Marieke/methods

What? Objective observation How? Procedure Why? Motivation

Dancer project

What?

A dancer is making fluid movements she is alone in a space. The space she is in is dark and she is the subject that is followed. The following of the dancer depends on her movement. It seems like she’s floating or maybe swallowed by this dark space she is interacting with. The colours are dark with blue undertones. Except the limbs of the dancer those are a pale light blue and seem to light up in the space. The atmosphere seems claustrophobic even though she seems to be floating. It seems like there is a limited space and frame in which she is able to move. The video contains an atmospheric sound.

How?

The dancer was moving on the floor. While she was making these fluid movements I followed her with my handheld camera. The perspective is from above with my camera moved downwards to the dancer. This was because I was standing on a high balustrade and she was on the floor downstairs. This made it easy to follow her movements and film her from a downwards perspective. After the filming process was done I edited the video in After Effects. Here I changed the colours and contract with 3 different filters all in a dark blue tone. The contrast is quite high hence the big difference between dark and light. Why?

What I have always admired about dancers is that they seem so at home in their bodies. Since there seems to be a very aware connection to themselves. This transfers in the way they are expressing their movements. So in a certain way there is no disconnection between body and mind, they are one. This makes them very connected to their surroundings as well since they interact with a certain space. I wanted to separate the body from its surroundings, so it’s floating while it is so present. Which might sound a little paradoxical since being present is often associated with being grounded. Because of this contradiction I wanted to research the relationship between internal and external and this project was my first aim at that.

R.E.F.L.E.C.T project

What?

For this project I designed a video installation with accompanying book. The installation exists of different computers screens which are lined up in a corner. There are 2 different videos which are sometimes playing in the same or a different pace. So it seems that the screens are interacting with each other. The screens are sometimes grey but in a certain rhythm they change to coloured images. The book which accompanies the installation has different spreads with photos and texts in the same visual style as the installation. Visually the imagery is glitched and contains altered film and images in which the colour channels are adjusted. Certain things you see are: A mouth with an eyeball rolling inside of it, glitchy loading portraits of my own generation and nature imagery. The videos contain distorted digital sounds.

How?

For the installation I used different computer screens for the two videos which I all connected to their own media player. I didn’t play them exactly at the same time so when I turned them on I would see how the images would connect with each other and adjust them if I wanted to change the connections between the images. The screens were stalled in a metal construction and they were placed in a corner. All of the video images were altered in After Effects and edited in Premiere. I adjusted the colour channels in After Effects. For the book I altered the images in Photoshop and transformed them into negatives while cutting them up and changing the channels to get this glitched effect. To turn all of this in a book I used InDesign. Why?

In this project I researched the thin line between our physical and digital reality. I was interested in the Turing test which researches if a computer has the same intelligence as a human. So I wondered why wouldn’t they? Since computers were designed because of our ability to construct them maybe we aren’t that apart from them. Especially with all of the current developments. At the same time we can alter our own representation and identity in this computer: the digital world. Has our digital identity become the personification of our self now? In this way, our digital and physical lives are hard to separate. With all of these assumptions I designed a Twilight Zone of the line between this physical and digital reality.

Lost Encounters

What?

The location is a forest. It starts with a dark fade into the environment while the sound starts. There are characters that are interacting with the forest and they are all young men. The images of the men in the forest are in a rhythm switched with imagery of the forest alone. The rhythm in which the imagery is edited is sometimes fast with rapid cuts and sometimes slower. The images are either a bright red or a darker purple combined with red. The compositions contain one person in the forest, a group in the forest or the forest alone. The sound is a reversed soundtrack which adds to the surrealist surroundings.

How?

I filmed the video with a handheld camera. During the filming I didn’t gave the characters any directions. I was just filming them from a distance when they weren’t noticing. Which was funny because they all interacted with the forest like they were still kids. So I wanted to capture this. In the meantime I was filming the parts of the forest that I found particularly beautiful. The altering of video was done in After Effects in which I used different filters and played around with the saturation. The final edit was done in Premiere where I added slow-motion to certain parts and the rapid cuts.

Why?

To me it is very interesting how a filmmaker can play with time and memory. I was curious if I could combine this feeling of the past, present and future. In a way I wanted it to be a representation of a déjà vu and predictive dream at the same time. There are flinches of memory and hunches of what is about to come. It is nostalgic in a way since I used the soundtrack of the first game I ever played with my dad and reversed it. While the altering and rhythm of the images give the film the atmosphere of a dream and a sense of the hereafter.