Abstraction Screening Response

     The Pipilotti Rist interview was a fun watch, in particular I liked when she spoke about how the camera can provide a perspective of animals, children, and even rocks. It was interesting thinking about how if the camera was zoomed in on her hand it would seem like it was a kilometer long but if you zoom out and shoot her whole body from far away she would only be a little dot on the screen. It seems like Rist really enjoys breaking away from the conventional way of thinking when it comes to setting up her shots and creating her films. I also found the video of the girl trapped behind the screen really interesting, it's not super uncommon to see a filmmaker play with the frame of the scene their shooting, but having the actor press up against the screen like they're trying to escape the frame was a really cool concept that I haven't really seen that often, it definitely is creepy looking and implicates a breaking of the 4th wall as it directly addresses the constraints of being a recording limited to the frame that is capturing everything. The video of the museum of art was really just a series of what I would consider to be b-roll, but it served to show the museum and give the viewer a pretty good understanding of what happened there from the perspective of someone who was just walking through looking at exhibits and others visiting, I might use a serious of b-roll shots myself like this for our project. 

    Frames and containers was extremely informative and I feel like it touches on a similar topic as Rist's video of the girl trapped behind the screen. I agree that most modern films definitely limit themselves by sticking to the standard rectangular 1920 x 1080 dimensions. I also liked how the narrator discussed creating a frame without using negative black space but instead putting a window in front of the subject or filming through a mirror, this concept of using a physical part of your environment as the frame really stuck with me and I'm definitely going to try and apply this to my feature projects.

     Habitat was visually very interesting to watch, but I actually think the audio is what stuck out to me more, a weird sense of vast open space is created from the echoing effect the static noise has. It felt like I was physically inside of whatever this environment was because of how the sound sort of just surrounds you, which I assume to be the intent of Ratté because the clip is titled "Habitat" so there's definitely some kind of physical space / environment being implied here.    

    Black Refraction gave me a few good ideas of how I might try and tackle our abstraction project, none of the clips have any context, and some of them are, similarly to Habitat, not even shots of physical things just strange effects and glitches. The music somehow made everything flow together really well, most of the movements in the shots and the cuts seemed to be synced to the beat of the music which made everything still feel as though it still belonged together. This paired with having watched the montage video afterwards has made me think that music videos lend really well to abstraction because the audio the viewer listens to is a sort of through-line that can connect your shots even if those shot visually have little or nothing to do with each other. 

        Overall this screening has given me a lot of ideas to brainstorm for our abstraction project, and I think I'm going to attempt to make a sort of Overtonal Montage using music and other various sounds to connect a bunch of b-roll that is also tonally similar.