The Incident Criticale

Version:1.0 StartHTML:0000000168 EndHTML:0000008829 StartFragment:0000000487 EndFragment:0000008812

The incident that, for me was critical came not from music, like it probably aught to for a music student. Instead it came from the music video crafted part of the project. Let me explain.

Pick up a camera, pick out something to shoot, shoot it for about ten minutes and then edit it down to about three minutes is no attitude to music video direction. I'm sure I always knew that but somehow I it all slip in favour of a robot suit. The suit was made of brown cardboard and Matt wore it and talked around like a robot, and that was our entire concept. Like the very costume itself, it had a weak atheistic structure with no brain behind it.

Let me start at the beginning.

I was away when the finer details of the music video were explained as well as for the digital arts lecture in which Tim Dollimore went through the various ways to inexpensively produce a music video so from the very start, I was in the dark. Matt and Jade who were at both lectures had put a string of ideas together involving stop-gap animation (think Aardman) and a sort of hand-puppet realisation of the lyrics to the song. I initially thought it was a bad idea since a lot of the ideas they had involved being outside and if there is one thing I know about making videos on the cheap (and possibly the only thing) is that if you film outside then the uneven natural light makes the film look like a home video. The idea of theirs I really did like was the stop-frame animation and I bargained keeping that if we replaced the hand puppets with a pop-up book that played out the lyrics. My reasoning was that if the world was on paper, we could do it inside under controlled lighting conditions. So I then went about thinking of how I might make a pop-up book. I had never made one before so first things first I went on the net and learned how to make basic pop-up parts. Once I was relatively confident with the engineering involved I took the first lyric of the song and planned a two page, multi-faceted pop-up that could be choreographed to the music. It took about two long days. And there were three more verses and two chorus' more. I gave up pretty sharpish.

It wasn't as if I was giving up on the whole process however, I had a plan. A plan in which I wouldn't spend all my waking hours cutting and gluing. I was going to put Matt in a robot suite, film him messing around the place and then edit it together into a charming, quirky video. So I spent that night making a cardboard robot video. I'm no tailor I admit.

The next day was a Monday and we had to have something to show for Tuesday so we had to work our socks off to have something ready. We raced to college to pick up a camera, anticipating that we would get the camera early and do some rehearing for the dusk/evening shooting schedule I had envisioned. We of course were informed once we got to the technology department that digital cameras were only being allowed out until five o'clock rather than the usual nine thirty the next morning. My idea was shot in the air and we had to show something. We went home with the camera and over a cup of tea decided what we could shoot in the limited time available. Since we only had about four hours and Jade could not get to use any time before three of those were up, we told her not to bother coming and that we would make do with just the two of us. Matt had an idea of going into the woods and filming something like Big-Foot footage. It was ridiculous but it could work, or so we thought.

Without any plan in our minds whatsoever we went into the woods and filmed about half an hour (in the space of a few hours) of Matt as strange, cardboard forest-bot, a Sasqubot if you will. Within moments of returning home and loading our footage up on the computer I think both Matt and I were struck with a heavy dose of reality. Our video footage was awful. Really really rubbish. I would not have it shown at college even with the arbitrary “work in process” disclaimer, this was terrible.

I wasn't quite sure how what we had did had become so terrible, we had been filming for hours and everything that people with cameras usually do. Then it hit me; we hadn't really done any work at all. What I had totally neglected was that the filming process is not a creative process at all, in fact it probably requires the least time of any of the process one has to go through when making a video. We had set aside to film something but speaking in terms of content, we had nothing to film. We had no narrative, not time line, no concept and no sign of any effort. For the Tuesday lecture I explained all this to Rick and to my surprise Matt produced from his bag my pop-up book that I had abandoned. Everyone in the class including Tim and Rick thought the idea was cute and conceptually strong and when I explained that it took ages to do the consensus from the group was “so?”. Them saying that spoke directly at me and made me really think about how I had gone about the video and probably many other projects in the past. It made me think that if something is dauntingly hard to do, it will probably have a better result than something that is easy to do, and it's not as if I'm ever too busy to cut out paper.

That weekend I spent all my time (free or not) making more pop up stuff and even planned a little shooting schedule. Because I had planned it all, the filming took about forty minutes and the editing took about an hour. Hard work had paid off.

So for my critical incident I have to say it was the time I, thought lazy workman ship, made a poor video which in turn taught me to plan, organise and put in the work behind the scenes. In the end it was more fun anyway.