Montage and Ultraviolence

This montage began as a camera project but ended up being an editing project for sure. I had a feeling I wanted to do something violent, watery and urban... and so I wasn't too concerned with getting shots that were designed to look good together, but more with getting shots with sufficient energy and tension. I used the camera in basically two different ways; to either move around an object, or to be still while the object moved around the camera but whichever one I was using, I wanted to get the right amount of speed and distortion. This was really hard to accomplish so the perfect parts ended up being very short pieces of each shot. I think the most energetic and violent shots were actually of objects moving around the still camera.

I began the sequence with this "moving around the camera" type of imagery and then started overlaying the other kind on top of it. The end result was a sort of duality in motion, where the camera moves and things move around the camera simultaneously. I played around with various fades and spacing of the frames to sort of build tension then release it, then build it again before releasing it into a final calm. I wanted to use the repetition to build a little familiarity and ground the montage so it won't be too unbearable to watch, yet retain the sort of edgy uneasy feeling that violence gives. I thought the overlays worked very well because it allowed me to tease multiple directions out of the motion at the same time, adding to the mayhem. The intent was to start strong and end soft. I left the last few frames alone with the intent of giving the viewer a calm spot to finish with.

For me this project was more about the editing process and learning/fighting with Premier than anything else. I must have crashed the program 3 or 4 times from not knowing how to build things in it without eating all my RAM. Once I got used to one way of clipping pieces of my footage together I started to notice how the program was laid out like a music sequencer, and that helped a little bit since I have played around with those before. It is also where I got the idea to make the different layers blend into and out of each other. Weird, I know, but hey we were asked for abstraction.