Katharina Bangata
January 2018

Ashley Briggs
Ellen Røed

Development of devices and methodology for Apartment portraits.

By combining methods from video art, cinematography and sound art, Ellen Røed and Ashley Briggs conducted a series of experiments and studies intended to design/setting up specific conditions that engage different materialities and relationships in terms of cinematic devices and video. Various devices and forms of scanning techniques were explored in order to develop methods for camera based field recording by approaching the recording situation as a form of ecology engaging camera movement, scanning techniques, gestures/body (cameraperson), as well as transcient temporalities, presences and spatial relations inside an apartment.

These studies resulted in the film Doors by Ashley Briggs as well as the Apartment Portraits by Ellen Røed/Lemur.

ON DOORS #1.
ASH'S CONTEXT. FINAL VERSION 240612

Text by Ashley Briggs

1. JOURNAL ENTRY

Plan:

This is to be a film about a camera mounted onto a series of seventeen doors within an apartment, where each door is operated to act out it's arc. A journey through an apartment. Each door will be allowed the opportunity to describe its own agenda. The shots are to be edited sequentially. The film hopes to act as a document of different devices acting within each other's fields.

Journal 18/01/23:

I journey through the home from one door to another with a low-judgement high-awareness sensibility. I allow each door to display it's own character and to describe it's allowances and hesitations. While on a door I work out how best to collaborate with it. What can each perceive? I get in the way at times as does furniture and objects. Purposefully I did not prepare the apartment. I am well aware that the doors will be seen to be powered by someone, something. I try not to be a phantom. I know my breathing will be recorded and highly anticipate parts of me being seen in frames. This is okay. This film is not about precision of operation, mystique or obscurity. 

I shoot quite quickly and make it around in just over an hour. I needed only one second take after a mount fail. I work with each door one at a time with a gentle togetherness. It's stepping stones,...but on doors.

8pm. Ellen and I had been primarily looking for the spacial qualities of the apartment and this collaborative work had activated a different form of creativity in me. Of the 3 experiments today it is this one that feels significant. The door's arcs transport us around the apartment. Each arc creates it's own scenic view. The apartment literally unfolds.

2. ON REFLECTION

ON DOORS #1 (New title)

A door is both a boundary and an invitation. A demarcated liminal space. A threshold. Decisions, beginnings and passage. Doors open and close us. 

A textbook cinematographic pan would have the camera's focal plane (marked with the greek Phi Φ on the camera body) absolutely true to a central rotating x-axis. This is a powerful, central, precise position which results in dominated space. Yet it leads to surface and not shape. Offsetting the focal plane from the rotating x-axis, as in here with a camera mounted half way along a door's width, produces a pan within an arc. The camera now reaches into space and probes the site. Our perception is also offset. In addition, on orientating the camera back onto it's own x-axis, a surprising visual confusion manifests. Sometimes we lose orientation completely within an arc, as complex visual motion is both created and captured, and the image falls into abstract. (Much heightened by the visual slipperiness of gloss white and the woodwork's profiles and recesses). The arcs undo our preconceptions of familiar visual spacial (in direct tension to the seeming banality of a door) as the door's motion incorporates the viewer, with at least the base gesture of raising curiosity through sets of revealings, but perhaps even a sense of estrangement.

The arcs are so critical to this film that it could be said that this is a film for the production of visual arcs. (The concept of recording devices acting through arcs go on to continue throughout the Image As Site research).

The ASC (American Society of Cinematographers) has three charts to outline panning speed recommendations for cinematographers to reference. Variables including aspect (width of frame), lens focal length and frame rates. The aim is to create comfortable, non-disorientated, normal viewing. I didn't reference this while making On Doors #1. I used my own feeling and intuition as well as the door's own fluidity, weight, balance and will. 

Despite relative visual clutter the overarching architectural elements render the film with a vertical structure. Partial views, abstractions and spatial fragments that occur mostly as vertical strips don't require much vertical tracking of the eye; the information field is denser centrally. In considering if the aspect of the film should be much narrower I realised that with pans an excess is required; perhaps for our peripheral comfort or visual democracy. A very thin aspect promotes a scanning eye. Scanning across such a strip of re-presentation of space doesn't offer invitation for absorption into the image, viewer agency or an emotive-imaginative response.

It intrigues me that it is optically far easier to scroll through a site via a screened video than it is to look with a panning motion in person. Without incredible determination a pair of focused eyes can not pan smoothly and uniformly across a field of vision. Blocking one eye helps, cutting stereo vision's relentless automatic will to see depth information, yet the single eye's curiosity and desire still seeks, focuses and locks onto a succession of singular objects, light or colour; a virtually unstoppable darting, shifting visual field. (Curiously this biological manner is replicated in the camera's AF system).

This is a voyage into and around my own home. The door's movements generate events as the pans animate the site. There is a sense of filmic mobility in that a home is in motion; the house moves and the interior moves us. Architecture becomes it's own recording. A connected synthesis of site, recording devices, physical interfaces and operator meld together to become, or to perform, the audio-visual information field. The habitat of the home and the habitat of being within cinematography; being within the image making ecosystem.

