The trend continues. Gettyimages teamed with RES and others to have seven directors make 30-60 second shorts on about The Big Idea (whatever that is). The catch: they were to use Getty’s own bank of 70,000+ images and clips.
By default, collage, compositing, and digital manipulation rule. Making a film from pre-existing images refracts so many layers of intentionality, it makes my head spin. Marc Wilkins’ explanation of his own short, To Long For, could apply to working from the imagebank itself: “The film starts with pictures waiting for something — not doing anything, not moving and not acting; just searching, waiting.”
There are no accidents. Or, rather, if any accidents happen, they’re buried deep in the production process and within the prescribed boundaries of the corporate source. The closest anyone comes is Koichiro Tsujikawa, whose initial conceptual approach, to make “a collage of images that come up when I search related keywords,” turned out to be too broad. Eyes is a seductively manipulated kaleidoscope of his search results for just one word.
If it’s going to be collage, then, how about a John Cageian level of randomness? What if you determined which digital bits and clips to use by throwing the I Ching or some other arbitrary randomizing system at the database? Such a film would be about the imagebank itself. You could call it The Better Idea. [via coudal]