This is the last of the vintage desert videos. It documents my actual life experience after coming back from the desert and riding up in the elevator to the 24th floor of Building #4 in Osaka, Japan, where I led small group discussions at the NHK Culture Center for people who wanted to improve their English.
Sometimes the doors would open and there would be nobody there and I took it to be a Doors of Perception moment as I would half expect, half imagine the doors would open on one of the places I'd visited. The video is a reenactment of that experience; the two actors being myself and one of my students, Sueko Tani, now Sueko McLane.
If you don't recognize the Doors of Perception, it's a 1954 book by Aldous Huxley detailing his experiences when taking mescaline. An American rock band, formed in 1965 in Los Angeles, California, took its name from Huxley's book and became The Doors.
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Lachlan Wittick
Katy B.
Poppi Iceland
designanator
Kerry Lauerman
Kathy Knechtges
Salon.com
Comments
Nice transitions...a great object lesson overall.
Your video is a wonderful vehicle for that, indeed much of your work on OS is as well. I wonder how Sueko has transitioned from a different environment. Did she come to appreciate the desert aesthetic on her own or did she come by it naturally. The simplicity of how much art is displayed in Japan certainly fits the sere views.
I'm also intrigued by the transitions. When you both enter the elevator near the beginning I was struck how you entered right away and a gentleman had to wait to exit. My first thought was I wonder if they have a different convention in Japan, that land that uses politeness as a social lubricant. But you had to leave your camera on a tripod and hope it would be there as you dashed back down again.
I'm also curious about how it was all put together. It's just so wonderfully done in the details, so well done in fact that it's easy not to notice the intricate care you took in producing it.
Thanks again, just loved this.
`R
As for the shot of us getting into the elevator, here's how it was done: We set up the camera, set it running, and walked into the scene, pushed the button and charged into the elevator expecting there would be nobody there as it was Sunday and we hadn't seen anybody in the building. Only, surprise, there was this guy, and he had to sort of brush past us to get out. The doors closed with the camera still running. We turned around at the next level, come back, and picked up the camera. The last shot where we get off was done in a somewhat similar fashion.
All of the shots were put together with Adobe Premier which allowed me to have one set of doors that opened and closed upon a different clip. The doors were hand crafted so they opened on nothing and were superimposed on the start of the next sequence. All the shots of the numbers lighting up was done with one long shot, cut into pieces and inserted at the appropriate time.
To make sure I would shoot everything that was needed, I storyboarded the whole thing after studying how Kurosowa (think Seven Samurai --> The Magnificent Seven) created storyboards for whole movies! That way the order in which the shots are shot didn't have to correspond to how they appear in the final product.
That video was the most interesting to design and complete except for Kobe, The First Year After which was a much bigger project. However, I've got some others that are more simple, but show what actual life was like where I lived in Japan some 15 years ago. Maybe I'll put some up …
All but the last were done with Photoshop + Premier builtins.
The last was my own invention were the "smoke" was created separately from multiple swirls coming from a katori-senko (mosquito coil) and the laid on top of the highway.