As I mentioned on my previous entry: ... Platform-Spring has been a hard making process so far. I’m blending the images frame by frame and am allowing my daily insights to take over. The problem is that these insights change a lot and sometimes I’m happy with a good part of the film then I take a break – a week or more – and when I come back I don’t like everything I see, just some bits so I start changing again the bits I don’t like.
These breaks started happening more naturally as the second half of 2016 got more manic with the “paying the bills” side of my life. The hiatus sometimes was over two months and like with every book, there’s a point a writer has to say: stop! I did that to the Platform-Spring back in October, but I didn’t want to look at the final cut for a while. I wanted to be a bit detached from it in order to accept what it has become. Now, end of December, I am able to reassess it.
One of my favourite insights about editing comes from the online course on film production – Digital Storytelling – says:
“editing – even on a ‘normal’ film – is not so much a putting together as it is a discovery of a path… a vast amount of preparation, really, to arrive at the innocuously brief moment of decisive action: the cut – the moment of transition from one shot to the next – something that, appropriately enough, should look almost self-evidently simple and effortless, even if it is noticed at all.”
Walter Murch. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nd Ed. (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2001), p.4.
And that is it really, Platform-Spring has become what it is. I’m proud of the process but still not sure of the piece individually but I have to stop. I have to finish editing Platform-Summer (which I’m almost there) and post-produce and edit Platform-Autumn.
Now, what I really want is to be able to see the video installation ready, with all the 5 videos together. So, as soon as I finish the 4 Platforms, I’ll start working on an illustration of the installation – it’d be nice to have a proper 3D animation of the videos, but that’s going to be another story.
Here is the link to the short version of Platform-Spring, let me know what you think ;-)
