Assignment 3: Anti-Video

Rose Colored Glasses

When I did my video observation, I found that mainstream videos today share many common themes. They all seem to be very “human-centric”, with most of the footage being of people, like hosts and characters. When I closed my eyes and listened to the sound being played with the videos, it was almost entirely human voices, like narration and people talking. The footage was taken from the familiar perspective of human eye level. We like to watch other people talking about things. In lecture we learned that films almost exclusively have plots that are easy to follow and have logical conclusions, and are made to be passively consumable.

           

In this assignment, we were asked to make an “anti-video”, which goes against the conventions of videos in popular media. I did not include any footage of people in my video, although most of the footage was taken from typical human vantage points. I did use some upside-down footage of empty hallways for a non-human perspective, and I like that it can take a moment to realize that our familiar hallways are upside down. I think that I expect that the footage I watch is going to be from the standard human perspective, and I don’t seem to put much effort into confirming whether it actually is or not, so the upside-down hallways create an interesting illusion to me. I did also use human voice in this video because it really seems to demand our attention, and I thought it would be useful in making the video more surreal. I called my poor brother on the phone and silently recorded his answer, and he very kindly gave me permission to use the recordings when I later explained what I had been doing. I think that his “hellos” feel like they should have a meaning or purpose in this video, even though they have none.

I find it interesting that we seem to want to make sense of what’s going on in a video, and so in a random assembly of footage and sound we’re still trying to piece together a plot, even if there is none. To make this video, I used my brother’s voice and sounds of a string trimmer and frying eggs, along with footage of upside-down hallways, cracking eggs, an online textbook, tree tops, a hollow log, and some footage of a field taken through a rose-colored glass casserole dish lid. The pieces have nothing more in common than that they were the things I had access to in a typical week, but I like that it appears as though they have some collective meaning when placed together in the finished video. My anti-video is fairly strange, but I think it does accomplish the goal of going against standard media conventions.