The Holiday season always brings me to a conflicted state. In my opinion, the holidays are about the spirit of giving, sharing and caring for eachother. That’s what makes humanity what it is. All too often I see the ugliness of the holidays through peoples’ greed in excess and the direness of lives around us. Homeless on the streets are often ignored in the pursuit of gifts for our close circles of family and friends. We spend a few short days singing about peace and goodwill then go about our lives in active ignorance for the rest of the year. In this video I originally intended to study those contrasts, but I ended up wanting to do something more. I intend to highlight those opposing forces – the ugliness of our blissful ignorance in contrast with images of love, assistance, and care for our fellow mankind along with the world around us.
Initially this video focuses on our ignorance, our ugliness and how our societies are so polarized by the elite few who control our perceptions of those same societies around us. However, the video moves to a place of peace and love, ending with images of hope and joy. The message I intend to leave the audience with is a message of love, to be carried through the holiday season and beyond.
The form of this piece is time-based media, and the content is intended to initially give the audience a sense of frantic tension, followed by an easing into peace, joy and hope. I used several elements to convey the feeling I wanted – color, movement and sound. The soundtrack of this piece is from the Piano Guys, “Carol of the Bells” performed with cello. I find it to be a dramatic work suited to the message I wanted to impart. In the background, barely audible, is the constant of wind in a blizzard. It is more prominent at the very end of the piece.
For color, I used the two primary colors of the holiday – red and green. In this piece, red symbolizes tension, stress and fear. The primary image of the tree is also inverted. The tree is an analogy for the tree of life, inverted with the blowing snow in front of the tree nearly black, giving a dystopian feel to that recurring image. Video clips are ponderous and disturbing, not quite giving the audience enough information to process until the 50 caliber machine gun firing, then transitioning to the elite who shape our perceptions. These images turn into sensory overload before ending at the music’s transition. At this point, color shifts from red to green, and the image of the tree shifts from negative to positive, conveying a harbinger of better things to come.
In the “green phase” of the video, green is used to give the content a peaceful, harmonious, calming feel. Video clips and images of help, assistance and togetherness are used to give the audience some calm after the turmoil of the “red phase.” Images and video clips of people helping one another in spite of the difficult situations around them convey a message of hope. Groups of people taking time helping each other and the beings in the world around them denote a message of peace and care for everything in our environment, especially those people/other beings who desperately need humankind’s assistance.
Movement is only used in the early part of the piece in the video clips. Images of the elite are all stills, to portray the transient nature of those who try to control our perceptions. Later in the video, slight animation is used on the stills to draw audience focus to a particular element of the still, and to enhance the messaging by keeping the audience engaged with movement. The “red phase” ends with a striking image of a demonic face. I end the “green phase” with Mother Theresa, one who I consider the personification of pure love in the modern era.
I believe this piece gives the audience pause to reflect on their own lives and hopefully view the holiday season and their everyday lives from a different perspective. A perspective of love instead of fear.