Apr 5, 2010
Salvaged 8mm Clips – Rivercity Montage
Here’s a fairly random clip it’s high time I posted.
It’s something I filmed years ago on 8mm. The long story is that I was writing “Rivercity” at the time, which puts it mid to late nineties – and I wanted to grab as much visual reference and inspiration as possible; ways to describe colours, textures, movement etc – that communicated the atmosphere of the Old Town as evocatively as possible.
I had a certain aesthetic in mind and along with Polaroids, standard snaps and scribbles, I took a load of 8mm footage as well – I just love something about the fuzziness, the saturation of colours, the depth of contrast and the strange sense of movement. The plan was to use all this material to look at and to help get my head around how to articulate Hull’s very particular ‘down but beautiful’ vibe from the time.
So here’s some of the bits I rather liked in conveying the ambience of the place – I filmed some of the ripple shots upside down as I thought they’d look just a tiny bit odd (as if there’s something wrong but you can’t quote figure out what). And now I’ve ifnally cobbled it together into a clip, I avoided any kind of special edits whatsoever, left it completely linear, and added “Sketchpad With Trumpet And Voice” from Peter Gabriel’s soundtrack to the Alan Parker film “Birdy” over the top (for no better reason than it’s fab).
Rivercity Scenes from Gareth Bouch on Vimeo.
