Art 345 Final

Eric Franklin

Clint Sleeper

Art 343 Final

Random Photo/Video Accident

            For my final project I based my idea on the reading on Moyra Davey "Notes on Photography & Accident ". When I read this, I was intrigued with the reading. She talks about how with photos for some can have an accident in it that was unintentional. in the reading a quote stood out to me: "Most photographers have always had an almost superstitious confidence in the lucky accident" by Susan Sontag and I was fascinated by it. Continuing the reading I was slowly trying to understand about how her process works and how she talks about others things in her life while looking at a photo or something along with those lines. After reading it I was still a bit confused on what her message was about and what her thinking process was like, but the quote really stood out to me. How I interpreted a photo accident is something that is taken within the photo that was not planned out. So I decided to go through this route to find a "photo accident", however I wanted to throw a twist. I wanted have a random factor to make it a more like trying to find that photo accident, but also a force out of my control. The random fact I used were dice. Particularly a 3,6,8,10,20 sided dices as seen here:

 I chose the 20 and 10 sided dies because they would be the more effect because of their high numbers. The 10 sided dice (right) would determined how long would I take pictures for and how many steps I would take before taking pictures while the 20 sided dice (left) determined how many pictures I would take after I hit the step once I hit that last step. I rolled a 10 on the 20 and I rolled a 70 on the 10 sided. So I took 10 pictures every 70 steps for 70 minutes. I did this twice one for the city and one while in the country because I wanted to see if I could get a photo accident based on the environment and see the difference between a city photo accident and a country photo accident. For the city I decided to go with Reno downtown since it was a lot of cluster and for the country, I drove to Fallon and went to a farm I was familiar with since it was away from the city and I could get some cool shots out there. The equipment I used was a Samsung HD Camcorder for the video recording and a Canon T3 Rebel for the photos.   After I had the photos, I decided to put them through a random generator and it will pick out which photos for me to print to make it more luck based.

I picked a number between 1-138 since that was the number of photos I took and told the program to picked 70 photos since it was half of the total photos. While it was interesting, I noticed that a lot of repeat photos were being picked and it worried me since they were being hung up, people would be confused on why there were repeats of photos up here. I ponder at the thought and finally came to the conclusion that if I wanted to stick to my method, I had to keep the repeats in.

Next was the video side. I had help with my roommate for this one. Again the dices were in play, however, this time we based on how long we filmed, how many times we changed the angles while filming, and what to talked about. The results were to film 60 minutes, changed about 20 times and talk about current events while shopping at Wal-Mart because from my experience, you can find some interesting things there while shopping at Wal-Mart. I wanted to try and make the conversation and natural as possible, ignoring that the camera was on and filming, but at the same time making sure I was keeping to the method and the project in mine. Once the filming was done, I took to my editing program ( I used Adobe Premiere Pro CS 6), again the dice rolled determined how  many cuts I did and where those cuts were and delete the others. The results was this:

The whole random idea and how it was done was based on John Cage's mathematical random factor in all of his works particularly his "Chess" piece.  I wanted to incorporated that because I felt that when you somehow get a photo accident, it is in a way based on luck and by random chance.

            The final product of my project was I loop the render video and hand the pictures around the video in random ways. I would hang them perfectly, I just hung them whatever came to mind, all randomly. Creating a random system and creating a way to where all of my decision was determined by the roll of the dice was fun and challenging. Did I get an accidently photo? After all was set in done, I did to see if I did get an accidental photo or something in the video I did not plan. Only thing that was close was in the photos, I looked at the dog and the dog jumped a bit to give me a lick. While cute, I felt it didn't come close to what I was aiming for. True that it was something I was not expecting, it just wasn't right, like a wedding photo being taken, but in the far distance you see a tornado being touchdown. To me that is a photo accident.  Overall I felt my final project was something I would not see myself doing, but it was an interesting challenging for me to do and was something of boundaries for me I had to follow. I could not just go out there and hope to get something what I was aiming for, but had to follow a set of rules that was up to the roll of dice.

Work Cited:

Davey, Moyra. "Notes on Photography & Accident." N.p., n.d. Web. 3 Dec. 2014. <http://74.220.219.113/~murraygu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Davey_Notes_on_Photography__Accident.pdf>.