Our Tools

"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." - Marshall McLuhan

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Filters



When filming my initial footage of me breaking a pool rack, I really had no idea what I was going to do with it until I actually got it into Premiere. As Woody Vasulka said, collaborating with the machine is a big part of how his art is produced. Once I started playing with filters, I found that manipulating color had some interesting results. The pool table was initially tan, and changing some color levels made it appear bright green right away, which was something I kept in the first few seconds of the video. When changing the color, the first thing i noticed was that one ball did not move much at all from the break, but all others did move away in every direction from it. This ball in a way accidentally became the focal point of the footage for most of the time. Adding motion trails to the breaking billiard balls added a sense of slowing the footage, even though the time was kept at 100%.

Eventually as my experimentation continued, building off of the layers on the previous segments of video, I was able to create a more liquid feeling to the image. Visually, these effects obstructed the natural movement of the billiard balls on the table. However, they soon began to develop a style of their own and I noticed when changing the layering order, interesting looking patterns reminiscent of carbon fiber would develop in the "waves" on screen. The visual effects developed toward the end of the video metaphorically turned the pool table into a pool of liquid.

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