iMovie Project

See written sheet for project details
Final Product: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0WRH5bjSkk

Artist statement:

Most people, with our technological innovations, are used to spending most if not all of their time inside on most days. Work, schooling, research, and other deadlines require us to be working indoors, but it is important to take a step back and breathe. The stressful speed we are living our lives on can cause our physical and mental health a significant amount of damage. When was the last time you had taken the time to clear your head during a stressful situation? Where did you go? We tend to gravitate to places that are calm and quiet in our environment to escape the calamity, but the urban settings around us are what houses the largest amount of this stress, even in scenarios that are quiet and calm. It is rare when any of us are willing to drop the luxuries we have in our society to completely escape. This project is how we will emphasize the need for that escape in our live, and how the nature we neglect to acknowledge around us can bring us there.

Our video shows the importance of taking breaks from the business of life while captivating the beauty of nature. We wanted to use music, gestures, cues, and cinematic techniques to express the difference between public chaos and natural serenity. Nature is an excellent way of conveying this topic overall, as it is not only beautifully serene, but very quiet and absent of all the busy traffic that the population creates. It also completely removes us from our usual environments, immersing us in this new world, which can be extremely effective in helping us separate from our problems. Although the focus of the video is the contrast, it is meant to evoke a sense of desire to explore the beauty of nature and understand the benefits it can provide us with. As we pay more attention and take care of our environments, they in turn will take care of us.

We recorded scenes for our video for about two to three weeks and edited these together with additionally captured nature scenes from a group member to highlight many of the breathtaking examples out there in the world. Those scenes were taken from different places in the country at a high distance to fully capture the view. We decided not to use any dialogue and instead opted to edit our piece in a way that expresses the stark contrast from the two types of footage: Nature and civilian life. Time-lapses are used to emphasize the busy and fast-paced lives we have while keeping the video compressed enough to focus on its main ideas about nature. Some of the nature scenes contain yoga and other relaxing gestures to continually emphasize the contrast. This contrast between the two “worlds” is our focal point. This is what will drive the idea on the importance of nature in our lives in an appealing way and convince others to experience it themselves first hand.