3 Screen Piece Documentation

 Idea

My idea for my 3 screen piece was a time-lapse video collage called Passage of Time, inspired by the experimental video film Koyaanisqatsi: Life out of Balance by Godfrey Reggio that involved multiple clips of sped up footage. I chose to film my piece in a similar style to Reggio's film to show the passage of time, the frequency of patterns in daily life, and the way we unknowingly see and undergo repetition in our daily lives, although my video piece would be a far shorter 3 minutes in comparison to the multi-hour film that is Koyaanisqatsi.

Filming

The footage for my video piece was filmed on my own iPhone 11 over the course of a week, and edited together on Adobe Premiere Pro. The central focus of the project is a clock being sped up, broken, then fixed and played in reverse to return to the beginning of  the sequence, to represent the cycles of our daily lives restarting at the beginning of a new day. I also chose to have the footage be put in a negative filter when in reverse to give a more visually distinct presentation of the footage being in reverse, as some clips such as water or the clouds are not as easy to see being reversed due to either the video quality or with the direction clouds move being entirely perspective based.

I originally planned to film the clock outside using an old Canon camera I owned for photography, but unfortunately the Camera didn't have enough battery life to film all the footage I needed, so I opted to once again film the clock on my phone inside my living room. Original setup seen below.

 I kept my phone stable while filming all the footage using a tripod with a special holder for mobile phones. The locations I filmed were;

• Hertfordshire University, College Lane Campus
• Welham Green, Huggins Lane
• Welham Green, Dixons Hill Road
• Welwyn Garden City, The Howard Centre (Filmed the World Food Festival)
• Bricket Wood, The Moor Mill

Editing

For editing I recorded additional folly sounds once again on my iPhone for additional quality and effect in the video, using both the clock I bought to smash and a small stopwatch my grandad owned. I also smashed a glass for the breaking sounds for the clock to make the impact seem more destructive. The music I chose to include in the background is from Lud and Schlatts Musical Emporium, a YouTube channel dedicated to creating copyright-free music piece for others to use in their video projects, also providing copyright free covers of many classical pieces. I chose their song "Sunset Bay", a calming track to convey the peaceful and passive way we undergo our daily patterns without notice.

 I made sure to reverse the music along with the footage near the end of the video both for added effect, and also because it just sounded interesting. I originally edited each screen's footage into separate sequences, eventually editing them together into a single 1920 x 1080 video by scaling each sequence down to 33%.

Generally I am happy with what I produced, though I will admit it took far too long of a while for me to start this project, in part due to my habit of being highly unactionable, which I someday hope to overcome. I think the filming of this project have helped me gain a new appreciation for how much work goes into filming simple time lapses like the ones included in the video project, perhaps some day I will be able to create a piece on par in quality with Godfrey Reggio's 1982 film.