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“This was the first video I made at college that used the ‘edit to sound’ technique…After I made that video I remember wondering whether it was too predictable. Sometimes people knew where it was going and they’d smile, like discovering something that was always there, but you just had to isolate it in the right way and it would reveal itself…that’s a good feeling, but how does it survive repeated views? Then I thought…I like the predictability, that’s the whole point. It’s like you don’t stop using a certain equation, like E=mc², just because you’re bored with watching the numbers getting crunched that way. What you’re watching in that slow build-up is an equation, which rudely interrupts subjective narrative in order to find a deeper level. What’s that deeper level? Well, the climax is always exposing the music and resonance in things, that point’s been made before. But the build-up… that effect is hard to create. You need to use maths, subtle maths, to create that feeling of…accelerando just with the edit, because video frame-rate is actually quite coarse; you’ve got 24 big nuggets a second to make a smooth cream with. The build-up is exponential, so as edits get smaller, the rate at which they get smaller gets slower too, giving that effect of slowing as we reach a climax. Its about trajectory, it taps into that natural sense of trajectory, of smooth rising and falling. That’s why it’s predicable, because the survival mechanism is built with that innate recognition. If you throw a ball in the air, without thinking about it you’re computing the height, speed, centrifugal and gravitational potential in a split second that tells you whether to catch or run. The exponential function is built into our understanding, but it’s also everything: its population increase, the sun cycle, toxicology and immunology, its how something is slow to grow and curbed when it gets too big or too old, its how much money you have after interest, a heartbeat, aviation, it’s the thing in life. Not just that, but its kind of self-referential in the way, as a rhythm, it imparts the mounting sense of importance it holds.” |
| Downloads In C Sharp Major (stills)
Single channel video loop 2006 |
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| Downloads In C Sharp Major, Final Cut Pro Sreenshot
This screenshot shows the exponential function at play in the edit. The darker length toward the end is the climactic section, consisting of successive two-frame edits. The progression appears uneven because a single frame, being one twenty-forth of a second, is quite coarse. The gradiated mathematical transformation had to be approximated, human recognision of acceleration smooths the effect. |
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