Fresh off the critique of last week it seemed I had my work cut out for me. I had to rework both the videos I had completed and rethink completely my approach to including some wildlife photos in the exhibit. I tried a few approaches to the intro video eliminating the photos completely, but it seemed too much to lack context.  I then tried leaving some photos and reducing the number of words.  I used animation effects to bring the key words in and out with a select group of photos and it had the effect of reducing the overall time to less than 2 minutes and serving as a perfect trailer to introduce the key themes of my work without telling the whole story. I plan to set this up at the exhibition entrance so it is the first thing people see when they enter the space and it will be positioned next to the artist’ statement.

The second video to be reworked was the Changing Faces piece that had already been through several iterations.  I took the suggestion to consider using synchronous view in PowerPoint and the result was quite effective.  Rather than requiring a viewer to stand and wait for the next sequence and either ‘forget’ the prior comparators or get bored and walk away before seeing what I would like them to see, the synchronous view allows four separate seasons to be viewed simultaneously.  The message of change is unmissable and it has the advantage of keeping the eyes moving from frame to frame looking for comparisons.  It also has the advantage of three of the four frames being essentially identical in their perspective and timing.  There are slight variations due to wind and other flight affecting factors but they are close enough so as not to be a distraction.  The fourth frame was a video created before I had pre-planned mission profiles that provided the repeatability of the other three videos and while it starts off differently than the other three it synchs up rather closely toward the middle section where the differences in the four scenes are the most dramatic.  The changing perspective of the first frame also contributes to the need for the viewer to keep their eyes moving between frames and creates attention holding interest that causes the 8 minutes to go by rather quicker than realised.

I also did a revision to my Artist’s Statement to put it into first person rather than third person narrative.  I did create some new aerial work, still images and sound recording to augment the final video expect to capture next week with the new mission profile I created that overflies all of Coul Links perimeter of the proposed development area capturing video rather than the still images of the typical profile.

For the wildlife photos, I created on A3 paper a 4 x 5 grid of images and printed three sheets (60 images) that are 5 x 6.5 cm and are sufficiently large to be able to see what they are if one gets close enough.  I considered different ways of displaying these images ranging from mounting them all on one large board with windows in the top mounting board to mounting on one board with a slight stand off to create some additional dimensionality.  In the end I decided to mount them individually on foam core board and distribute them randomly around the exhibit including suspending some so they ‘floated’ in space.  This approach does two things.  First, the scale of the landscape to wildlife in actuality is more closely approximated by the scales of the landscape to wildlife photos.  The birds occupy a very small segment of the landscape and are constantly moving with in it.  Which leads to the second point and that is the random distribution of the small wildlife photos is again a metaphor for how they exist in nature.  One never knows exactly what one might encounter and when.

Another week with significant tangible progress.  Next week the large format printing and mounting will be done along with one more new capture video showing the overview of Coul Links.  I hope to have the exhibition layout completed next week and all of the technical issues sorted with respect to projecting the video imagery in conjunction with the still images in the exhibition space.