This is how you disappear

This submission for 2008 HSC by Anke Vermeulan was part of a body of work comprising photographic works, documentation and installation. I’m placing this here so any student in the current year who is considering a video submission can get a good idea of what goes into a successful work in this media area.

During term 1 of Yr 12 Anke had a clear idea of some of the components of her Body of Work and over the Xmas break scripted and filmed the first part of this work. It was to have been a music video clip that still required a green screen sequence. After some long discussions she decided to complete the green screen sequence and open out the concept to include multiple videos in the one edit. Over the next term she scripted and shot the main sequence of this work whilst refining the green screen/chroma keying, as both works now included this, and the second shoot was more complex, because of some reflectance problems which made the chroma keying quite tricky. However the work still needed more to pull it together. After prototyping the split screen sequences it was decided to include some home video footage, text and an appropriated sequence to introduce the whole work. I had mentioned the works of Andre Tarkovsky as a possible source and she settled on a small sequence from ‘The Mirror”. The scene was a slow dolly from a hallway to a room. The beauty of this was that it provided a workspace in which to place elements of her own work projected onto floor, ceiling, walls and into picture frames within the room. A nice idea that was a technical nightmare requiring extensive use of the motion capability of the software and long hours of editing for her and a steep leraning curve for me. By the end of term two the work was beginning to take shape but the sequencing and the pace of the work needed a lot of refining. The text transitions were still a little clumsy and it was decided to link each transition from a common letter within each word, slowly getting there. The soundtrack was only in skeleton form at this stage and required much more than. In term 3 Anke brought in a recorded dialogue which set the whole tone and made it so much easier to sequence an ambient score around it. Long hours scouring sound libraries and it was beginning to come together. The final touch was a transitional link using an 3 sec grab from a Fellini movie, that joined the opening to the body of the video. Syncing the soundtrack to the video was labourious and we were both beginning to fray at the edges by this time. In between all this came the development of a body of photographic work drawn directly from the documentation of the filming process and some other works. The roulette wheel that features in the film was constructed by her and included in the body of work.

Screen shot 2010-12-02 at 3.20.51 PM

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This is how you disappear

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