APD Week 12 - Play and Stillness

THEME

For this week's theme Play and Stillness, I initially wanted to make an animation loop of an infinite blooming flower made up of found objects. I was inspired by the time lapse videos of growing plants and flowers I've seen online which were very mesmerising and soothing. I happened to have a vase of dry roses at home, and as I was studying the shape of the flower, a new idea came to mind. I wanted to experiment on freeze frame shots on falling pedals to capture their stillness moment and how it changes shapes in mid-air.

CONTEXT

I took inspiration from one of the movie scenes in Cloud Atlas, where the two protagonists were throwing and smashing plates in a room full of china. There was a shot showing all the plates flying in the air in slow motion, filling up the whole space. I saw the beauty in this seconds-before-destruction scene because even though the two protagonists were acting in such a violent and destructive manner, I felt a sense of relief and freedom from their face. Therefore, I also wanted to try to capture the beauty in stillness of flowers.

METHOD

I picked one flower pedal and tried to film it falling in slow motion, but my camera was too close to capture just one pedal. So I set up the camera on a phone stand and adjusted the distance so I could throw a handful of pedals in the air. I then took screenshots of the falling pedals from the video and cropped them out in Photoshop. I chose the pedals that had a clear falling path and aligned them up so that every pedal's movement is visible frame by frame.

REFLECTION

There were a lot of bad takes where I threw all the pedal up and none of them were in the frame. The randomness and uncertainty of the falling pedals formed a contrast with the idea of wanting to capture their still moment, which was very interesting to me. I really wish to take a freeze frame shot of an exploding water balloon or smashed glass, unfortunately I don’t have the space for it and might have to try to go to The Break Room in Melbourne.