Energy—some half-baked ideas

I believe we respond to the energy expressed within each frame of video or film. What makes Stan Brakhage's scratched emulsion films so compelling, for example, is that each frame is like an individual painting and the time spent on creating each frame shows. The Episode III DVD has a nice feature on this same idea. There's a segment that shows what goes into making one minute of film. The way I think about it is that part of what we're responding to as viewers is the energy of all those people stored in visual form.

This relates to our film because I have lots of energy saved as After Effects files and that energy is now being expressed within the exposition video. Sometime ago I created a bunch of AE tests that I don't even remember doing. Now I'm applying them to the project at hand and they're working well. I have one file that splits the image into RGB channels and jitters each channel individually. I applied this to the exposition text and it creates a nice analog video feel. I realize that the look I'm after is analog video, as opposed to film or digital video... analog video with smears and misaligned RGB guns and handmade edits. I also like the fact that the RGB splitter effect was designed for different video footage. This makes its application to the current footage look less planned out and a little more authentic.

I find two notions related to this energy idea interesting. First, I wonder if I'm somehow mischaracterizing this conception of stored energy. Just the sound of it conjures the idea of Bestand. Maybe it's the wording.

Second, this idea suggests a particular way to think about production. If the energy-within-frame idea is a valid one then we have no way of competing against something like Episode III. How can our tiny efforts compare to the efforts of the thousands of people who worked on that film? Can three people working on a film come up with something that has the aesthetic "weight?" of a mainstream feature film? In one sense, our efforts cannot compare. Episode III contains a level of technological expertise that we will never equal. And yet, there is a difference between a technological mastery and meaningful energy. A huge part of the work of Episode III went into creating its world. And there is a lot of energy that we can find for free. The garage we use as a set, for example, has lots of stored energy in the weird spray paint, the weathering, the dust. Our film also carries the weight of years of thought, years of collecting and years of experience. I guess there are different ways to conceive of "production value." On the one hand, we can think of production value as the amount of human and physical capital seen on screen which creates a certain kind of authority. What the stored-energy idea may lead us to is the idea that energy can potentially replace capital and that energy can be found instead of generated.