I decided to edit a short video to document the MA Fine Art Digital low residency at Central Saint Martins in March 2024.
Recording events through photos and videos is a bit of a compulsion for me. My ex used to criticise me all the time for “taking too many photos” – but I enjoy doing it and value the resulting memories, so I continued regardless. It may be in part due to the overwhelming amount of travel I do for events, but my memory of them often becomes blurred and they merge into one big, indecipherable mush of recollection. This is why I make my landscape and architecture sketches when I am travelling – it grounds me in the place and provides a stimulus for memories when I look back through my travel sketchbooks. I also love taking photos and videos of people in all their chaotic human glory – it also helps me to remember people’s faces, expressions, mannerisms, personalities and the connection within communities - like a study in humanity… In 2019, I had been to so many events and was so cognitively overwhelmed, I started to have the disconcerting experience of Prosopagnosia – the inability to recognise people’s faces. I value individual identity highly, so this alarmed me.
I had footage of both my course mate, Dee’s performance, as well as my own from the interim show open night – which I used for the main body of the video, with other short clips layered over the top. I framed the video with the introductory and closing footage from Dee’s Mx Farms performance, taking clips which showed the positive audience engagement. In between, I used a short clip from my opening spiel, which the audience had responded to enthusiastically, followed by one of my favourite songs ‘Always On The Road’. I felt the lyrics of this song (out of the four I performed on the open night) were most appropriate to fit with the rest of the footage I had filmed during the Low Res.
I sorted through the clips on my icloud and downloaded all the footage I wanted to use; there was a mixture of footage of our artworks in the interim show as well as the workshops and gallery visits. I cropped each clip I used to around 3 seconds and tried to time it to the beat of the song – which was slightly challenging because a live performance isn’t usually that consistent in timing. I’ll be honest, I could have spent longer making it “perfect” but given that the footage was far from perfect (filmed impromptu, without my gimble), I decided not to be precious about it. I don’t have any intention to use it as anything other than a record of the Low Res – something to look back fondly upon and smile.
After uploading the clip to YouTube I added subtitles to make the video more accessible.
The Best of the Many Photos I took...
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