The constraint of “no cuts longer than 4 seconds” led me to explore a style of jump-cutting 1 subject with so little change in the jump as to produce the illusion of movement between frames. This in itself is a type of animation, if less manual of a process than creating each frame independently, as is traditional to animation techniques.

The red substance oozing from the mouth of the subject is Oobleck, a non-Newtonian solid.

The process of creation of this video is somewhat interesting to note. All footage was ‘collected’ completely independant of this ‘production’. The story was actually created and sequentially evolved out of the seed ideas of the contents of the footage I had previously shot. For example, the idea of the “Omnipotent Artificial Consciousness” / Brain-in-a-Chamber-Pot was concieved and added into the script after the footage was shot, which was when I was about halfway completed with it.

Looking back on The Bees, there are some technical elements which I could certainly do better (notably, sound design and mixing!), however I am quite enamored with the amount of nuance and obfuscation in the story. I also love the stylistic approach of synchronizing audio and video, in both cuts and motion within the frame. This is evident throughout The Bees in the cutting, and to a more obvious degree in the fly breakdance scene. Note that this represents an imperfect initial exploration of this technique, and that I have honed and perfected my approach and skillls in later projects, such as the music video I did for edIT‘s track “Laundry.”

The editing was accomplished in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and various video effects were done in Adobe After Effects 6.5, with sound capturing and processing done in Sony Sound Forge 8.0.

Cinematography, sound and video editing, voice talent, video effects: Jed Smith
Music by Autechre, µZiq, End, Aphex Twin, Aix Em Klemm, and John Dowland.

Note: This video will require the most recent version of the Adobe Flash Player to work.