So this is the first page in my process book for FIN230. The picture is of Kin Beach Park, one of my favorite outdoor spaces. I go there with my grandkids and we enjoy the swings and slides as well as the wooden structures on the beach and the rockpools. I am hoping this semester that I will be able to incorporate some sort of kinetic element in my final assignment and I’m going to head out shortly to shoot some stills in the park as well as some video of the swings and roundabout.
Only stayed for a couple of hours. Spent a lot of time sitting on a bench. Very quiet today with only two couples walking their dogs. Kin Beach has an amazing variety of colors and textures.
My chosen place is large and absolutely overflowing in its range of colours, textures, sounds and movement, so I have decided to reduce some of the variables to help me sharpen my focus. My first is to eliminate colour – I love working in black and white and I feel sometimes color can distract from the other elements. Texture is amazing, but rather than trying to incorporate some of the wonderful texture of wood, stone and organic material from the site into the work, I will do my best to show them through still and moving images. This may not perfectly fit the assignment – and I may just have to show my video in some way on the site to re-establish the link between the work and the place.
Another notion that intrigued me today while in Kin Beach was the concept of perception – the difference between the outside observer and the experience of the subject. I had previously recorded the swings and the roundabout in motion, and today looked at the affect of that motion from within looking out.
so things took a bit of a turn on my last visit. I had thought back about something to introduce to kin beach park and also about a kinetic element. In previous courses I had started developing a theme around orange balls and I thought that the incongruity of a spherical regular manufactured product and the range of natural colors and textures might be an interesting juxtaposition. Its going to take me a bit longer to develop this theme as I need to brush up on some of the things I learned in FIN200 videography to create a video but I have gathered a little material – and will probably need a couple more visits to get what I need.
This assignment for me was far more about the journey than the destination. I already had a relationship with Kin Beach Park having visited it more than 20-30 times in the last 2 years. Almost every previous visit had been with my grandkids so my first visit without them was a new experience. I got to experience the park in a different way, starting to appreciate the wide range of textures and colors. I still however wanted the assignment to have a kinetic element. There is a lot of natural movement in the park, people strolling, dogs running, the motion of the sea and the wind in the trees, but the playground also presented many opportunities, and had a certain familiarity. Having looked at rendering the color out of the experience, I was looking at using found elements, of which there were so many on site, pebbles, driftwood, plants among many. I do like juxtaposition and introducing a modern, plastic, perfect sphere into this are of natural textures in the end was what drove the project. This is the current version of the video. It is a work in progress and I am considering adding sound and also trying to figure out how to render all the videos into black and white keeping only the orange balls in color https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1018848224