RE-play

I run an art video/animation club two lunch times a week, at school. My previous editing experience has all been on iMovie HD which was available for free download up until 18 months ago for all iLife users. So, due to the limitations of the more recent incarnations of iMovie I have had to get to grips with Final Cut Express.

The matter was getting rather urgent as the students have taken some footage and need to do some editing now, so I really ought to be at least one -step ahead in the knowledge of the software. As a result most of my spare time today has been at the computer with a manual in one hand.

Here is the result!



It is a very rough stop-motion animation but at least I now know how to do most things which I knew on iMovie HD.

I often use video in my own art work or as part of the creative process. I had one of those moments yesterday when I stopped in my tracks and my mouth fell open as I realised I had created a piece of work so very similar to an other artist. It is not the first time this has happened but I usually realise it at the research stage and take another turn or stop going down that path but this is the first time that I have discovered it some years later. I was flicking through an old art magazine and came across a still from Ori Gersht's 'Pomegranate' video.





I too re-created Cotan's still life and created several videos from it. As it turns out it was around the same time (in 2007) but I was not consciously aware of Gersht or his work. I was inspired by the Cotan still life image when I was looking into the theory of perception and representation (in the essay by Norman Bryson from the book, Representation : Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (Culture, Media and Identities series) ).

Here are two of my Cotan inspired videos, these are based on the original 2007 footage but have been subject to further editing in 2009.





Ironically my original idea was to have the fruit and vegetables decaying but realised Sam Taylor-Wood had already done that - albeit with a different composition and different fruit.