Light Video

18.01.2022

Last week Emma and I hosted a workshop at the Critical Inquiry Lab MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. It was the second time we had done this particular workshop. We call it 'Once Upon a Time in Desktoppywood'. The idea of the workshop is to show how video doesn't have to be this big bloated medium that takes time, energy and resources to be able to produce and it can infact be used for short, simple, DIY visual communication.

Emma and I both use video a lot in our own practices but recently I've not had the motivation to make anything with moving image because I began to believe in the heavyness of it as a medium. My feelings were summarised by this instagram post by Avacado Ibuprofen explaining why they didn't make videos anymore. It was with these feelings that I first approached this workshop after coming back from my holidays at home. I wasn't particuarly excited and it was a bit of a struggle to find the enthusiasm.

I think most of those feelings came from my experience with making videos last year. Specifically a video made for an exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut about Disney. It took several months to produce this 10 minute video using external render farms and a 6 year old macbook pro (I know it was a silly idea). I worked on this video for 9-11 hours everyday for 2 months and at the end I was exhausted. Burnt up just like my poor little laptop. Then there were others around me talking about 4K footage and 120 frames per second. It was too much. Too much data, too much definition and too much energy. I love being captivated by the quality of renders and 4k video but it also makes me tired.

After we did a bit of planning and organising for the content of the workshop I managed to get more excited and regain some of the enthuasiasm to do it but it wasn't until I started seeing the students in the group produce videos in a matter of hours that the heaviness of video lifted and I saw the lightweight, DIY, sketchy, dirty and awkward version appear...my kind of video.

I began looking back at videos I made 10 years ago whilst playing games with friends online and some of those videos are things that I want to be making now. Awkward edits, rough cuts and lofi effects but with energy and excitement to them. So I'll be returning to video soon.

For anyone interested the website for the workshop can be found here.