For this project, I decided to create a video that on the surface portrays an everyday activity, yet demonstrates certain features unique to the modality of video. Alex, the main subject, decides to cook dinner but needs to buy groceries first. while shopping, he is repeatedly tempted to buy Cosmic Brownies because they’re delicious and reminiscent of his childhood. After all, he is an adult, and as an adult, he can buy his own toys and candy, because that’s what being an adult means.
Fresh Cuts
The main theme for the video’s style is frequent cutting of the clips that hits the same beats as the music. The music is fairly repetitive, providing the opportunity to keep a consistent rhythm throughout the video. I had to cut and rearrange parts of the original song to make it work with the number of clips I wanted to include in the video. This borrowed techniques used in the previous audio project. Those techniques were very transferrable to editing video as well.
Although the video shows two primary actions — shopping and cooking, the way in which it is arranged resembles a montage. I think this video is closest to a rhythmic montage as the shots are not just cut to the beat, but also since the corresponding actions that occur in the video line up to the rhythm of the song. [1]
While editing the clips, I had to be very conscientious of the exact actions that were going on in the shot. I had to carefully time everything to make it match the rhythm of the music to the best of the footage’s ability. For example, I timed Alex’s blink to the hit of the snare drum from the song. I also made use of selectively cutting the action happening in the clip to the rhythm of the song. For example, the actions of Alex debating whether to put the brownies in his basket are cut to the rhythm, as well as all the shots of him cutting the vegetables. Taking the timing of all these actions into account in addition to the timing of cutting to the overall music was pretty challenging, since I didn’t originally plan all the details when filming. For almost every instance, I had to carefully cut and time the clips with the footage I already had to work with.
Given the rhythm of the music, I had to make a lot of cuts. Every other measure of the song contained about 5 cuts over just a second or two, and this consistency of cuts remained throughout the entirety of the video. A few technical challenges that came out of that were the sheer amount of cutting that was necessary, as well as dealing with stabilizing footage. I didn’t have a stabilizer or tripod, so a lot of my footage was shaky, especially when I walked around. I used Adobe Premiere’s warp stabilizer feature (which takes a painfully long time to process) to stabilize the footage.
I applied the stabilization to every clip after I made all the cuts, and that proved to be quite problematic. I realized that the feature would use just the clip that was cut to stabilize instead of the entire source video it came from. That resulted in very inaccurate stabilization, and a lot of the short clips weren’t even able to be stabilized because it was too short. After running into this issue, I ended up stabilizing the source videos (which took even longer because there’s a lot more footage in total needed to stabilize), and then re cut everything. Definitely a lesson learned.
All About Arrangement
Let’s talk about the clip that shows Alex walking backwards outside of County Market. You may have noticed it comes from the same shot as the opening scene. The reason I included him walking in reverse was because after filming, I realized I didn’t capture any footage to serve as a transition between County Market and the apartment. I felt that the context switch from the two settings without some sort of transition was too jarring, so I had to make use of the footage I had to create a transition.
I think the decision I made to reverse the walking in footage was the best I could do given the situation since it was the most accurate way I can provide “visual evidence” for the action. Hampe describes “visual evidence” by claiming, “It is the actual scene as it’s recorded on film or videotape that has to provide the visual evidence for the audience of what occurred while you weren’t there.” [2] In my case, with the footage I had, reversing the entering scene was the best way I could provide a notion of exiting. This was made possible due to Adobe Premiere’s feature of reversing clips.
<Side rant> Actually, it was really annoying because Premiere didn’t allow me to stabilize a clip and play it in reverse at the same time. It was pretty frustrating because intuitively, I can’t see why a video needs to be representing a forward movement of time in order to apply their stabilizing algorithm. I worked around this by stabilizing clips first, then exporting them, reimporting the stabilized clips, and then used those to do reversed footage. Why you gotta do me like that, Adobe? </side rant>
I believe the ability to not just technically do this, but do this and preserve/create new meaning is something unique to the video modality. With text based modalities, there isn’t a clear notion of chronology, so “reversing” it isn’t very applicable. Reversing text yields incoherent words or sentences. As for audio, although there is a clear notion of chronology and it is pretty easy to reverse an audio clip technically, it’s almost impossible to make meaning of sound being played backwards because it usually sounds like a completely different sound altogether. Without the knowledge that it is a reversed audio clip, people would typically try to make out a “forward” sound. I would argue it would be even harder to decipher reversed audio than reversed text, since at least with text we can mentally rearrange the discrete letters or words to decipher the message, but the mental capability to rearrange the chronology of audio is not something most humans can do. However, with video, humans are able to make meaning from a reversed clip. We can typically identify when a clip is in reverse because of certain cues such as the direction of gravity, the posture of people walking, the direction people are walking (because ya know, people usually walk forward), etc. This provides the context needed for a viewer quick enough to make meaning of the situation.
I also believe this ties into the basis of the Kuleshov Effect. As the video claims, “the meaning of film was not only in spatial composition, but in the arrangement of shots… film can transcend space and time, and the viewer can construct the geography in their own heads as they’re watching the film.” [1] Not only did the clip of Alex walking backwards out of County Market provide a parallel and offered symmetry with the initial scene of him walking into County Market, and not only did the reversing of the clip offer a notion of movement and direction, implicating that Alex was leaving County Market, this clip essentially fulfilled a recursive, self defining characteristic of being a transition scene. Kuleshov found that viewers of a video create meaning from the order of shots more so than the content of one shot by itself. With that, the clip in question can essentially be the transition clip simply because it is used in that way. By piecing together the checking out shot, this reversed shot, and the establishing shot of the next setting, the viewer can make meaning that the reversed shot was the transition, just from the way it’s used. Ain’t that nifty?
Conclusion
Overall, I believe that the modality of video not only offers the things talked about above, but is also the modality that offers the most density of information per unit time. It engages multiple senses and has an inherent sense of chronology (or the ability to break chronology and still generate new meaning). The recent advancements in technology have made it not just possible to create, edit, and share video content easily, but have made it the norm. In 2018, you can’t claim a communication app is really a communication app unless it supports video. After working through this project, it is very apparent just how much planning, attention to detail, and time needs to go into producing just a few seconds of a video. After all, creating content that has a high information density will certainly take longer.
I believe in the future, the way we communicate will involve more of modalities like video and perhaps others that don’t even exist yet that support a higher bitrate of information density. Nowadays, people are getting better at absorbing information from all types of sources at a faster rate, and I expect this trend to rise. Conversely, it means that as the ones doing the communicating, we need to expand our scope in the ways in which we do so, and be able to adapt and evolve to the new ways we will be expected to communicate in the future.
References
[1] Filmmaker IQ: The History of Cutting — The Soviet Theory of Montage
[2] Barry Hampe: Visual Evidence
