RED
By Marcelo Meneses
Red is a short 1-minute film that has been glitched to achieve the effect of cliché horror filmmaking. Due to the piece’s theme being “insanity,” the film is about how this kind of mental illness can distort and affect thoughts and experiences. It showcases these in an exaggerated manner that makes the viewer uncomfortable and slightly terrified. Black and white contrast the bright red to help make the distinction of what is going through their head and what is not. This film takes advantage of the relationship between visuals and audio and how they complement each other, using the track’s ambient and electronic elements in the piece to help create synchronization between the visual imagery and sound.
Much of the experimentation was conceptualizing and filming rather than technical experimentation. However, even though it has been done in the past, “breaking the video” in hex fiend and step-printing are all techniques I have never done before, so it was still lots of experimenting from my point of view. Hex Fiend was the main tool I used for real glitching. Once the footage was in After Effects, I started experimenting with blending modes, step-printing, displacement maps, time displacement, color correction, and kaleidoscopes. One of the most interesting aspects of the glitched footage was that sometimes, if brought natively to After Effects, the glitched footage would show pieces of other footage even though there wasn’t a video overlapping it or even in the same comp. Somehow the glitched footage got a hold of frames from different parts of the project and would play it randomly. Of course, eventually those frames disappeared and I could not figure out a way to replicate it naturally the same way unless I closed AE and opened the file again.
Soundtrack: Blackout by Tony Anderson
