Moving Forward: CCTV Footage and New Possible Themes

After taking our experimental photos (see earlier post) we got thinking some more. In a group meeting we agreed that the final piece will probably be a video projection in CCTV style to portray our theme of surveillance. To create this and make it really resemble CCTV footage, experimenting taught us that putting together a series of photographs taken in the same place over a few seconds could give the sort of jumpy effect seen on CCTV footage. Effects could then be added to create the noise in the images and loss of some of the colour to create realistic impressions of security footage. Here is an example that Becky experimented with:

This is the sort of thing we would like our final piece to look like. However, looking further into 'The Umbrellas' piece has provided us with another theme to tie in with the surveillance too- women. We believe that within the painting, Renoir focused mainly on making the female in the foreground appear quite beautiful and almost flawless. He appeared to do this with other women in many of his paintings that we briefly looked at. We thought that incorporating an aspect of this into our final video could be really interesting- cutting to intrusive close shots of a beautiful girl in between the CCTV footage. This would hopefully communicate quite a sinister theme, linking in the intrusion of privacy (linking well with surveillance) with the exploitation of women and the changing appearance of the female form since the time 'The Umbrellas' was painted. This would be supported by research of make-up and fashion of women in the 1880s and also research into the treatment and rights of women from this time.

In terms of the presentation of our proposed video, we are thinking it should be quite uniform and simple, in a way which might make the audience feel uncomfortable whilst they are watching it. This is because we think that this will further emphasize the negative aspects of filming people who are unaware they are being watched, voyeurism and with the footage of the beautiful girl, themes of female exploitation and possibly perversion. We would like to position some fake cameras looking into the audience to further emphasize these themes and make the piece quite experiential- as though they are being watched, forcing them to watch the video which may in itself be an uncomfortable experience.

We are very excited to get going with putting the video together- we feel this is the next step for us, whilst researching further context along the side.