I later realised how my own topophilia, or the love of a place, was a strong motivator in working intimately with a site. Intrinsic knowledge can lead to a sense of love, or visa-versa. This knowledge includes awareness of a situated knowledge. The doors, 120 years old, have had a life, and are living. A modern laminate panel door apparently does not. I can sense this and this is what I can work with. Such emotive processes undoubtedly lead to the inevitability of at least a suggested narrative weaving through a work, or the allowance for narratives to enter a work.

I subsequently made On Doors #2 and #3. Neither were a success per se yet together they succeeded in highlighting how useful On Doors #1 had become. #1 is a pioneering sketch, it is raw and has a non-aesthetic aesthetic. (The 'regular' prosumer DSLR look has a relatability). #1 maintains as "infraordinary" (Perec). #2 was made at the same apartment, but during packing to move house and with a different, slightly more cinematic camera. I had thought a suggested narrative of relocation would add value and could enhance the notions of a site in motion, or flux. This was too literal and the optics over-reached into 'cinematic'. As a system the nuanced relationships deteriorated. #3 was made at my parents house and ultimately over-valued photographic precision leading to nullified spacial feeling. Significantly the bland 2000-era doors and inter-generational family goings-on collapsed the film; it was distracted system. 

#1 is not distracted. It is a full immersion within a system. The materiality, the devices, myself; not a controlling immersion, but an immersion with allowance for each part to become. To create a structure or system that allows each inter-related components to become or be. Components each embody one another. Embodied flow. Embodied motion. Wholeness.

Feedback from screenings tended to generate interest around the suction mount, the auto-focus and the audio recording. The suction mount is a standard piece of grip equipment used to hold equipment effortlessly on smooth surfaces such as car bodywork. It takes seconds to pump out the air from the rubber cup to create the necessary vacuum. A red line's position is the only gauge to see how much suck remains. Adding some drama, the suction isn't always totally guaranteed. This film relies on atmospheric pressure.

I haven't yet landed on why having a forced material absence centrally located within a work is attractive. Perhaps it carries a notion similar to negative space. 

Device agency is central to IAS, including camera function. The notion of automatic provoked some hostility in me; what about my agency as a cinematographer? Will the camera see for me? The autofocus lens struggles. It is keen to be accurate, to the point of maniacal, but technically fails to reach focus often. It's unruly, petulant and overly-eager. Canon clearly don't calibrate their AF systems on gloss doors in motion. But after basic tuning and testing I came to realise that autofocus is central to the film. Hunting algorithmically for light and contrast the autofocus lens 'feels' the space. It partners with the panning arcs in becoming the visual field, not merely representing it. We slowly accept and become accustomed to it's searching, even willing it along as the camera seems to discover vision. (It does via communicated metadata for constant development, leading I am sure to AI focusing). The camera matches our own curiosity.

Multiple offsets occur around the recording device. By relinquishing my own focus control to AF the system now benefits from apparent haptic navigation as the lens feels for the space. This is mirrored in my own operation; not of the camera but of the door. I set up the camera and then perform the door, at times operating the door through the camera. The camera become a grip device, a proto-handle. Cinematography is a surprisingly non-haptic operation and many cinematographers including myself lament the lack of touch perception in their working process. In parallel, the cinematic image is mostly lacking in haptic qualities also. Even novelty imaging processes such as 3D or VR can't really address this. On Doors #1 could be seen as an attempt to navigate the haptic and create a relatively tactile view of space.

The film's audio (comprising almost entirely of what film sound recordists try to negate) captures in sync, in stereo and in the direction of the visual field. One channel is free to capture unaltered atmospheric sound being orientated away from the door, the other captures modified sounds via pointing into or off the door's surface. The doors must act as barrier, amplifier and reflector of atmospheric sound together with a structural material transmission; although this is beyond my sensitivities to tell for sure. (This is a simple stereo mic. I am not a sound recordist). Yet there is deep value for the film in the rather basic, stoic manner of the audio recording. The soundscape is quite dynamic. It's rather intimate. The on-body mounting provides close proximity audio together with structural-born noises that brings us into the realm of the recording device adding a distinct internalised information field. 

At least from my position, as assistant artistic-researcher and cinematographer within IAS, these early works based on doors created passages for entry. Quite literally an opening.

3. SPECS

ON DOORS #1 (Previously titles IAS EXP01 KB19 DOORS 180123)

Camera: Canon 5Div / Canon L 24-70mm f4. No filtration. Rec to CF Card. 1080p All-I. 

Settings: Profile Neutral. Fluctuate between 800-1600ISO. f4-f7.3. Constant 1/50th. 

Grading/Post: None. Master to ProRes422HQ1080p.

Audio: Sennheiser MKE400 (unmonitored once set up).

Grip: Manfrotto suction cup / camera plate / lightweight photo-head / x17 interior domestic doors.