it's all real
Notes on methods in my new film. Sensory absorption and belonging in new experimental work made out of what's academically known as "shitty phone videos".
My film it’s all real is nearly finished. It emerged from a need to reconcile different parts of myself, something that has been rising to the surface in the last few months. Here I give some background to the motivations behind the piece and critically analyse some of the processes and methods applied experimentally in its creation. Most often I find that a film is born from a need and intuitive experimentation. It is only later, frequently when the film is close to being finished, that I discover the source of that need. I explore this piece relation to the state of absorption and my Autistic unmasking journey.
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In January 2023 I made a film from videos taken throughout 2022, some on my phone, some on my camera. It was a year of transition, moving from London to Plymouth, and I captured a lot of travel between places, and first impressions of the area around the new home. It was full of transient landscapes behind a train or car window, alongside the beauty of new beaches and parks, the greenest grasses and luscious trees of the summer. SUN DAY ended up being 20 minutes long, weaved through with non-chronological, asynchronous fragments of my journals from the year, including quotes and original writing around identity and explorations of the meaning of home in a way that felt flowing, spiritual, and ever-changing.
In 2023 I haven’t filmed as much of nature at all. Instead I found my phone camera roll filled with wobbly, flashing images of dancing crowds and groups of friends in the middle of the night. Loud, distorted gig footage, and striking rave lights displays deprived of their glory by the grainy phone camera, fibrillating faces and movement. I decided the part of my identity which loves dancing until early hours of the morning to loud music that vibrates through the body, and endlessly talking with friends, needs to be recognised as belonging to me, alongside the tame, considerate, meticulous, and cautious personality of a lecturer and a charity operations lead. Then, somewhere in between the working world and the nighttime world, sits the calm, peaceful part of me which writes, does the PhD research, makes films, swims in the depths of focus and freedom of sensory bliss of interactions with nature. I began to acknowledge that I, like most people, need all the different parts to experience life in fulfilling ways.
I think a lot about identity as an interactive place one recognises and develops for oneself within the world. A way of exchanging with the world. This makes me interested in diaries, memoirs, and diary filmmaking. How far can I express parts of myself, the spaces and times I experience in a specific period, and the phenomenological depth of how it feels?
For the new film, I gathered all the videos I could find that I shot in 2024. I began by putting them all on a timeline and watching each one. I slowed some down, sped some up, cut some beginnings and ends off, depending on the feeling of that particular video. Sometimes close ups seemed like they originated in a moment that felt much slower than some wider shots including crowds of people. After going through the many clips, I took a few days’ break.
Returning to the material gave me a new idea: I started making each video exactly 3 seconds long. Some I chose to cut up into a few fragments, sometimes zooming into different parts of the image so it doesn’t repeat exactly. I often wondered, when reading about Zen and about neuroscience of perception, how long is a moment. Each fragment of video was a fraction of a moment taking place in a specific time and space, or perhaps a sequence of moments. The interesting part of the creative process is often the self-imposed restriction or a rule, which frees the creative decision-making up for other areas of the work. I made up a world in which a moment is exactly 3 seconds long.
I then put all the 3-second clips on the second video and second audio track. I started blindly (randomly, without looking at what clip I was moving) moving them down into track 1. Most clips kept their sound, on very few I replaced the audio with a fragment of something else. I am not sure what the reasoning behind this step was, other than some clips have been unlinked earlier for the purpose of speed manipulation, lost the sound while moving onto the timeline, and I decided not to recover the original sounds. After all clips have been placed in a sequence, I went through them to check if each one is the same length. Gaps between them often meant that one or the other was accidentally trimmed while being moved, so I adjusted all to 3 seconds. This work soon became tedious, my hand and my back started to hurt, and I decided to stop. The pleasure of repetition I experienced at the beginning wore off, and it was better not to push the work further onto the pain.
