Observing Life

For this video, I focused on the idea of people dwelling on the past and how living your memories can take a toll on your mental and physical health. This something that has been engrained into society- to think and rethink about past events- and something that we almost innately impose onto ourselves. Often times you see people lost in thought- where their mind is at is not always clear but somehow thinking of the past often leaves a person melancholic, fearful, and disappointed. Though memories are not always bad, they can become that simply by overthinking and letting current emotions weigh you down so that joyous moments become memories you never want to visit again in order to save yourself the pain of having those times slip away.

https://vimeo.com/240598822

My first iteration of the video focused on a complete different aspect of life. It was meant to be about the feelings and sensations that one experiences throughout his or her workout.

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Then, I changed my entire concept to make it more widely-relatable, whereas the prior idea would only appeal to athletes. While thinking of how I would relay the messaged I described earlier, I experimented with various effects and filming angles to capture just that. In my final storyboard, I wrote out all the effects I would use such as the strobe effect and transparency to create a distortion in time, an overlapping of the past and present, and revival of old memories that almost seem to flash through or linger within your head.

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OBSERVING THE CITY

The movement of time and its effect on everyday things can be best observed in an environment where hundreds of events are happening simultaneously, such as the city. By taking pictures from various stances consistently every 10 seconds for 5 minutes each position, I noticed how the perception of time changes from scene to scene, and from object to object. While taking zoomed-out photographs of a busy street (6th ave between Washington and Waverly Pl. in particular), I saw that a lot of movement and the occurrence of many instances at one time and space gives the perception that time is extremely fleeting. As soon as the next photograph is taken after 10 seconds, so much already changes from the last photograph: the people, the position of things, etc. But while many things may change, some things just seem to stay static. When zooming into these almost static objects, such as plants, it seems as though time is at a standstill. Although in the zoomed-out images the subject was the street, the objects within the street created a story though the composition of all the different impressions they gave of time. Thusly, the zoomed in images simply show a closer look at just one of those small aspects of the street to reveal more about the effects of time that particular subject. The compilation of the 5 min, 10 second interval pictures of different subjects (zoomed in and zoomed out) can all be viewed in these following images:

After compiling all the consecutive images of each scene, it was time to make a composition of the pictures in each scene of the block to give an overall or particular description of the block. In the draft, I mostly used color grouping to relay a how despite the constant movement of time and the changes that come with it, one thing that seems to stay constant is color; and many times color is one method of how we categorize memories (color is linked with memories). In the final “block grid”, I again used color but reduced it to the two main colors that remind me of the street: light blue, dark blue, and red. The text in the center of the grid is the main indicator of that block because the billboard from which its taken sizes up to almost a third of the space. Also, it is the one thing that remains constant, despite the continuous movement of people along the street.

Finally, I created a linear reading of the block to document how layout can also change how time reads. As opposed to the grid, where everything is happening everywhere at once, the linear reading shows one portion of the block. I created an almost panoramic view by combining images from two different scenes that I photographed. I focused on incorporating the colors red and blue and showing how time can still appear differently no matter the distance from one space to another. By extending the length of the van, I showed how time seems to drag by when waiting on the stop light, whereas the combination of the black and red car depict the sudden change of subject that can happen at the blink of an eye once the cars begin to move. For the final linear composition, I chose to revolve around the theme that being and living amidst all the chaos going on, rather than observing, no one seems to notice the things surrounding them. Everyone is always so much in their own world, in their own thoughts, in their own agendas, that the things around them just swift right by them and past their “point of view”. I put a lot of attention towards the center of the page to emulate a person’s vision when in a situation like this. Towards the sides, I added fade to show how everything to the side of your focus “brushes past you” as it fades into your peripheral vision and eventually into nothingness. 

 

Observing Self

This first Time project entails recording a 24-hour day in life through pictures and critical thinking of how the concept of time may be represented. The first image shows the process of putting together a flip book of all these recorded moments in a day with captions that describe the scene.

This second photo depicts the process behind putting together the storyboard by selecting specific images from the 24-hour period to tell a particular story. Aspects like the spacing between the pictures and layout show the duration of a certain instance, the time gap between specific events, and so on.

 

Here are the final storyboard and flip book. In the storyboard, I manipulated time by rearranging the order of specific photos in which I took them to create a story that is different from what happened. I thought of making a story where I meet a “stranger” (the metal man-shaped object) and carry out a date with him that eventually stops (indicated by the red light). It ends with my departure home. On the other hand, the flip book accurately documents my 24-hour day with captions to describe each photo.

Finally, the third and last part of the project required students to make a time map of the events that occurred in the day based on how you memorize them. In my case, I chose to stick to one part of my day where I find a man-shaped object being thrown away and repurpose it for one of my future projects. The way I saw time and that particular memory was in terms of direction, for it happened along one street (going to the Hudson River and back). I separated the entirety of the memory by first indicating where my journey began (at my dorm building on the third floor level) and ended (the cafe by my dorm building). The reversal of the images taken at the cafe show that I was walking back toward my dorm on the opposite side of the street at which I began. The Hudson River acted as a separation point between the memories of my walk there and my walk back. The overlapping of bursted images is a “cinematic” approach to showing the elongated duration and the step-by-step process of something happening. In between the bursted image of me walking toward the Hudson, I included snippets of scenes that stood out along the way and would work in conjunction with my narrative. I overlapped 2 sets of images of windows where one is zoomed in to mimic the idea of “peaking inside” or taking a closer look at something. The narrative can be read via this link: Time- Final map narrative -p266do