I placed the 31 seconds of 4:3 edited footage in the centre of an HD frame, preserving the image quality by having its pixel size at a 1:1 ratio. I felt the image seemed a little ‘lost’ in the HD frame and would likely be smaller than other work in the compilation.
In search of a solution that would use more screen-space, I then composited another two frames across the 16:9 HD screen. As seen in Figure 21, the outer two SD frames extend beyond the edges of the HD frame, shown as a black rectangle.
I chose this arrangement in preference to having three smaller complete panes. Offsetting the footage in each pane by one second from right to left displayed subsequent clips in the three panes. The three video tracks in Figure 22 above are the right, centre and left panes, reading from top to bottom. When playing, each one-second clip appears partially on the right-hand pane, then fully visible in the centre pane, then partially visible on the left-hand pane, alluding to past, present and future across the composition, reading left-to-right.
The footage used in One Second a Day is silent. To create a soundtrack, I recorded a Super 8 film projector being started and running, syncing this audio to the moving images making an auditory connection to the performance of film projection. The machine used to digitise the footage was almost silent, its operation not disturbing the hushed, reverential space of the telecine suite in Soho. The sound of the Chinon projector being operated in my work room brings the footage home – literally – as the progress of a 50ft reel through the machine is sonically coloured by that space. Brandon LaBelle describes his act of clapping in a room as “more than a single sound and its source, but rather a spatial event” that is “inflected not only by the materiality of space but also by the presence of others, by a body”(LaBelle, 2015, p.xii). Recording the audio in a domestic-sized room with me standing and holding the microphone, shapes the audio, and to me, it speaks of the times when I first saw each reel freshly returned from processing.
Super 8 cameras usually have automatic exposure, so filming can be freewheeling in execution: frame, focus and press the trigger. The cost of the film and processing encourages frugality, so individual shots are fairly brief. Despite the consequent brevity of most of the filming – meaning more frequent in-camera edits – 30 of the one-second selections contain a single shot. Close inspection of One Second a Day reveals that a single one-second clip has an on-screen edit within it that then repeats across the three panes, shown in Figure 24.
The short film was compiled with the other students’ videos to form a collection with a running time of approximately eight minutes duration, entitled 3D3: 1 Second a Day Showreel. The compilation is displayed by 3D3 on its website.
My Super 8 films had undergone a complicated series of remediations on their passage to include in the group project. The film frames were mostly shot at 18 frames per second, digitised to standard definition video at 50 interlaced fields per second, colour-corrected by a telecine operator and recorded to Sony DigiBeta half-inch digital tape. This tape was played out and captured to hard disk, then de-interlaced and placed in a 25 progressive frames-per-second high-definition video editing project. The SD telecine and video edit used ProRes codec QuickTime files with 4:4:2 colour subsampling. When the edit was complete, the subsampling was downgraded to 4:2:0 and compressed using the H.246 codec for playback on an LCD television.