.
Normally as an editor you are one of the orchestra, following the conductor, the director. I would like to work in a way where the movie is made and in a lot of ways even written in the editing part of the process.
In this catalogue I will present some of my references. References that I apply both to my way of working and the different topics I want a story to evolve around.
If you want some backround music while reading, please feel free to press play.
Continuing on the nature theme... When crate digging I found this record. The title Musik för trädgårdar (Music for Gardens) was one that I found very appeling. Curiosity made me buy the record and I am very thankful that I did. This has been my soundtrack while experiencing different exibitions and doing my research. So much so that I hope to make this album the soundtrack of my video essay. While listening to this music I can see different sequences edited in my head.
I want to make a video essay that revolves around a character that tells a monologue. Then create or find
visual material around this. However every shot or archival material is created or chosen by its own merits, not in relation to what visual material that comes before or after. I will be using archival footage of a real family
in a fictional way.
Experiencing Cathrine Raben Davidsen's exibition Let Everything Happen to You at Copenhagen Contemporary I found a lot of inspiration in the way she makes her paintings. Davidsen uses her own family portraits and paints them in a provocative and quite horrific way. I see similarities in this and in my own work in the sence that I will be using my own familys archival footage to create a fictional story. A fictional story that will definitely be more morbid than in reality.
Experiencing Kapwani Kawangi's exibition The Length of the Horizon (also at Copenhagen Contemporary) where she puts diferent kinds of nature from colonized parts of Africa on show. I drew alot of inspiration from the ability to tell stories through nature. A piece of nature, a flower, a leaf, a three tells the story of life and death depending on it's status of growth. It also tells a story of belonging, belonging to an invorement that defines its life.
In my video essay I want to explore how much the place that you are born in can dictate the life that you choose to live. I want it to revolve around a caracter that has let the village he was born in decide the life he lives. A lonely life, working at the factory, just like the men before him. I think this story can be told alot through nature. Nature and it's condition is also dictated by where it is born.
For me a story is born out of a piece of music. So is the edited sequence in my head.
Another record that is helping me in my research is Tomas Öberg & Jonas Jonasson's album Musik från filmer av Dan Sandqvist. Another record that I am hoping to use as soundtrack in my video essay. The music is very bittersweet. It tells a sad story while using a kind of comedic sound. This is where i want this story to land, somewhere between comedy and darkness.