Editing Sean and possible Alexandra

At the moment I am trying to edit the video I took of Sean together sequentially, something proving harder than I had anticipated. However, there is one line of continuity I can look for inbetween videos: on the day, Sean was suffering a recently swollen elbow, and was having trouble reconciling this with the relative hardness of his computer desk and the plastic arms of his chair. Because of this, during the course of the day he cycled through three different computer chairs, at first switching to a nearby chair with padded, elbow-friendly arms, and finally, finding even this too much to bear on his joints, he threw caution to the wind and comandeered an armless chair from the main administrative office. I am therefore using these separate chairs as technical signifiers for a sequential narrative of continuity - one of several narrative structures in Sean's day I have discovered retroactively. Below are screenshots of his first and second chairs, as well as his hasty acquistion of the final chair.

























On an unrelated note, I have secured another volunteer for the project - a jewellery student named Alexandra. Now, I need only negotiate a date for filming and make the necessary preparations.

Poster

I've just designed a poster for advertising the project which I intend to display at shopping centres, different community centres in the university, and really any other place with a public billboard. The transcript for the poster I have included below:



Filmed For a Day
A video art project


My name is Dylan Hewson, I’m a third-year visual arts student at Curtin University and I’m looking for volunteers for a project where I:
· Film you constantly from within an hour of your leaving bed in the morning until a predetermined time in the evening for the course of a particular day.
· Edit this footage into a short documentary, as well as an interactive media installation, to be screened at the end of the current semester in front of any number of people.
The only rules regarding this project are:
· You get to decide how much is filmed and when, with an emphasis on as much as possible, preferably on a day involving some regular activity you undertake.
· Permissions for filming certain people you may interact with or in certain environments are sought either beforehand by me or you, or on the day if you want to risk it.

If you are interested in participating in this project, please contact me at filmedforaday@gmail.com or phone me on 0416 959 074. If you want to find out more about the project, go to http://filmedforaday.blogspot.com .

Contemplating whether to film again and Mark Laita

After 11 hours, I decided I wanted to stop filming Sean and go home. This was mostly because I had spent long enough filming to realise what I had done right and what needed to be changed the next time, but attrition also came into it. The question remains whether I will try re-filming him, and I need to ask Sean about this. Certainly, as he pointed out, a significant portion of his day - the evening - wasn't filmed, and this, quite apart from his rather social day job, casts him in a rather more solitary light, where he spends much of free time watching television, playing his guitar and trading securities. He offered at the end of filming to be available for another day so I could film his evening as well, although we didn't discuss filming his day again.

Via thesocietypages.com, I have come across a contemporary photographer who explores similar territory - one Mark Laita. According to his artist statement, his work revolves around the "growing chasm" in American society between rich and poor, and as such he contasts portrait photographs of people on different economic strands of society but with very clearly defined connections across a spectrum. Juxtapositions such as a homeless man versus a real estate developer (pictured below) work to counter presented ideals and cultural icons with the reality of of their role in society and the relationships they share with their polar opposites.

My project is similarly concerned with the tangible spheres of influence individuals occupy within society, but as my work is in video format it is intended as more of an exercise in documenting a period of living, rather than the presentation of a particular image.



















Source: http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/02/21/social-commentary-through-juxtaposition-the-work-of-mark-laita/

Sean P. and technical considerations

After a bit of wrangling, I managed to film the projects first subject, Sean from about 7:30 Thursday morning until 6:00 in the evening. The line of events leading up to this I will document in greater detail later, but in summation:

• I first posted the idea for the project and a brief writeup on Facebook, a week before the semester started.
• Sean responded to this post, expressing interest in being a possible subject.
• I proposed acting upon this idea in my first Studio Project tutorial.
• Sean consulted his manager, who gave the go ahead so long as I am insured against public liability.
• I consulted the School of Design and Art administration, as well as the unit co-ordinator, and I was pointed toward the head of department.
• The head of department said I am automatically assured by the university if it qualifies as an authorised practicum, which is dependent on his authorisation and that of the unit co-ordinator. He would email Sean's manager informing him that I am covered, but I would need to get authorisation from the unit co-ordinator by submitting a pre-project proposal brief for consideration.
• I submitted the brief and was given authorisation from the unit co-ordinator, on the condition that I additionally submit an ethics form, which I will hand in to the head of department when I see him next.
• With the bureaucracy mostly dealt with, I loaned the necessary equipment from the department two days before filming.

The filming itself proved to be something of a pilot episode to my semester's season of work. Although I planned ahead for extensive filming by having two cameras available, with the aim to alternative between filming with one and recharging the battery of the other, this was only one of many concerns to take into consideration when intending to film constantly for long periods of time.

One of the biggest disappointments of the session was due primarily to a lack of technical foresight. Apparently, attachable microphones for cameras depend on AAA batteries in order to record sound and, as I found out earlier today while transferring the video files to computer storage, the battery inside the microphone I was using was flat. This effectively means that half the footage I took was silent, unless there are some hidden audio files recorded by the camera without the microphone a technician can point me to.

I'll write more about this later. The most I can draw from this experience at the moment is that it was an introduction to the skills and processes I'll need to draw from to engage in this project later on.