chapter 0 - map of your head

Despite the very unusual and seemingly insensitive title, this short film tackles a dysfunctional family using non-standard documentary/experimental media techniques - it tries to get inside the late father's head by looking at his belongings and possessions, as well as conversations with the family.

The unique approach to stop-motion that seems to relate to the soundtrack is very enchanting, and the mixture of film sources used is both somewhat overwhelming and extremely intriguing. 

I feel like this is an interesting approach to 'getting inside someone's head'.

However, I am looking for a less 'short film' kind of outcome and more of a visual representation of a journey through.

With that in mind, here are questions I'm trying to answer:

1. Who's head am I trying to get inside?

2. How do I do this? How do I draw a map of someone's head?

3. Why is this important? How can it impact/change the viewer?

4. What format is this going to be in?

(Currently am leaning towards an After Effects project with minimum sound (but still present).

However I should probably explore the idea of both visual and melodic journey.)

The style of this short experimental film is amazing and I'm at a loss of words to explain how it's been done. To me it represents a thin wall between two worlds where if you look from a certain angle you can actually see through that layer.

Here are some After Effects experiments I've done, such as smooth zoom and 360 footage turn. I've just done these to get more comfortable with using VFX.

chaper 0 - infinite zooms & antisocialism

i decided to dive into the experiments for maps & networks even before i've quite sorted out the 'whats' and 'ifs'. earlier in the summer i found this video in the staff picks on vimeo and it blew my mind. it was gorgeous, rhythmic and to me looked like a cave into someone's mind. the director was inspired by one of the musicians and artists in the band, jan anderzén. the colours and patterns create a lovely flow that feels almost mesmerizing. 

''Once I zoomed infinitely into a single pixel and felt a path open, leading to the source of an unnamed nutriment.''

so then, obsessed as i was with the colours and the 'cutouts', i decided to make a test project using some photographs (macro photographs of oil/milk/ink and pressed flowers on tracing paper against natural light + quick shots of sunflowers), photoshop and after effects. this involved cutting out a lot of flowers on photoshop and using the camera tool in after effects, which might at first seem obvious and easy but is actually one of the most difficult tools because if you divert your attention for a second, you're most likely going to mess something up.. which i did multiple times.

i love after effects and i think this kind of a zooming in effect is actually brilliant. it creates a path of a sort, metaphorically, and allows one to look inside by pulling them deeper and deeper.

it's fascinating, and whilst i didn't really resonate with most of orlan's work, the one idea that i did enjoy was that the human body and mind should be explored before we get stuck in the bigger picture of online sites and maps of the world. throughout history we've only learnt the tiniest bit of what makes us human, and isn't that crazy? on that note, this following video is also exceptional:

What do we say we’re interested in? What are we actually interested in? In the intimacy of our smartphone or computer, we secretly tell Google what we’d like to know about.
By fetching most looked up words from Google search and Google news in real time, and by bringing them to the public space through visual and sonic signals, visual artist Romain Tardy proposes to the visitors an involuntary self-portrait of our contemporary networked society.

and last but not least, i'm aware music videos are usually frowned upon as they are made for the mainstream/general audience but i found the particular style and ideas of this imagery to be really good at portraying with only the slightest indication the atmosphere of anti-social behaviour. i thought it was wonderful how much attention went into building up this strange character who observed faceless others - their necks, their skin, their legs - and was also alone whilst in crowded spaces.

orlan

ORLAN is an award-winning artist whose work incorporates medicine, science, technology, and often her own body. She was the first artist to use surgery as an artistic medium. Most of her work features her body as an empty canvas, thereby she becomes the piece of art or performance.

 

I found it quite hard to actually look at screen whilst watching the clips from her surgeries, although I thought it's interesting that someone would turn their own bodies into an art piece and document the way it happens, no matter how bloody the images turned out to be.

I suppose it's intriguing that our own bodies are anatomical maps, and that we have to explore ourselves first before we get to explore elsewhere.

ORLAN physically alters her body to question the idea of beauty and the real reason why we see certain things as beautiful. She aims to evoke her audience to question and challenge their knowledge of what is important in the world / the art, and attempts to break the barriers of gender, generations and general art practice.

elections & t-shirts.

Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirrored Room - The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away (2013) is a mirrored installation that you have to physically enter - and close the doors to after. It's almost hypnotic and alluring, and the viewer becomes part of the artwork in the mirrors. I think it's fascinating when the artwork actually invites you in.

 I found this video really interesting because of the point it was making - these days people are more interested in art that can guarantee a good photo, rather than a good experience. In all honesty that is very disappointing and disheartening but on the other hand it opens up a whole different possibility of sharing art and its message. Something that is easily accessible and visually pleasing would thereby gain more coverage.

 

This is an older performance & installation that I went to see at the Barbican a few years back but it always comes back to me as it changed my opinion of viewers interaction with the art. It saw multiple rollerskaters and naked dancers move around the venue whilst the viewer could walk around and explore different corners and messages left by the artist. Sometimes the viewer would have to stop and move aside to let the performers get past them. It was strange to see how uncomfortable some people got when the performers were close to them - almost as if they thought they were to become a part of the performance.

I'm interested in that discomfort. How could I make something accessible yet uncomfortable?

My own answer to this question was - location.

At this point I had already gone outside and taken some 'product' photos, and I found it interesting how unusual yet natural they looked at the same time.

It reminded me of shoe tossing, and made me think of how strange it is to see clothing outdoors when it's not actually worn by people.

And so I thought - wouldn't that be an interesting concept for presenting images?

