Blog 3- Production Notes on "Stalker"

I cannot speak for my partner, and frankly, this video assignment ended up being highly collaborative. I can’t quite parse out where my contributions ended and his began. I know that neither of us were slacking, and that we both brought much effort and (admittedly spontaneous) creativity to the project. I will try, though, to speak from my perspective.

My concept was based on a personal frustration with current gender-based romantic dynamics: often, women are still expected to wait for men to ask them out, rather than the other way around. I took this oddly archaic dynamic and stretched it beyond my personal experience of frustratedly noticing disinterest when pursuing someone, and the idea passed through self-mockery and into the realm of absurdity. I looked again: what if a woman REALLY doggedly pursued whom they wanted? It stretched further into the realm of the suspense genre, since I like the tension that exists in suspense films. The main character lost any autobiographicality, got slapped with the label “crazy,” and the film was begun.

My technical goals were simple, since my technical skills are minimal. I wanted to learn more about handling a camera with stability and grace (We took turns, we shot about half and half of the scenes.) I wanted learn the basics of Final Cut. I just wanted an excuse to try shooting moving images again, since cinematographic techniques differ much from the still photographic techniques that I have already studied.

One technical aspect that is tied conceptually to the plot is the long hallways shot. It is supposed to give a feeling of increasing suspense and tension, which is tied to both the genre and the situation, and it does this through cinematography: the camera begins much further away from Ben than it ends. Lots of over-the-shoulder shots and first person shots are used for conceptual reasons, too: I wanted the audience to get uncomfortably inside the head of the unbalanced main character.

The only post-development fluke that changed the final product was the inability to shoot again. We wanted to redo a few of the shots, and that couldn’t happen. If I could change anything, I would take Melissa’s advice and change the audio on the long hallways shot. I would also reshoot it to make it slightly shorter and more dramatically different from beginning to end. Andrew’s sarcastic feedback that it “really captured the tedium of stalking” actually kind of hurt my feelings, because he so perfectly said exactly what was wrong with that shot. Other shots would be redone- I want different dialogue in the opening scene, for instance.

But this is what it is, now. I like it well enough, since the goal was to learn more about film-making, and I did. Also, it actually succeeds on one artistic point: the main character really does come across as crazy. That's more to the credit of the actress Gal than to the credit of either of the film-makers, though.

I can haz Intellectual Curiosity?

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Blog 2 Redux: Nine Inch Nails' "A Perfect Drug"

Mark Romanek- "The Perfect Drug"- 1997
Album: soundtrack for Lynch's "Lost Highway"



Mark Romanek’s music video for “The Perfect Drug” by Nine Inch Nails contains a vague narrative, but atmosphere and emotion figure more prominently than plot in this gothic work. It is a montage of neo-romantic characters, landscapes and objects that are combined in an expressive way. The shots can be put into two different categories, split by the dominant color and feeling. One collection is mostly blue, and slow enough for the viewer to notice the surreal and at times pensive variety of actions and characters. These shots are mostly sorrowful.

The second collection is green, and the shots seem almost too fast for a viewer to consciously follow. This collection makes up a sequence that starts at 2:33, and it is why I chose this video to analyze. It represents an absinthe trip. It is only made possible by the uniformity of all the shots: they are all brief, and they are all shot in a special way or put through a filter to make them high-contrast and to replace any highlight values with bright green (instead of the normal white) and all the shadow values with black. These quick shots are made more chaotic by frequent flashes of video black in the middle of the brief cuts, which gives a strong strobe-light-like effect. In fact, it almost seems as though more screen time is taken up by black flashes than by images of characters in this sequence.

Drug trips can be portrayed in many ways, and it seems odd to present an absinthe trip in such a frenetic manner (absinthe is more of a depressant than a stimulant, since it’s mostly composed of alcohol.) These shots are edited in this way because this work is in the genre of a music video, and this genre demands the visuals to be strictly tied to the changing dynamics of the song. The complex, high-energy drum solo accompanying the visuals is undoubtedly the reason the edits are so fast. The staccato drums’ prominence in these measures requires that the accompanying edits follow their hyper rhythm until 2:59, the end of the sequence, and the introduction of a softer percussive sound that leads to more melody and vocals. Emotionally, the quickness of the shots, combined with the ferocity of the drums and the rage of the overlaying synthesized guitar sound, complement each other to communicate a feeling of angry, confused angst. I believe that this video is an effective work because it successfully delivers the emotions of sadness and anger that the song's instrumentals also convey.