For this week, I was recommend to watch Apex by Arthur Jefa as well as Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer. Apex inspired me to create a moving collage of sorts of my references and my interests. I wanted to show relation of the dream (of the films/cinema world) and the real — the real issues that the films touched on.

I initially began with where I left off last week, creating a video based off of the film stills I had gathered. I was hoping that the association between films would come naturally, and that I could find links between scenes and arrange them in a way where it made sense to the uninitiated viewer. After viewing it a few times, I decided against this, and to go further into the Apex style, where bits of media from film, pop culture, and current events would intertwine in odd combinations.

After gathering all of the images I planned on putting in the film, I decided to mathematically randomise the order of the stills, again to see if there was a link in essentially a loose associations between images as a set.

This is the result of that process.

After viewing this version a few times, I wanted to develop it further as I felt as if it wouldn’t communicate what I desired to my viewer. It also felt a bit plagiarise-y of Jefa’s work, so I wanted to put my own spin on it.

I was thinking of ways to communicate the uncanny, and I remembered how oddly comforting watching The Shining is at first. Aside from how odd it can be, Shelly Duval’s performance is oddly comforting and suggests nothing sinister is on the horizon; the juxtaposition of family—which is supposed to indicate warmth, safety, and comfort—and the violence that follows is what makes this film odd and uncanny, not just gory or gross.

I had lots of videos on my hard drives from the past year, so I decided to layer those on top of one another until it was unclear what audio was coming from where. I found that when I did this each time I viewed the video I focused on a different layer.

I kept adding layers:

Here are some of the layers separated:

I eventually pared it back a bit so that the meaning of my video could be understood at first, and then slowly descend into madness. I also removed the randomisation of the images and placed them more intentionally, creating a mini narrative for the first minute.

The goal behind this was to demonstrate clear links as I felt like an intentional, implied link, held more visual weight than randomised images together.

That came out roughly, like this:

This is the final iteration—From the version I presented in tutorial to the final, I just changed the way that the second half comes in as well as added another layer from Grey Gardens as I realised after I had laid everything out that my video was about the experience of being a disillusioned American in 2024.