Déjà Vu
(2010)
makers: Hui Penny Xiong, Raja Fadzli and Vanessa Morris.
This project has each of the participants filming their own material and then collectively working out how to bring them together, they used some simple guides in relation to their filming, so that material would not be too disparate. However, what sets this project apart is its use of thumbnails for navigation. While they only use three, they are hand drawn. This provides two interesting qualities to the work. The first is the tone it establishes. The second is how it helps set up patterns.
The use of the hand drawn images gives the work an informality that is quite unusual for many of the K-Films you see around the place. Most have what you might describe as a highly polished feel to them, all that black petite cinema enframing with high resolution stills or images being used. Here by being drawn they leave some of the indexical rigour of video and move towards the informal.
What is also enables is that because the thumbnail is not taken from the video track they can be used differently. For example a video clip of a snow dome picks up a round spoked wheel, a drawing of a tree like thing (turns out to be a clip of sparklers burning), and a grid. From this I imagine one of the series of relations (and patterns) being made is around shape, in this case roundness, which can happen precisely because they are drawings which can emphasise this.
The majority of the clips are brief, and many feature post production effects to make them more abstract, associative (eg adding swirls to again repeat this idea of the 'roundness') and fragmentary.