Next time I tried taking the entirety of the audio track and shifting it 1.5 seconds forward. Each video clip had the audio from the previous fragment for the first half of the 3 seconds, then the other half was filled with its own sound. This, although an interesting experiment, created an effect that made me clench my fists while watching - it was stressful to remain in this tension of attempting to follow the changes of image and sound. I felt like I was running and tripping over my legs, like I sometimes do in my dreams, always almost falling but never hitting the ground. I returned the material to the synched audio version once I started working on the overlays.
Most of the overlay material is comprised of the additional footage I found in a different folder, filmed in January 2024 in my little office room. It was made at the same time as the photographs that ended up as my piece Hyperreality Convergence which I shared in April in the Constellations exhibition. Rain-painted windows, the tree outside, a shadow of my dancing hand, steam coming out of the boiler extractor which turned the light play of the winter sun into a spectacle. There is also some steam from a tea cup and a nightly half-lit branches of the tree in our garden. I cut these up into 3 seconds fragments again and mixed up in a way that fragments of the same shots don’t appear in a row. This type of work, repetitive, blind, random more than intuitive, always feels very material, manual, embodied. I am using my laptop, with its fairly small editing windows, kept that way to fit everything I need to see on one screen, and only the touch pad and keyboard shortcuts. It provides a particular experience for my hands, where my right hand can get tense and tired and my fingers begin to get colder and colder, especially when editing in the winter, despite the heating being on, the constant movement of the hands that one would imagine should keep them warm.
I tested different blending modes and opacity for the textural overlay. I settled on vivid light, which weaved the textures into the videos, preserving and highlighting the intensity and colours of night lights, while making the image slightly darkened and high in contrast. I think it reflects more closely the sense of what many of the locations felt like - grainy, brightened by only streaks of strobes, flashing, fragmented. As much as I enjoyed the giving up of control while arranging the clips, which gave me structure to begin the film with, I did not stop myself from making adjustments which affected the visual and sonic flow. After I added the text, I moved some shots around. I not only wanted the text to be easier to see in all instances, but also endeavoured to feel the flow of the film and get attuned to it’s rhythms.
I experienced the state of absorption in the early editing stages, where I performed repetitive movements of cutting three second fragments, and moving them around on the timeline without much use for thinking. I was relaxing into the movements of my body, in a series of actions that required a sort of embodied focus rather than cognitive one. In the later stages, while I had all the clips in the sequence along with the overlay and text, I was absorbed in the feel of the film, the way it trickled into my sensory centres. While replaying the different fragments and then the whole piece, I began being able to assess which elements bothered me in some way, as if sobering me out of the intoxicating experience of the film.
While the “3 second rule” gives the material a rhythm, the changes and jumps between the sound levels, environments, and differences between the clips including framing, pace, light levels, all create a chaotic sense of immersion, where my brain engages deeply with each hit of sensation, just to be thrown straight to the next one in a regulated manner. There is a lot of pleasure in the state that the mix of rhythm and uncertainty this method offers. It seems to entertain my Autistic tendency for rhythmical stimming, while providing a sort of intense stimulation spikes that intensify a sense of absorption - without time to think or process, I dive into the audiovisual content and the waves of emotion it provides. I wonder if the film will have a similar or very different effect for viewers who were not part of the documented moments.
The text is what I hoped to contribute to revealing of the nature of my relationship with the images and sounds to the viewer, regardless of whether they witnessed the moments or not, of whether they know me or anyone appearing in the footage or not. Not surprisingly, the diary style of the reflections is inspired by one of the most prominent diary filmmakers in the Western avant-garde film tradition, the Lithuanian-born, New York-based artist and critic Jonas Mekas. His films are profoundly personal and document varied, vibrant, intimate moments from his life, portraying people and places with edits as poetic as the accompanying narration.
