So something I have been slowly working away at for some time is a “video painting”. A single shot composite video, re-imaginging Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen as a wind turbine instead of the classic Majestic stag image.
This video is a video sketch working towards the final work. the finished piece will also be presented with gold frame and name tag, the full works.
So I have been shooting some vlog style footage as I have been working on the Dissertation film. I have finally gotten around to editing some of them and posting them on YouTube and then of course up here.
This was from the first day of specifically planned shooting for the film. The plan was to film some driven Grouse moor, but I found a massive patch of fresh muir burn which was really very very fortuitous. The burn was masive and mis-shapen so looked like it had gotten otu of control, a scar on the hill but very useful for illustrating several points within the film. So, a bitter sweet discovery.
I subsequently made a few short experiments with that footage to help shape the tone and structure of the main dissertation film, most of them have already been shared here.
Novelist, poet and all-round cultural impresario Sir Walter Scott is renowned for inventing many of the myths of Scotland that still dominate how the country is imagined. His home in the Scottish Borders, Abbotsford House, brilliantly brings to life his romantic views of Scotland.
Colour grading is the process is adjusting and modifying the colour of your videos image. whether it is simply rendering accurate colour, or establishing a look and tone through a colour palette. It is a crucial step of the process and once that should not be rushed.
The footage from the camera is often quite flat, slightly low in contrast and almost gray looking. Cameras often have picture profiles to counteract this, essentially do the grade for you in camera.
But then you lose all control of what the image looks like and you have less flexability in how much you can change the image once a picture profile has been applied. Thats where shooting as neutral and low contrast an image as possible is very important. Some Cameras can shot in what is called LOG video. This is essentially a form of picture profile that saves as wide a dynamic range as possible. So whilst LOG will give a very flat gray image, it holds more colour information than non-Log video. Thus giving you more freedom in the grade.
These stills are example of the before and after stages of this process, from LOG footage to the first step of a grade being applied. Sometimes that is enough, sometimes for a more cinematic and stylised colour pallette a LUT can then be applied.
A LUT (or Look Up Table) is essentially a preset that changes the colour for you, it is at its most crude, an instagram filter for editing platforms. At its best, it is a way of creating mood and tone through adjusting the bias of colour in different areas of the image.
How and teal should be exagerated in the shadow tones, and oranges and coppers in the midtone for example.I personally find that LUTS are sometimes seen as a magic bullet, when they are only another tool or step int he grading process. I do use them, but I feel that there needs to be a specific reason as to why a LUT is being used beyond “It looking good”.
In these still for example, I was try to bring out the colours of the muir burn, thus exagerasting the impact of the burn on the landscape. so shadows have more teal pushed through them and green puleld out and more yellows and orange tones in the mid ranges.
“Walter Scotts phenomenally popular novels and poems created an image of Scotland as a land of sublime scenery and heroic chivalry.
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an… Why is it Scotts version rather than any of the many other nineteenth-century literary representations of Scotland that has endured in the popular imagination?
This lecture will explain why Scotts romanticised representations of Scotland were such a hit, and how his enduring legacy has helped or hindered Scotland as it seeks to define its place in Britain today. The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an…”
Description of the lecture on YouTube
Audio is in my opinion, more important than the visual when producing an edit. A viewer will put up with a poor quality image but will be instantly turned off by poorly mixed or recorded audio. A good audio track is to a video or film edit what a good road is to a car. You don’t notice it until the road surface deteriorates, then thats all you can notice.
The audio quality is something that I want to really push and use as a powerful tool to further the tone and emotive power of the timebased works I am currently developing. The pieces in question are all nominally under the title of Landsear or Land Sear, are visual essays that are exploring elements that my MA is exploring.
I presented an initial visual draft as a soley visual essay, with no audio at the last formative exhibition. Since then I have been exploring and refining the edit further, focusing mainly on the audio track and experimenting with voice over. Now V/O is a device that I have used on many occasions, but this time I have been treating the audio so that the feel and the subjective quality of it alters over time, in an attempt to build an increasing sense of unease or anxiety.
This short sketch edit is a more polished section, with the audio track, still a WiP giving a sense of where I think this stand alone piece may be going.
Work In Progress sketch video edit.
It is possible that it could become a stand alone piece, it was initially an excercise exploring visuals to accompany the dissertation. I however can see this becoming a multi-channel work.
This work being developing into “Arrested” the second channel exploring “Succession” shot in a healthy woodland. With the audio mix being very important, as the sound of birds and insects would be in stark contrast to the wind of the grouse moor.
First pass at the first chapter of my video essay. Needs a lot of refinment but I think the guts of the first chapter are there.
The land has always been altered by animals, whether by mega fauna or keystone species, such as Beavers, Wolves, Elk. The land has always been shaped by the animals that live upon it. The land scape biases certain animals, so it is a symbiosis, so the landscape whilst being dynamic, is more passive in this relationship.
The animals upon the landscape alter what plants grow, how they grow and what occurs within that landscape. Man is no different an animal, Man only has a greater degree of agency. Whilst one could also argue that man is a keystone species in some respects, creating certain habitats and environments that again bias certain animals and certain plants. A greater weight of argument could easily be made to the fact that we are merely an animal influencing the landscape beyond what we should be.
