Platform – Winter (a work in progress)

I’ve just realised I wrote about Platform – Summer before adding the entry for Platform – Spring. So here it is.

Lots of things have happened since my last post that prevented me from working hands on on the Spring video, however, subconsciously I’ve been thinking a lot about it as now and then I have a new insight about the whole project.

I’ve shot the Spring version and already have ideas for the Summer and Autumn ones – both inspired on old silent films so no sounds on these ones… and to be honest no sound for the Spring one either. After collecting some sounds and being very interested in them I decided to do all of the 4 Platform films silent. I still have a lot to learn about making these films happen and adding the sound editing would be too much, I think.

I’ve been watching some great B&W films and got really thinking about how mainstream cinema was more daring. I’ve watched October by Sergei Eisenstein & Grigori Aleksandrov, Micheal by Carl Theodor Dreyer,  Brief Encounters by David Lean and Story of a Love Affair by Michelangelo Antonioni. They showed me how to work with more sharp editing, really close closeups and double exposures so I decided to try some of these techniques because as a photographer, I used to love trying new techniques when photographing with film or printing.

So I decided that for the Spring film, I wanted to do double-exposures, but I’m shooting with a DSLR through my window so I kept analysing how I could make this happen. Coincidentally, I started taking the DLR twice a week at peek times and realised that the passengers use their mobiles phones more for texting on the DLR than on the tube – it makes sense as is not currently possible to use mobile phones on a significant proportion of the Underground system. That got me thinking of a way to capture images of these people and then layer the images over the time-lapse ones.

I didn’t want the passengers to notice I was doing this, though as I knew these people wouldn’t be recognisable on the pictures anyway. I then did some research on how to create macros for my Android phone and came up with one that gives me access to my mobile phone camera without actually triggering the LCD screen. So I can take pictures without looking and without being noticed either.

After some tests I started clicking away and got some really cool images like this one below:

I’m now working on the double exposures. I’ve got a good number of inside the DLR images to layer over the time-lapse ones… it’s quite time consuming to find the right match but I’m enjoying it.

A quick snippet of the first frame:

In the mean time, I’m working on the Platform – Summer. It’s going to be shot using a digital pinhole camera, which I’m adapting on my Nikon D90, and it’ll be shot on the 20th June – summer Solstice, of course!

Shooting wasn’t easy. Making the “lens” for the digital pinhole wasn’t either. Figuring out how to do the exposure compensation throughout the day was hard. Changing angles to better show the people on the platform…all these things happened and I felt super thrilled I was dancing with the music and not being too bothered about restricting myself to shoot from the first angle or to follow a particular rule…I’m enjoying more the process and less worried about restricting my art. “Let it flow!” I tell myself. “I’m doing this because I like it, the world is already full of restrictions, rules and systems that we have to obey…I love this creating process too much be doomed to my own made up concepts. What’s the fun of making art if we can’t be playful; let it flow and happen and enjoy what happens” – I carry on, the conceptual artist I’m trying to break free – at least for this project – from hehehe.

Developing, editing and putting all together…lots of thinking. Should I reshoot?! – NO, remember to do what you feel like. Forget thinking. Feel it. Indeed, I felt I could carry on shooting until I got whatever I FELT it was right. Then after some trials I realised it wasn’t working, I mean not the way it would improve so much to justify. Arghhh, so hard to stop thinking!!!

Then again I remembered to work with the adversity, to let it flow and after looking at the images I had I decided to stick to the first batch, they looked so much better. Not sure if I turn them

into BW, though … leaving it to marinate. Finish Platform-Spring first!

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