Recent Art Projects Postscript

Last week I posted about Janet's work for Moonlight Interior and my work for David Storlie's MFA show. I thought some of you might want to hear how things turned out. The costumes for Moonlight Interior turned out wonderful. They were an incredible amount of work crammed into a too short period of time, but in the end Janet's proud of her work and proud to be a part of the show. She was sewing up until the curtain was drawn, getting asked to add a hole to a belt just minutes before opening with no equipment nearby. Janet, of course found a drill, but the bit was too big. Then she found a screw, so she put the screwdriver bit in the drill and screwed a hole in the belt. The premier of the show had a few rough spots, but subsequent performances were smooth as silk. Most, if not all of the weekend performances sold out, so they are hoping to find a way to add shows in the near future.

I was pleased with the way my video turned out for David. Though, after seeing the whole show, I would have done a few things differently, given more time and a better understanding of how it fit together. The show was titled, "Too Fast, Too Tight, Too Loud, Too Bright." I thought I was doing video for Too Tight and focused on the crowd aspect. This led me to layer multiple crowd scenes on top of each other to try to emphasize the tightness. Seeing the show, I think I was supposed to focus on Too Fast. If that were the case, I would have insisted on shooting some crowd footage ourselves, so I could have sped up the playback. Given the time between when I was asked to do this and when it needed to be done, and David's original idea to just use crowd clips from existing films, I didn't push the idea of shooting something ourselves. It couldn't have happened. I couldn't speed up the clips I had because they were already very short and I don't think it would have been reasonable to make it any faster. I also didn't understand how they videos were going to be played. I made 1 video, but then cut it in half and rearranged the two halves so they would not play the same image at the same time. They were projected onto the gallery walls in one corner of the space, so one projection was on one wall and the other projection right next to it on the other wall. David probably explained that too me clearly, but I'm much better with diagrams. I think that type of dual projection could have been used even more effectively if I had more time to think it through. It would have been neat to try to have the two projections interact more. All that said, I'm pleased with how it turned out and I'm looking forward to my next project.