My fascination with letting images repeat and repeat – or in film’s case ‘run on’ – manifests my belief that we spend much of our lives seeing without observing. —Andy Warhol
[one_half padding=”4px 10px 0 4px”]The Warhol quote is appropriate for this morning. Today’s video experiment is one you may need to watch more than once before you actually observe the subtle transformation that takes place over the 30-second duration of the project. I’m not going to tell you right away exactly what it is. Sure, you’ll see the video move; that part’s rather obvious. But there is a subtle transformation that occurs slowly, one that changes the emotion of the image, but avoids being dramatic in its presentation. Don’t be embarrassed if you need to hit the replay button more than once before you realize what’s happening.
I’m going to have to watch this post today. I’ve been uploading the videos to my YouTube channel because not only is that the easiest and most dominant method of video presentation, it also integrates well with our web design. I don’t have to go through a number of steps for it to work as I do with some sources. I could upload the video directly, but I tried that with the first one and was less than pleased with the result. However, YouTube, like many other forms of social media, sometimes goes apoplectic over artistic material. Unlike Facebook, where I can set some images to be seen only by specific, appreciative friends, YouTube videos not set for public viewing don’t embed in other websites. There’s a chance the video won’t survive the day. Or it might. One never knows.
As a backup, I’ve uploaded the video to Vimeo, which has a more tolerant policy toward artistic material. I have to take a couple of extra steps to embed it, should that become necessary, but if it happens that, too, should be a subtle transformation that is less than obvious to the average viewer. There are so very many considerations when working with video.[/one_half]
[one_half_last padding=”4px 4px 0 10px”]I will also be watching to see if today’s video is more popular than yesterday’s. Once again, I was disappointed in the lack of attention yesterday’s image received and have to assume that it was largely because there were no humans in the picture. This is why I post so very few landscape and other non-model oriented artistic images. When we post a photograph to the website, we need for that image to draw people in, to make them curious and interested at what we are doing, what there is to see here. Ultimately, we want people to click on the booking link and set an appointment with us, or contact us if they have questions. That doesn’t happen when I post pictures of barns, even though I think the effect in yesterday’s video was very cool.
I get it; subtle transformation is something that happens in our head the moment we see an image. We glance at a picture and instantly decide whether we want to give it any more of our attention. People, especially faces, are easier for us to engage on an emotional level. We look to see if the subject is someone we know, what they might hold in common with us or someone else with whom we are acquainted. Our instinctive response is to try and personalize a photograph on some level and having a model in the picture makes that easier because, if nothing else, we’re all human. Allegedly.
Subtle transformation is, I think, I good approach to today’s image. One needs to not just look, but observe carefully or they’ll miss the entire point and purpose of the video. I’ll be watching to see how many times the video is viewed. I’ll explain the transformation below the original image. [/one_half_last]
A Quiet Moment (2012)
If you’ll watch today’s video very closely, you’ll see it slowly moves from black and white to color. That’s the subtle transformation!