My final project for abstract video is four videos stitched together to create a four minute video showcasing my shadow walking through the day. Each video shows me walking in a different environment and different forms of abstraction through it all. I filmed each base video during a different time of day. This was a way for the viewer to stay grounded in the narrative structure through the abstraction.
My motivation to make this piece was a desire to explore how I could manipulate my daily walks in a way that reflected my thought process during these activities. I often feel scatterbrained and have very creative visualizations/memories come back to me when I go on these walks and tried to express those in a program like TouchDesigner, where almost anything is possible. To create some sort of narrative theme, I decided to make the shadow figure walk through a full day.
To create this project, I first filmed all the base videos. One for the morning, afternoon, evening, and night. Then, I used TouchDesigner TOP’s to manipulate the video through contrast, mirroring, and layering videos over each other. Each video has its own type of abstraction depending on how the base video looks. For example, I primarily used childhood footage for the morning nature video because it reminded me of my memories from growing up and being out in nature. Once I finished editing all the videos I exported them from TouchDesigner and edited them all together in iMovie. I used this final mp4 for the projection. I decided at the last minute to add a frame made out of colorful yarn to create a base for the video to be projected on.
This project was a wonderful opportunity to explore and revisit tools in TouchDesigner that I have enjoyed thus far in the course. I was a fan of the last minute change of presentation with the yarn frame that I created and was very happy with the final product for Open Studios.
