Assignment 3 - Remix Video

AIRSHIP from Andrew Kirstine on Vimeo.

For my final assignment of the class I had little idea of what I was going to do. It's difficult for me to get ideas for videos when I'm filming them myself, but having to take videos I didn't make and turn them into something new was even harder, especially with the criteria of each video being in the public domain. I started searching for videos I could use, and after scrapping over 7 initial ideas I came up with the concept of AIRSHIP.

With this video I wanted to create a juxtaposition between family life and the atrocities of war to show the ignorance of man. I decided to use solely black and white film in order to create a coherent setting, which in this case is World War II and home life in America. By using only black and white it seems to create a singular timeline, and the viewer believes both sets of images are happening concurrently. I tried to capture a feeling that I sometimes have, when I read or see glimpses of wars thousands of miles away from me and my home. At first I feel scared or saddened by what I've seen, but eventually I push those images to the back of my mind and continue on with my everyday life. Every human being in the first world is guilty of this. I also used the shots of landscapes at the beginning and end to show the viewer that both these lives are happening in the same world we all live in, yet they are both drastically different. I used the flag at the end to remind the viewer that even though these two worlds are not alike, the people in both images are from the same cloth and country.

I decided to do longer shots for the clips from the happy, family videos, while doing really quick flashes of the war torn clips. I did this to show the feeling I was talking about, where you are affected by what's happening to your fellow man but only for a split second until you get sucked back into the everyday world you are living in, remaining blissfully ignorant with your own first world problems while these terrible things are happening to your fellow countrymen. 

The song I decided to use was 'Come Take a Trip in my Airship' by J.W. Meyers. I thought this song perfectly captured my idea. The songs low fidelity fits right in with the grainy black and white images I used, while the subject matter of the song can be construed as both a tourism guide as well as a call to arms.

Works Cited:

“Early Settlers of New England (Salem 1626-1629)”, 1940. Archive.org video, 5:54, accessed March 24^th, 2013, http://archive.org/details/EarlySet1940

J.W Myers, "Come Take a Trip in my Airship", 1904 by Columbia #32589, 78rpm, accessed March 24^th, 2013, http://archive.org/details/airship1904

“Redwood Estates Promotional Film”, 1927. Archive.org video, 10:25, accessed March 24^th, 2013, http://archive.org/details/RedwoodE1927

“World at War (Part 2)”, 1942. Archive.org video, 16:53, accessed March 24^th, 2013, http://archive.org/details/gov.fdr.42.2

“Your Family”, 1948. Archive.org video, 10:38, accessed March 24^th, 2013, http://archive.org/details/YourFami1948