Demet Adiguzel

Tied Down

My latest project Tied Down, was actually named after its soundtrack, started as a part of my PZI application assignment. For this assignment, we were asked to provide series of photos inspired by one of the seven deadly sins. I have chosen 'Lust' and along with the photos I have shot for this subject, I was also inspired to shoot a video.

I worked with two dancers from Codarts who in fact were in a relationship. This was intentional in order to capture the true chemistry between the subjects. The whole video was shot in six hours in a studio on black background. The subjects were asked to act certain emotions, reflect specific feelings such as rage, despair, desire, affection and their derivations. The purpose was to acquire the exaggerated but genuine description portraying an inter-gender relationship. In addition, I referred to how women are crushed under the norms of male-dominant cultures.

The soundtrack also had a solid role to present the work. I chose this specific piece because it gave the dramatic and even poetic tone that I intended to reflect. The postproduction was made on iMovie because of my lack of experience with more complicated video editing tools. The outcome ended up with losing the original quality since the tool had some problems related to speed alterations and I had altered the speed of most footage.

In the end, Tied Down was developed to visually speak for gender relations born by lust and the way they were balanced in our world. Respecting the feeling of the soundtrack of two minutes, the video intended to expose the intense secrets of a couple, their struggle and how they affected each other by directing the viewer's attention to particular symbols and acting.

The video can be viewed here : http://vimeo.com/user7626123/tieddown