Medium Specificity--Country Road

Country Road from Samuel Woodruff on Vimeo.

With the medium specificity piece I tried to comment on an element unique to film. That is the combination of moving picture with sound. Though in theater for example we see people and hear sound it cannot be edited with the same control that can be done with the camera and especially editing. So the video is a juxtaposition of the faces we see on screen with a different voice. Though it aims to be amusing, I tried too to experiment with sound to create both pleasant and unpleasant feeling. Basically this is an experiment into what we can do by taking apart the soundtrack to go with a film and juxtaposing it against other sound.

This is much like the Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory. Eisenstein used the juxtaposition of images to make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Through editing he was able to evoke emotions that the images standing alone could not. This ability to put images together in close succession is something unique to film. The difference with what I am doing here is that I am attempting to juxtapose the audio with the video. It isn’t so much about sharp cuts and evoking emotions through different images because my images and sound remain somewhat similar throughout. Instead it is about experimenting with our classic ways of seeing sound in film. As you can tell in part II when I lead the track off by a little bit the feeling is sort of annoyance because our brains are putting the track with the sounds we expect. But as the gap gets longer that emotion starts to fade as our brains get used to not seeing the audio and video the way we expect it to be. We start to accept the disjoint and give the film our suspension of disbelief.

Part I on the other hand is an attempt at a humorous juxtaposition of sound. By playing with these different juxtapositions of video and sound different emotions come to surface. I believe this is both a comment on, and a celebration of the medium of film. It shows how sound can be used to our advantage. Perhaps here in an odd way, but how people can engage with something that is a lie in a sense. That it doesn’t have to be completely authentic to have an impact. Like Scott McCloud says in Understanding Comics, “If people failed to understand comics, it was because they defined what comics could be too narrowly! A proper definition, if we could find one, might give lie to the stereotypes and show that the potential of comics is limitless and exciting!” Obviously film is not as narrowly defined as comics, but maybe there is some potential here to expand upon. Emotions, especially in movies that are somewhat abstract to begin with, can possibly benefit from more disjointed or juxtaposed sound.





Work Cited:
 Understanding Comics
 Sergei Eisenstein Montage