I made three quick experimental videos the other day with footage from train journeys in three different countries. Note, they are all extremely wide, so it might be hard to make them play on a phone. On a computer, you can make them fullscreen by double-clicking somewhere in the video.
France
The first video I made was from France, taken sometime in 2016. I think it’s just outside Paris:
Stills from the video:
England
The second video is from an old video of a train journey across England, about 2013:
Stills from the video:
USA
And finally – and perhaps most successfully, a longer form train journey across Chicago, from 2015. Note this is the only version with sound:
Stills from the video:
Why?
I make short experimental videos quite regularly (see here, here, here, here, here, etc), as a way to sketch an idea, and keep developing my video editing skills. For years, I’ve been taking videos of places I’ve been, looking out of various vehicular windows. I’ve got scores of them (and other footage) stored away on various hard drives. And whilst I enjoy the process of taking films, quite often I find the videos themselves are a reduction of the experience of being somewhere, as if you have to perceive the environment you’re in through a very thin rectangular cardboard tube. There is so much in a journey that doesn’t come across in a film; a wider field of vision than a smartphone camera can capture, the sounds all around you, the lingering smell of a stranger’s fried dinner further up the carriage.
I’ve been reading Ed Yong’s book An Immense World lately, and thinking about the myriad ways in which animals perceive the world, and how our umwelt is so specific to our physiology. I’m on the part about vision at the moment, and it is so much stranger than you might think. Jumping spiders have multiple types of eyes with different functions; scallops distribute their vision throughout their body; there are so many ways to see. Yong argues that the mode of vision we take as ‘normal’, i.e. two eyes in the front of the head, is anything but. Take, for example, birds of prey:
Many birds of prey, like, eagles, falcons, and vultures, actually have two acute zones in each eye – one that looks forward, and another that looks out at a 45-degree angle.
– Ed Yong, An Immense World
All of which caused me to think about vision, and memory, and how the films that I take regularly always fail to capture the entirety of an experience; that cameras are made not to capture reality, but to frame an aspect of it for a screen. I wanted to make films which capture the texture of experience, so that you experience the texture of a place on a journey; rather than focusing on individual things in the journey, my intention is to show textures and patterns in movement. I think they’re getting towards what I’m trying to do – there is too much to focus on any one thing, and so instead of watching a video, you can see similarities between them, how parallax movements shift into and out of logical sync, and so on.
This is not an articulate definition of this stuff – it’s hurriedly written, and these are sketches, rather than exhibition-ready things, posted here in the spirit of sharing my experiments in progress.