I rarely film other people. A few times I have performed in my films, usually in a manner I would describe as abstract or surreal, attempting to express states of mind more than a personality or character. In SUN DAY no faces or bodies appear at all, the images focusing on the relationships with the non-human. With it’s all real I wanted to challenge that hesitation of including faces of people I know, to allow myself to acknowledge and appreciate the human relationships that admittedly nourish my soul, and the sense of community I find in dancing surrounded by loud music and lights with friends and strangers. I refer to Mekas’ words “these are not memories, this is all real”, to reflect on how I feel about these moments captured impulsively on my phone camera, without the sort of “filmmaking” intention I would usually articulate when talking about filming for other projects. I discovered that indeed, these captures are led and motivated by the sensory and emotional absorption in the moment just as much as when I film landscapes, plants, and objects, all of which have been appearing in my previous work. I met a lot of wonderful people and deepened friendships in 2024.
Whether it was a “filmmaking” impulse or just a compulsion shared by mostly everyone with a phone camera these days, I am glad I captured the moments in which I felt a sense of belonging and an intensity of being alive among other human beings, something I have avoided exploring sufficiently before. I suspect that this uncertainty of whether the captured memories, or rather, real moments in an audiovisual, fragmentary form, are mine to edit and turn into a film, has a source partly in the lifelong process of Autistic masking in which I unconsciously or consciously engaged, like many other late-diagnosed neurodivergent people (Price, 2022). Feelings of shame in relations with people have been my companion for a long time, and belonging, as well as friendship, were luxuries I believed myself to be too inadequate to deserve. Not being able to interact with people in way that comes so easily for allistic (non-autistic) individuals, I’ve spent a lot of my life practising rigorous restraint in how much of my real self I share with people.
In the past few years I have admittedly openly endeavoured to challenge my habitual feelings of social and personal shame. “Making friends as an adult is so difficult”, I said when I met two of my now close friends for the first time. It is in fact even more difficult for an Autistic adult. But, however surprisingly for me, it does become easier when starting to unmask and open up to people, revealing the parts of me that I often hid because of being seen as too much, too intense, too sensitive, whatever else didn’t quite fit in the narrow expectation of what a “normal” person should be. I have been beginning to discover my Autistic identity, reunderstanding why I have always been facing certain difficulties, soon after I found myself in a safe and trusting relationship with my beloved partner. It was with him around that I started to try out being myself with ease, allowing myself the expression of joy, articulating healthy anger, and my thoughts and feelings which I suppressed in most relationships. This last year, I found reassurance, love, and shared enthusiasm in the many new friendships too.
The making of this film is reflective of the process of rediscovering a joy that’s shared, not only kept to myself. I am full of gratitude to everyone next to me or in front the camera in all the fragments of experiences, the moments of blaring bass or subtle quietude, shifting and glittering with different expressions of what it means to feel alive, delightfully confused by the flashing lights and the rushing of time and spaces, and innocently joyous.
I would have not made the film, nor written this before I knew I was Autistic. I would still be too concerned with trying to fix what made me so unfit for functioning. Dr. Devon Price writes about Autistic unmasking, or “refusing to perform neurotypicality” as “a revolutionary act of disability justice” (2022). It becomes less about me, less about overthinking of what’s “wrong” and how can I twist myself further to match the expectations, and more about recognising myself as part of humanity, rediscovering my places of belonging in the world. It’s all real is a simple diary film made form videos much like those taken by any other person with a phone and posted on social media, with a written text that the viewer likely won’t read in its entirety, distracted by the flashing 3 seconds intervals. It documents and evokes the states of intense sensory stimulation and the altered state of absorption just like many of my other films. But unlike my pieces which explore detachment, displacement (I won’t make a sad film, KINO Out of Body), or transience (SUN DAY), it allows for an intense celebration of belonging, not as a subject of hesitation and uncertainty, but of joy.
Would you like to preview the latest draft version of it’s all real? I would love to hear your thoughts! Message me or comment below to gain access to the private link.
Grrrrrl send me the link, it's cool as fuck you're doing this