Lying awake I recall an idea shared with me by a good friend, his thought is that anything is watch-able as long as it is short. Lately it seems true; a new wave in videography and digital filmmaking has emerged in the form of amateur filmmaking and Internet streaming video. Enormous trends have been set already, funny cats, inside jokes, personal video journals, sexy-smoking-housewives, music video parodies, etc. More often we are seeing professional concepts being inspired by amateur videographers. The mass contribution continues non-stop and it is a global phenomenon.
Conventions for Short Concept Digital Video, this is an experiment:
1. Digital art should be remixed, mashed up, sampled and reborn over and over and over again.
2. One minute in length (60 seconds)
3. No credit to the director
4. Showcased in a digital public forum, i.e. the Internet, youtube.com, Google Video
I am trying to produce artistic, unique, experimental, conceptual, funny, smart videos that do not take long to create, do not cost money and do not take long to watch. Work with these boundaries, suggest some others, this is not finished.
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. –Albert Camus
(this page still under construction)
I don’t think it should have to be hand-held. Also, I think that limiting the number of edits is good because it restricts people from the ADD music video style editing, but I think four might not be enough. Maybe less than eight edits.
As to the number of edits, I’m on the fence. If the vid is less than a minute, four cuts might be fine.
What about the number of edits, as well as some other rules, being on a sliding scale. So, for instance, you may have 8 edits, but you are forced to have less to produce with in another area. I’m not sure what these other areas should be. Lighting setups? Script revisions? Time to edit? Time to shoot?
Might get too complicated, but could be cool.
Original sound is completely antithetical to digital culture! I would go as far as to even require some sort of remixed element and its very congruent with the no director credit rule. Bits are almost by definition worthless. They can be duplicated at no cost an infinite amount of times. Digital art should be remixed, mashed up, sampled and reborn over and over and over again.
I agree with Nate that there shouldn’t be a hand held camera requirement mostly because I’m bored to tears with hand held cameras.
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