Zhuang's first draft ToP

1. What have you been making?

I have been making a short film around Hook Van Holland, a recreational area located on the edge of the industrial landscape of the Rotterdam Port. The film consists of optic and sonic observations from the site, through visual and structural arrangement of these observations, it explores the edge between a personal and an industrial landscape.

2. How did you do it? (method)

From last winter I have been constantly going to several sites around the port of Rotterdam, where I started to observe these landscapes along with cameras and microphones. I would let myself and the camera roaming around the sites, to visually and sonically observe the industrial-influenced landscapes. Later these recorded images and sound files served as footage for me to distance from but still able to simultaneously study on these sites, which became the continued spot for the next stage of observation and further contextualize the landscape with my physicality and a larger environment.

3. Relation to previous practice?

The aspects of duration, time, and structure are important parts of the film. The process of making this film connects with my previous practices, they delve into the experience of film as a time-based medium, and address the power of paying attention through pace and duration. Through making them, they propose a way of using film to address something that exists beyond the boundaries of film, in our awareness. At the same time, it raises the question of how our attention and our perception of time shift through the process of viewing and creating the film and alter our relationship with the world outside the film.

4. What do you want to make next?

I still want to explore the idea of structural films. I really enjoy the idea of working with film as a sculptural medium -- sculpting time and duration, working with the pace and the structure of the film. For further development, I want to try to work with analog film. In conversation with the context of film history analog filmmaking has a strong relationship with structural films. By recording light directly into the film itself, I want to explore this materiality of film. Other than that I would also want to explore film projection and the idea of expanded cinema -- think about how the film will be presented, in a way to break the linearity of the picture, allow the audience to enter and leave, to experience it in a different way.

Narrative in structural films is also something I want to get into more. My current fit works are often quite abstract, and I want to include narrative in a way to be able to communicate with the audience on different levels.

5. Why do you want to make it?

Analog moving image is something I am always interested in, it brings some nature of filmmaking embedded in its materiality. By wanting to include narrative in structural film and exploring expanded cinema, I intend to explore the political nature of the modernist aesthetic that lies between the audience and the film. Instead of a picture being projected directly into the mind, l like the idea of the film projection works as an image and light source to be experienced.

6. Relation to a larger context

Landscape and industrial pollution(social aspect around it) Who has the power to alter the landscape Effect on personal stories and individuals.