Sergei Eisenstein was a Russian film maker and film theorist who was the first person to theorise about montage and its effect on narration. Through montage he showed time as no single viewpoint. Through the process of splitting frames up he shows the audience connection in a non chronological way. Eisenstein's theory of montage is important to me in my work as it describes how I can show different points in time as connected events.
Response to Sergei Eisenstein |
If we focus in on the individual subjects in the montage series then a narrative of what is happening in the same space at the same time becomes clear. Common themes of the scene are shown. We gather a big picture narrative condensed into a short space of time. The photographs below are screenshots of my Personal Investigation. They are all taken in the area of the Strand. A connection is established when seeing the film because the scenes are all in an urban setting. Each segment of film lasts for 15 seconds. They then are broken down into 3 second pieces. Each 15 second scene is scattered throughout the film. The connection of timing that Eisenstein theorises about helps to describe my piece because of the way it switches back an fourth between scenes. The film has no narrative effect on the audience. This therefore means it is very hard to grasp a sense of timing - what happened first? Due to Eisenstein I have learned that this doesn't matter. I have instead enhanced the unclear measure of time in the film through the way in which the film will be seen by an audience. The way the piece will be displayed is on a continuous cycle. There is no beginning, middle or end. It simply exists as an exploration into other potential forms of street photography, capturing the rush of city life and a way of seeing how sound/music work together/against one another to change the way we look at film.
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'Most of what I want simply slips away like water flowing through a net, and always what remains are only vague, elusive fragments of images… that sink into countless strata in my mind.'
Robin Hood Gardens from billy leach on Vimeo.
1. Sound Loops |
From each video I cut out a small part of sound. I ended up with having five different loops. The loops overlaid one another. The most important loop is the bottom loop. The actual sound of this loop is a footstep. The loop lasts for three footsteps and then repeats. This creates a musical reference point firstly it gives a tempo to relate the composition to and it also gives a time signature for the other instruments to refer to. Since there are three footsteps included in the loop the music is in a time signature of 3/4 - meaning three beats per bar.
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2. Manuscript |
The second image above is the way I ordered each sound and matched it with the corresponding bar number. I wrote out how many times the three beat pattern heard in the bottom loop track was repeated (38 times) and then shaded in the amount of time each of the other loops were played for. This made it easier for me to organise when each instrument would play and for how long.
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3. Film/Sound/
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The film editing software that I used was iMovie. The top green audio file is the music and the bottom file is the sound. I created a midi file of the composed music that would play at the same tempo (115 BPM) as the sound file so that they don't go out of sync with one another.
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