Man has always altered the landscape, as long as man has been within an environment, that environment has been altered permanently by Man. We think of the Anthropocene and the changing of the landscape by Man’s hand as a modern phenomenon. But is has always been the case. The tools at our disposal multiply our agency, and as our tools grow and our means of exploiting the landscape proliferate, again the influence that we can act upon that landscape is multiplied. Take those tools away, we still have an impact.
One could easily romanticize, with the distance of time and think of a past where Man lived in harmony with nature. But if you look into the record of the land, Man has altered it from its earliest beginnings. From as long ago as the Mesolithic era, when man burnt the forests of Scotland with the endeavor of farming, we’ve always dramatically impacted the landscape.
Any effort to alter or better the landscape now are also only able to be done within a certain degree of influence. We are impacted by the acts of our forefathers in that respect. The grand Scottish estate for example, can only perform so much conservation work within a certain degree of radiance based on a path set by past generations.
The landscape has a time horizon beyond that of any lifespan of a mere mortal human. That kind of long-term planning restricts what land managers now are able to do, they also restricted by other factors, more local in time than the actions of their past. Current government policy, subsidies, tenant farmers, public opinion, the wider economy, the availability of capital. All of these things are influencing factors on how a landscape may be managed and altered by Man’s hand.
But by doing so, Man also limits and inhibits the natural cycle that the fauna on that landscape will go through. By burning upland moors for Grouse shooting, one prevents natural regeneration of woodland, Man prevents plant succession. We hold our wild places, so-called, in a state of arrested succession. A monoculture of plants, so poor, that they can support very few animals. And those that they do support, are chosen specifically for the sport that is acted upon that landscape.
It is a managed landscape, but it is a farm. It is a farm designed to produce an abundance of a certain type of animal, so that a certain activity can happen upon it. No different to any farm that creates a monoculture, either for crops or for pasture for livestock.
The narratives built around our upland and wild places however, tells us this is a natural state of play. That these are wild places and that these are a normal natural state for them to be in. Fence off and area of upland moor and leave it, and plant succession will begin. Slowly at first with lichens and mosses, followed by blaeberries and heathers, and ultimately ending in woody perennials, trees and mature woodland. Again, this is a slow process and one that will usually one that will take more than one lifetime to complete.
External factors also have their part to play in inhibiting and encouraging a change of policy within and estate or managed landscape. The external factors I previously alluded to all impact what an estate may choose to do upon a landscape. Their hands not only being tied by the actions of past generations, but by much more local factors in terms of time.
Land management in any context, but particularly in an upland context is an incredibly long-term project. The external influencing factors are significantly shorter in their scope of time than what the land requires for its natural cycles to complete and to be influenced. Therefore and estate may operate to a five-year business plan, but will still have to consider 30, 60, 120 year timescales for certain activities of commercial or conservation work.
Certain activities are benefited or hindered by external factors. Each trying to enact its agency over those who are custodians and owners or managers of a landscape. Westminster government legislation also has its part to play and usually impacts commercial operations more than conservation works. Where within a Scottish context, the Scottish Executive having devolved powers over certain conservation and land management issues. Through reform is perhaps encouraging change, but is also inhibiting financial expenditure and development of certain things. These multiple competing factors are all balanced by those who have the estates and who manage those landscapes.
And again, the narrative is only ever simplified. The same simplification that tells us that our upland moors and these wild open hillsides are in a natural state, also tell us that those managing those landscapes are doing so only for their sole benefit and profit. And they do not consider the landscape or the people who live on or around it either.
The narratives surrounding those people is similar to the narrative told of the lairds that they have replaced. That they are gods over their domain and that they can enact and make sweeping changes at their whim. Whereas the reality, as always, is significantly more complex and nuanced than that. And sometimes only when a landscape has changed do we fully engage with what was there previously and question that change.
A stand of trees planted for commercial purposes as a crop in the 1800s, harvested now, is seen as a tragedy. Yet some would also see the changing of an already damaged farm landscape of a heather moor from one of a shooting ground to that of a wind farm as also being a travesty.
There’s no simple solution or answer to any of these questions, but the over simplification of the narrative is where most of the problems in my view begin.
I first saw this film in my mid teens, too young to fully appreciate just how much of a masterpiece Mallik had wrought in the jungle. But old enough to see the quality and appreciate that this was something different, this was not Saving Private Ryan.
Seeing this at that time has meant that each time I have returned to it I reach a greater depth with it. Another facet of the filmcraft that helps shape the story, themes or tone reveal themselves. And the impact it has had on my own tastes and filmcraft aslo make themselves apparent.
When I was 14, I did not (from memory) appreciate everything the crocodile in the first shot represented. But I did however, fall in love with the introductory sequence and the Melanses choir song. Watching it over and over and letting my developing critical eye become informed of the filmic grammar at play in this sequence.
Letting the medatitive pacing guide my eye around the composition, changing and leading what I was thinking about. Of what the camera was doing and how the shots read differently when the camera was held and the shot “breathed” compared to a smooth “hollywood” dolly style shot. How the lack of motivated sound created and otherwordly poignancy.
This form of poetic liltingly paced film making is something that I think only Mallik can do as well as he is here. Tarchovsky builds slow poetic tension, revealing new meaning as he holds the shot, but he is achieving a subtly different thing from Mallik.
It is a thin line that Mallik walks, as he runs the risk of pushing this style too far. And when he does, it strays into self indulgence, which some of his other later films, arguably have done. But this film, this film doesn’t, and this film teaches you everything you need to know about filmcraft.
