「Positions through Iterating」week 1
Because during the discussion in the last class, I noticed the impact of cinematic language on my work, and I began experimenting with narrative through the arrangement of images in the translating brief. So this week, I attempted to merge some film shooting techniques with flat narrative. The main technique I used this time was the multi-take cut, an editing technique in which the exact same action is filmed from various angles all around the subject, then edited together with jump cuts amongst all the different angles. In the final piece, what we feel is a complete narrative of an event, but if each shot is examined separately, it is narrated from many different perspectives collaborating to complete the story.
Therefore, I aimed to find one hundred different ‘camera positions’ to document the same event, and then complete my multi-take cut of this event. To achieve this goal, I had to find an event that many people would be observing and recording with cameras at the same time. I chose the total solar eclipse that occurred on April 8th. I found one hundred clips of the eclipse observed from different geographical locations on TikTok and attempted to arrange them in chronological order, completing the multi-take cut of these one hundred camera positions.
The most interesting aspect for me after completing this multi-take cut was that the videos I found had different pixels, tones, and exposures, which made the transitions between shots particularly noticeable during editing. This aspect brought the cameras and the photographers who were thinking behind them, which are often hidden in movies, to the forefront. What I saw was no longer a smooth narrative (which is often pursued in many film edits) but the entire set, the positions of the cameras, and the photographers contemplating behind them. By incorporating this into my iteration, the process of a total solar eclipse turned North America into a vast film set, with one hundred frames representing one hundred excited photographers capturing the event from different locations in North America.