Time (in videos)
Andy Goldsworthy’s Leaning Into The Wind is primarily another chapter in his ongoing documentation of what he’s been working on lately, but it had a few items whose timing/length didn’t quite fit with that format. It made me think about time, time lengths of visual snippets and how they can fit into a larger context. It’s likely this will be obvious to anyone who has an understanding of time but is useful for me because I don’t.
I think in terms of static objects that one would look at or walk around. The most temporally ambitious I’ve been is with slide shows. Although, after seeing some recent work by Sarah Sze, I’ve begun to understand how short (~30 second) video loops can be incorporated into sculptures
The film had a number of pieces that are extremely nice but don’t build into a movie and made me wonder about what kind of format might be the best fit. There were only a few items like this, but they stood out for me and fell into three categories (even though only one of the categories has more than one item)
Loopable (could be looped with minimal changes)
Hand flowers (Plunge into water) 1:28:26 1:28:58 — 30 sec.
Hand dirt (Wash under waterfall) 1:28:12 128:26 — 14 sec.
Shaking pollen (?) from tree 1:20:52 1:21:30 — 38 sec
I’d go for separately looping these (see below) a few times even in the context of the film, e.g., 3x repeats right where they were.
Disjoint Single Section (didn’t hang together within itself)
Light 2:36 -4:38 A lot of the separate motions that could be read as one event, but didn’t quite: not enough continuity — too much separation, lacked inter event progression/continuity
I’d go for separating these, even with a short pause, and potentially looping them as above
Linear progression (single scene insufficiently tethered to the rest of the film)
Hedge crawl 13:49 16:24 — 156 sec — there were verbal references to this at a few places in the movie, but the visual tiebacks seemed weak, and I don’t recall any verbal preview or immediate post clips comment that would have more strongly locked it into salience.
I think better verbal tie in, coupled perhaps with short excerpts sprinkled in when the verbal associates are made.
A few data points for consideration
Embodied Human Time Constants
normal breathing is 12-16 breaths/min (4-5 seconds each)
Walking: Normal walking is ~ 20 min a mile, which is 264 ft/min which is the length of an average Manhattan Short block
Experiments have shown that rats can successfully estimate a time interval of approximately 40 seconds, despite having their cortex entirely removed.[23] This suggests that time estimation may be a low-level process.[24]
Time Length: Best practices
Giphy says that gifs shouldn’t be over 6 seconds, so ~ 1 resting breath
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