before you were mine

We were particularly interested in Gill’s project entitled ‘Outside and in’. Within this series of photographs, Stephen Gill introduces objects from his photographic locations to the camera chamber. Their place in the composition occurs entirely at random, establishing both harmony and conflict. This creates an obstruction to the orig-inal photographs thus creating surreal montages, whilst a sense of uncertainty is produced due to the distorted and fragmented natural ephemera.

We thought that the overall effect of this method was perhaps quite dream like, produced by the un natural collision of tranquil photographs and raw gritty textures, rather than merely being su-perimposed.

Duffy’s poems address issues such as oppression, gender and violence in an accessible language that has made them popular within secondary

education.

Using the Pentax film SLR, we tried to imitate Stephen Gills work. We removed the lens and, using our surroundings, placed objects and random behind the lens.

We applied letraset transfer lettering directly on top of the negatives, quoting key words from the poem.

We initially experimented with stop motion, focussing on the idea of looking back at old memories which we symbolized with use of an enveloped which enclosed our negatives.

Using stop motion, we generated lines from the poem word for word. We transferred letter by letter onto our negatives, utilizing a Helvetica typeface lettraset. “Years” is an example of a complete word after step by step shots.

We had a look at another project of Gill’s entitled “Coexistence”. Gill challenges the viewer as his photographs are blurred and therefore made unclear and perhaps confusing. This effect appears to have been produced by perhaps photographing through a sheet of thick glass, the effect of which is foggy and dream like. It is this idea of blurring footage to create an uncertain image which fueled the next stage of our project.

One of the lines in ‘Before you were mine’ is “high-heeled red shoes, relics...” we wanted to keep the symbolic colour of red apparent in our motion piece and thought about how we could incorporate this with Duffy’s voice within the poem. We therefore decided to use the image of red lips throughout our video piece.

Upon researching typefaces to use in our title sequence, we came to the realization that none of the typefaces were ‘personal’ enough for the poem. This poem is an intimate out-look into a persons memories. We came to the conclusion that we would use hand rendered text as we thought this was raw enough to be teamed with the intimacy concept.

Again trying to incorporate the red lips and the red referred to in the second stanza, we decided that we would hand render using red lipstick.

In order to get the full effect of each stroke, we wrote on assetate which we would later scan in and edit ontop of our video.

Using Adobe After Effects, we incorporated the ‘write on’ option to create the effect of the words being hand written as the appear on the screen.

We decided to use a classical jewellry box track as the sound for our piece as we wanted to stick with the nos-talgic and dream like effect which is created when looking back at old memories.

We also thought this would work particularly well with the image of the dancing woman in the fieldwhich reminded us of the twirlling figure which appears when opening a jewellery box.

http://www.freesound.org/search/?q=jewellery+box&f=&s=score+desc&advanced=0&g=1

We recorded someone speaking the whole poem, focussing on just their mouth and movement of their lips.

by dom okah and hali merebat

with special thanks tocarol ann duffy

andStephen Gill