Beauty
and the Bench
Beauty and the Bench is a video piece that captures
and unlocks the simple beauty in the bench
Benches are a
part of everyday urban lifestyle and at the same time they are incredibly
mundane, part of the unthought-of in society. The video attempts to show as,
Murray puts it, ‘Locate beauty in the mundane’ (155, 2008). The benches have a standard
presence in our society and are seen on the street and in parks, but are often
over looked by taking photos of them is an expedition into the urban eye,
seeing what is not intentionally seen and can display the category of photography
that Murray calls ‘ephemera’ (155, 2008).
Benches have
unconstructed moments that continuously happen, these happen on benches, birds
resting, rubbish that has been disposed off, clothing that has been misplaced,
newspaper left for someone else to read. These unconstructed moments clearly
show Murrays everyday aesthetic because these moments are gone as soon after
they appear, the bird flies away, the rubbish is cleaned up, the person finds
their clothing, or the newspaper is taken away, these images can be speedily
replaced with more recent images, (Murray, 157, 2008).
A total of 44 photos of benches were taken around the Sydney and around
the western suburbs and 23 were used in the final video. All the images were
taken with a three Megapixel camera on a phone. The clip goes for a total of 31
seconds before crediting myself for the music.
iPhoto was the tool used for editing the images. Some colour correction
was used to bring out the depth and highlight colours like greens and browns
that weren’t especially captured by the camera. Brightness was taken away to
balance some of the colours more effectively; saturation was either added or
decreased to also bring some balance. The iPhoto boost filter, as well as the
Antique filter, were added to some pictures to bring some warmth to the colours.
As the pictures were of objects that have a very similar shape, to ensure an
aesthetically consistency iPhoto was used to straighten the images so that the
top of the benches were horizontal.
In iMovie a series of effects were used in the final video, Ken Burns
were used to give the benches some movement and life. Two different types of
movement were used in the ken burns. A zoom was used to enhance the sense of
largeness, to show the benches were bigger and more beautiful than they seem. A
pan up was used to imply an elevation, a heightened sense of importance to the
images and it made for a strong start. Two types of transition were used; a
fade transition between the new park bench and an old one of the same style, as
well of the doorway one. These were inter placed throughout the to visually
give some more movement and life to the stagnant pictures.
An original musical composition was created for the purpose of the
video, called MAS110 song, it was designed as a juxtaposition to the ‘mundane’. The piece was made with a series of
vocal layers to give it a choir effect, a strong sense of reverb in the
instruments, and cathedral like effect was created. This gave the piece a sense
of largeness and an epic nature. Combing this epic sound with these pictures
that could be mundane make the pictures more epic in size and proportion and
gives them some more beauty. The intonations in the piece matched the change in
the images to give a stronger connection between the music and the images.
Bibliography
MURRAY, S. (2008).
Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics.
Journal of Visual Culture. 7(147),
pp.132-163
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