Manipulating Time - Experimental Video: Blink

The experimental film 101 is to make a video about time and manipulating time. Time is always a interesting subject for me. When I was 15 I read the book A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, hoping to discover the truth of time travel (hashtag science student). I was amazed by all the possible ways of time travel but if I have to pick one I would like to travel to the future. The theory would be like this:





There is another theory that I learnt from watching the Series M of QI XL, an episode called Messing With Your Mind (http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06vmkwb/qi-xl-series-m-9-messing-with-your-mind), from 23:00 to 26:33. There was a short film shown at the Royal Institution Christmas Lecture by Professor Bruce Hood showing there is a in-attentional blindness caused by blinking and is a problem for witnesses and so on. I was amazed by the fact that we are blind for 2% of our lives and that blindness stops up from noticing things right in front of us. There is so much information that is lost in between the blinks, as shown in the short film. TV/Film and Time Travel Today, the film Interstellar (2014) had used the theories of time travel in the plot, which is fascinating. Also, other movies also included different kinds of time travel in the plot to create meaning. There's a list worth checking out: The 25 Best Time Travel Films of All... Time. In the list, La Jatée (1962) by Chris Marker is the most interesting one in terms of the style, and it's shown in class as an experimental film, perfect. There is one which I watched many times called About Time (2013), beautifully filmed, good soundtrack and cheers me up every time when I was upset about life. As for TV, Doctor Who is surely the classic time travel series. Cultural theorist Alec Charles said that the programme is about time and timelessness that time travel can be interpreted as a metaphor for the way we live in the twenty-first century, and in the era of relativity and relativism, it is not continuity but discontinuity which define us (Hills, 2010, pp. 87 – 87). It reminds me of a theory that time doesn't exist that I first learnt it from John Lloyd in a TED talk, saying "Time. Nobody can see time... There's a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist because it's too inconvenient for the figures. It's much easier if it's not really there. You can't see the future, obviously, and you can't see the past, except in your memory." (Lloyd, 2012). I am not an expert, but a more detailed theory can be seen here on a scientific website. 


Personal Time

All of those above inspired our experimental video: Blink. 
Let's say universal time doesn't exist, how about "personal time", the way we experience life. (And I am sure there are other "times" as well, such as political time and technological time.)
We chose train journey to present the concept because: 1. It is taking us to the future (in Stephen Hawking's theory and in real life as well, we are all     traveling in time and space sitting down), we are all traveling in "personal time" to the           future. 2. Different people have different perceptions of time and that can be expressed with a train journey. Trains sometimes goes fast, sometimes goes slow and there is never a standard speed as far as we experienced. Just like life journeys there is never a standard route or speed to travel.


Visuals

Ethan and I agreed to film each of our train journeys which we traveled to different places at different time on different trains with different cameras (iPhone 6 and Canon 5D Mark II). Therefore, we have two personal footage of our journey. Then we filmed our eyes to be over-layered.

Inspired by Professor Bruce Hood's short film we created a black screen whenever our eyes blinks and they are nearly unnoticeable just like how we blinks. Also, we manipulated the speeds of different parts of the scenery of the train journeys as there is no standard speed of it but personal experience. There are colour changes as well, which are nearly unnoticeable after the lost of information caused by the "blinks". It is interesting how the "blinks" creates discontinuity and continuity at the same time. The changes of colours follows the rainbow colours while rainbows meaning life, hope, promise, creation, etc.


Audio

Some parts of the video is with a background noise of a bus journey instead of a train journey but it is barely noticeable. It represents the fact that sometimes we think of something else in our heads but you won't know that unless you were informed.





Blink - Blink as time passes, blink as we are alive. 



















Hills, M. (2010) Triumph of a time lord: Regenerating doctor who in the Twenty-First century. London: I B Tauris & Co.




Lloyd, J. (2012) An animated tour of the invisible. Available at: https://www.ted.com/talks/john_lloyd_an_animated_tour_of_the_invisible (Accessed: 14 January 2016).