Tuesday, March 5, 2013

KidPlay

KidPlay, 2013

This video, a response to Wisconsin Death Trip (a book compiled by Michael Lesy of photographs by Charles Van Schaick and clippings from newspapers at the time that Schaick was taking those photographs), is made to be used in our class's multimedia event on Saturday. As such, it was designed to be viewed along with experimental music (I envisioned a rather droning-like sound from the previews we saw of the rehearsals), but in the absence of that music to put along with it, silence is the next best thing.

My focus in this video was childhood as a whole, taken from the perspective of people as they age. Wisconsin Death Trip features many crystal-clear, beautiful photographs of moments in the lives of the Wisconsin residents, but memories very rarely, if ever, work that way. They aren't clear or clean, and frequently aren't even coherent. I wanted to show this through the low quality of both the footage and, frequently, the camera abilities (or lack thereof) of the person taking the video. Most of the video clips I chose to use (all of which were found on YouTube) were home video-type footage, taken to be shared perhaps with family, but which ended up shared with hundreds, thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people with no relation whatsoever to the children in the video.

The accelerating, frantic pace of the clips references how fast childhood seems to have gone by as someone ages. At first, it seems fairly normal-paced; but as one ages, childhood seems to have taken up less and less time, and gone by faster and faster, until only jumbled snapshots of memories remain accessible. However, the full memories still exist, even if they can't be accessed; this is true as well of the video. The clips were not cut in order to make them shorter, but rather sped up faster and faster until only a frame or two is visible from them, leaving the entire clip still there.

4 comments:

  1. Such a great video. The Rhythm is priceless, the visuals are rewarding, and your contrasting idea to Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip is an approach that I can relate to a lot.

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  2. i enjoy it so much!!! It's funny, adorable, and just moving. I miss my childhood life. :'(

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  3. I like your idea that Wisconsin Death Trip is not completely about death and darkness. Your video does a really good job of capturing the happy moments of life, and just life in general. A fantastic final product!

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  4. Gurl, u r kool. Very well done. Very interesting interpretation. Beautiful. Will b so gud wif errbody's vids. <3

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