Our project was inspired by the montage works of Stan Brackage, particularly The Machine of Eden. Initial group discussions developed the aim of our project into exploring how we can use montage to visually contrast emotions of stress and calm, and their relationship to place. We noted Brackage’s use of swiftly changing scenery and blending of frames into one another to create both a sense of confusion and peace as a method we could adopt for our project.
We aimed to slowly build frustration in the audience until the arising emotions reach a point where they can not be contained, emanating the process of being focused on one task for a long period of time, until working on it becomes overwhelming.
We had immense success with this stressful portrayal through use of montage, varying camera angles, and repetition of images. By gradually increasing the speed of cuts we were able to create visual stress for the viewer, amplified by accompanying audio. This is contrasted by the single wide shot of a pond where diegetic sounds aim to relax the audience after the chaos of the earlier montage.
We made initial plans to combine projects with another group to create a multi-screen project where characters would overlap to show a connection to people and place, however we separated after our projects naturally took different paths. To further our idea, we would create a collection of several similarly styled videos for various emotions to project as a multi-screen project in one room. Ideally, the ending ‘calming’ scenes would all line up to create a panoramic experience where the characters from each video were shown in the same area as they retreat from stressful environments into nature.
Throughout this project many ideas were discussed, however we quickly realised that less would be more, allowing this project to take its own shape and path. Our experience in creating this project taught us to listen to what the location and space offers up naturally, rather than forcing our ideas onto the space. We have unintentionally mirrored our outcome, where the chaotic montage reflects our initial ideas fitting in a box, before we transitioned to the calm nature scenes as our project truly came to life.