I’ve just had my first thunder storm experience here at i-park, there has been an almighty downpour following a really gloopy, humid day where you almost feel choked when breathing in. It’s a strange and uncomfortable type of heat, like something is crawling on you (which doesn’t help the general tick paranoia). At least sitting in the studio is both cosy and cool, meaning I can watch and listen to the downpour form the safety of my hut, while playing radio 4 over the internet.
Anyway today has been somewhat more productive than yesterday, where I felt a little lost and unsure what to focus on. Obviously it didn’t help that the day kicked off (excuse the pun) with the dismal football result, and then developed into a very muggy, close day again, which means being continuously dive-bombed by insects while walking in the woods. We did make use of the common room though, watching a silly film (Art School Confidential) which was fun. As for working on the film, I started with collecting the taglines, and then today I’ve been organizing them- some of them are really quite amusing (“Woman goes around tree”; “The girl in the bush”; “girl with laptop by waterfall”?!). The idea is to use them to write a loose story and then act out each instruction as a scene, thus enacting the experience of being in nature and using the taglines as both instruction and description.
I am also considering including taglines which aren’t just restricted to ‘woman in nature’- possibly by using some of the ‘couple in nature’ tags as well, as they tend to be very descriptive, almost approaching stage directions: “They are holding hands, walking and hugging. She is acting playful and is jumping all around the man.” For now though I am concentrating on filming the ‘single woman’ ones, starting today with ‘woman dances in the rain’ (see picture). I have to get over the sheer stupidness of it, then it becomes quite fun.
I like the idea that these taglines have created a kind of template of stuff for me to do, a score even, for me to interpret within the given guidelines, meaning that my experience of being in nature, becomes the work and is structured from the outside by a set of descriptions whose conception is purely commercial. From the research I did before, they always advise how the stock video creator must avoid being artistic, must avoid poetic titles and must think only in terms of what will sell: it’s a really utilitarian form of image making.
And its also important that it’s a form of image which is inseparable from the text- since it is the keyword and tagline which makes it searchable and therefore sellable/ viable. This also relates to my ideas on the average, in that these stock videos are both searched and databased through probability, according to the inputted keywords, but also since the one you are most likely to see first is the one most viewed by everybody else- creating a kind of feedback loop of information. I suppose it will also end up as a kind of diary as well, a kind of snapshot of the time spent here so that the record is the document.