It was actually this, together with my confusion leading up to election month in Latvia that made me decide that I wanted to take portraits of Latvians and Latvian-Russians. I decided that finding three patriotic citizens who displayed Latvian red-white-red flags in their cars and three Latvian-Russians who felt confident enough to display Russian flags in their cars would be a good start.

...To be followed by printing their portraits on t-shirts and placing them in opposite locations, and to make matters more challenging and uncomfortable, I thought that the other side of the t-shirt should feature the flags of the countries. What I mean by opposite locations is different cities within Latvia with different Latvian/Russian percentages, so for example Daugavpils is a mainly Latvian-Russian city near the border of Lithuania, thereby I'd place the Latvian t-shirt in the town centre there, and do the opposite in Smiltene, which is a mainly Latvian city.

It sounds very confusing indeed, but I feel like it almost perfectly captures the strange, bitter and diving atmosphere in Latvia at the moment as the October Parliament election is coming up, and I'd be very interested to see the reactions concerning these issues when provoked.

[in memory of my grandmother, 17.09.2018]

the line.

I'm very interested in the limits of what is and what isn't acceptable.

Am I a bad person for my opinions? If I can argue my case, does it make it acceptable?

I had some friends over and was getting to know a girl who shares my hometown. We were both asked about our opinion on Latvian-Russians, and both of our answers fell in the lines of 'We're not bad people but we loathe them'. Another friend butted in and said, 'That's what they all say'. 

And so surely that makes us horrible people. How stereotypical of us to loathe 'foreigners'. Isn't that how Brexit happened, anyway? It's all brought on by that feeling of 'strangers in our homes'.

So where would you draw the line?

 - Someone rolls their eyes as cars and people flood their small village. 'Tourists,' they say. 'Hate them.' 

 - An older lady gives a student an evil look. She mutters incoherently under her breath. 

 - 'I hate them,' she says. 'They're everywhere and it doesn't feel like home anymore.' 

 - Another headline flashes. 'Standoff in Italian port as Salvini refuses to let refugees disembark.' 

It's hard to figure out the right things to say. How come the world's become such an uncompassionate place?

Of course these are all very different situations but they still bring in the same kinds of human characteristics.

But if I gave you my case for the third one, perhaps you'd find it easier to forgive the statement?

If I told you that more than half of the people living in my hometown are Russians with Latvian citizenship who refuse to speak Latvian, or that it's almost impossible for young people to find work unless they speak fluent Russian, or that the current leading party in our Parliament is mainly Russian -

- and knowing that we only gained our freedom in the 90s, and that thousands of Latvians were wrongly imprisoned and slaughtered, and that the rest of the world still finds it amusing to compare us to Russia or only acknowledge us as 'one of those Soviet Union countries'?

Would that make that statement acceptable?

Then again most countries have had difficult pasts so how come we're allowed to complain?

The more I think about this, the more confused I am. I feel that perhaps we are bad people after all.

prints.

This is the final version of my multi-screen project. I'm really glad that my idea went from simple fingerprints to something much more fascinating, and I think the final film does it justice.

I realise the audio is not perfect, but my main aim is to come back to this and actually extend it even further, making it into more of a film than an after effects experiment.

To my surprise, when playing around with opacity and blend modes, I noticed that  exclusion  created a sepia-like tint to most of the imagery. This was simply a happy accident in the editing process that actually ended up shaping the rest of the project. With forty-two videos on me, I decided to cut them all down to one second, speed them up and loop them. This was my original idea. However, when I came across the beautiful colours that the blend mode offered me, I decided that instead of a repetitive and unchanging loop, I wanted the fingerprints to interact more. 

So when it came to it, I actually layered two of the same videos on top of each other. The bottom layer was reversed whilst the top one was blended using exclusion. That's what gives the effect of movement in some of the shots, whilst others remain still (apparently my hands were shaking at different speeds when holding the camera.. heh). 

For the ending I actually layered the clips three times, the third layer also being blended with exclusion, creating a somewhat golden and blue haze. I found it fit in well with my ending shot of a golden fingerprint, and worked perfectly for my colour-scheme of yellow, white and blue.

Happy accidents when editing are the absolute highlight of my life. I didn't expect the visuals to actually look so mesmerising but now I can't picture the film being anything but what it is. It worked perfectly well with what I created in After Effects prior to that, and at the end the screens really seemed to interact with each other.

mana dzimtene.

 evaluation: 

I'm pleasantly surprised with the outcome. I was really excited to use archive footage, and to tell a story that people aren't really aware of. I enjoyed filming the visuals for my interpretation of my grandmother's stories as I had to get creative with it. I used a dictionary my grandmother used to have in 40s, and some photos I took with a film camera outside my home. I used a white flower and red inks, and a mirror for the Forest Brothers part, and footage I filmed earlier this year whilst it was snowing of an old Soviet Orthodox church.

I decided that in part two I would let the subtitles tell the real stories while I'd direct my speech at only Latvians as it's quite personal and talks about the recent years and how things seem to be getting worse again over time. I cite a few personal experiences within this part, but they are meant to bring Latvia's attention to these problems without alarming anyone else, hence the choice. I suppose in some way it's a trick as two audiences would get two very different things from that part of the film.

As for text and my voiceover, I managed to cut down its usage to have more breathing space which ended up being the perfect decision to make the film more free-flowing and easier to digest, whilst also allowing a beautiful interlude dedicated to The Baltic Way and its amazing story.

All in all, I'd say I'm proud of it because I think it represents my homeland perfectly without being too overwhelming, and giving a bit of ambiguity at the end - just as it feels like to everyone at home at the moment. I felt passionate about the subject matter, so I hope it came across, although I'm still unhappy with my voice as I feel it's below standard quality.