Maps and Networks Developed Idea

After a lot of consideration, Nicole and myself decided our idea of using the butterfly effect as a short film was a much too linear and narrative idea for our installation piece. We hadn't properly thought outside the box about what we could do with an installation and we were just looking at making another film with a regular plot.
We also began to realise that logistically with just the two of us we would probably have a lot more work to do than we had anticipated.
With this in mind we decided to change what we were doing. We didn't want to change it completely though, so we decided to just adapt what our initial idea was, which was about the connections between people.
Nicole came up with the idea initially for our butterfly effect piece, which was to use more than one screen within a screen to show different things that were going on.

Johann Pascual was someone we stumbled across whilst looking for research for our 'butterfly effect' idea. We really liked the idea of using multiple frames in our piece, and this inspired us to move away from our rigid idea of a short film and make us decide to branch out a bit. 

This was the kind of thing we wanted to go for with our piece. Not with as many different boxes as this but something similar. We then deviated from our initial idea into maybe using three side by side boxes to show different objects being used to try to communicate between people. 

We also found this video installation art on Vimeo that had the 3 screens side by side in a way that was similar to what we wanted. There is really nice imagery in this piece, and all the colours and tones match throughout the work. It's clearly of the same or similar place and has an eerie melody being sung throughout the piece. 

What I took from this piece is that the woman is always in the middle. We want our work to be similar to this in that all the important parts happen in the middle screen. Our characters would be either side and the passing of objects would be in the middle.

Something else I like about this piece is that most of the movement also happens in the middle emphasising it's importance, the outer two screens have very little motion compared, and the woman doesn't often appear outside of the middle screen. This I thought was interesting, as a way of keeping peoples attention mostly focused on the one area. This is an issue Nicole and myself discussed, as when we make our piece we don't want there to be too much going on so that people don't know where to look.

When people do appear outside the middle screen, there is a peak in interest as it's a break in what's been happening for the rest of the film. It was a useful tool to think about using, just having motion in the outer screens occasionally to further involve the viewer.

At a couple of points in the film the characters from the outer screens cross over into the middle screen which I think is really effective as it happens so rarely. It reminds us that they're in the same world but just doing different jobs, and sometimes these overlap. 

"Stormwater" 3 screen video art installation by Tom Skipp from estrellasonora - Tom Skipp on Vimeo.

So instead of thinking of the butterfly effect and literally the procession of events, we moved on with the idea of connections between individuals, and and how people struggle to communicate what they want to say.

The basic set up would be this;

three screens, the left one with a woman, the right one with a man, and the middle one as some sort of no mans land , which they keep crossing in to but missing each other.

The idea was that they are both trying to communicate but can't. We experimented with the idea of technology and how different generations struggle to get across what they mean when they're talking to each other, and also looking at how teenagers these days have been raised with technology and it's very natural for them to be using it, and how that contrasts with people of older generations to whom it is a very alien concept. 

With this in mind, we thought of one of our characters using just old fashioned technologies, and the other using modern ones.

We arranged it so the woman on the left would be the one using the old fashioned items such as books, letters, radios, and the man on the right would be using items such as an iPod and an iPhone.
I also wanted to link this to Tom Skipps 3 screen video art piece by having the most important parts of the film occurring the the centre screen. I really loved the ending of the film where the man crosses over into the middle screen and picks something up, I think it was a really effective use of the crossover and Nicole and I wanted to show that in our work.