Video Essay from Daniel Carter on Vimeo.
For my video essay I had chosen to do a super-cut of Stanley Kubrick’s works in regards to fear and the human condition in his films, taking segments from each film where the human side of the characters is exposed to be indifferent from the rest of us, regardless of how the character is portrayed throughout the film. The one weakness shown in each of these clips is the reason why all his films end in a somewhat failed goal, but results in a stronger human connection with the characters.
Being a fan of Kubrick’s work after studying him under auteur theory in Film at A-Level I decided my knowledge of the director and the availability of his films online was enough to prompt me to create this video essay. Being a topic of study in film for quite some time Kubrick has been rendered as an academic movie maker with work that comes under scrutiny and study all of the time, especially in the regards of theme throughout his film. Choosing a popular topic ensured my essay was not only relevant but interesting, as with any good essay it should be about argument, discussion and study which definitely comes through in my video. As it has been debated time and time again the subject remains current and will most probably remain a topic of intellectual argument for years to come.
My video essay meets the aim of the artefact as it demonstrates using the clips, rather than a drawn out somewhat boring explanation, the short and simple presentation of my findings is enough in itself to draw a response from an audience. The fact that nothing is hand fed to the viewer means that they can make an assumption as to why these characters are portrayed in this way, but the overarching subject stays the same for this production as it is objective as much as it is subjective.
To make my essay I ripped clips from YouTube as this was the fastest, most efficient way of finding my clips as I could just search the scene. Hearing from my fellow peers and attempting to rip a copy of the DVDs myself I found it incredibly difficult and heavily time consuming trying to find the scenes I wanted, opting to reduce quality of clips through watermarks and aspect ratio, I still feel that my essay meets its point with the poor quality clips.
In the future if I had enough time and resources I would have to take full resolution clips and dissect more content from these specific films, making my future essays more in depth and more interesting, by changing the duration of each clip to its minimum timescale a more fast paced edit would have sparked more intent to watch.