inanimate

We've had lots of fun traveling on the weekends and exploring the city after class, but we've also spent a good amount of time in the classroom, behind the camera and in the lab.

For our first exercise, we were told to create a video using an inanimate object and a one minute clip of music. When our professor said this to us last week, we asked if we had to shoot ONLY the inanimate object. He danced around the question and said he was letting us make that decision. In my liberal arts state of mind, I thought, okay, he wants us to think outside the box and come up with something more, he's just not gonna spell it out for us.

WRONG.

He meant literally, an inanimate object, and nothing else. But I wasn't the only one who misunderstood the instructions. In fact, the entire class did. We all ended up incorporating a person in our videos in some way or another, to more or less, make our objects "come alive." Paul (professor) was astounded by our unanimous misunderstanding, but took it well and let us all laugh it off. Apparently we are the only class to ever come in with every single video having something animate. Of course now it makes total sense that we were supposed to use only the object. The whole challenge was supposed to be to make our objects "come alive" through creative camera work, lighting, editing, etc. We still got lots of feedback on our rough cuts, which was great since we're just learning the basic elements and characteristics of music videos. But of course, after the critique, Paul assigned us each tasks to do for our final cuts, namely finding ways to recreate the exercise and eliminate any people, whether it be through different shot selections in editing, or going back and reshooting. I went back and shot more of my chosen object, my camera. Here's what I came up with...
(let it load fully, and turn up the volume! the intro is quiet but essential)

inanimate from Hannah Epstein on Vimeo.