Representing nature

Waking up at Tauranga Bay south of Westport on Monday 21^st April, I pondered on the view from my bed. The picture shown here is taken the following day, and does not have the same sky. My photography skills have not captured the texture of the distant hills.

My pondering was around the idea of representing the view artistically. The sky asked to be rendered in water paint. The foreground suggested embroidery. The hills could be brocade, or oil paint. But what about the waves? They need to be video, or at least animated, because they are moving.

So the next question became, why is video always rectangular? There is an obvious and easy answer – because the screen/viewing space is rectangular. But that does not satisfy me, and when I get back to “civilisation” I will be talking to my media studies contacts and filmmaking friends about whether any work has been done on non-rectangular film.

And then, how could we create the described multimedia product – a combination of digital and analogue media is truly MULTImedia!

We could digitise the painting and collage and set it as an irregularly shaped border to our video somehow. But then the result is all digital.

Or we could overlay the water paint and collage on a rectangular screen, with just the waves showing. But I want more than that.