Miss You [LQ] from Claudine Lamothe on Vimeo.
This is a video of my progress so far with the assignment.
Following the given theme of language, I decided to create a motion typography work that demonstrate distance with words and language. The idea for this project came to me this summer, while my boyfriend was in Mexico. We would exchange emails and talk on the phone frequently, but even with all our effort to make the separation less painful, progressively the gap between the two of us became wider and wider. Looking again at the letters exchanged during that period of time made me realize how words like “I love you” and “I miss you” became so repeated that they seem to convey desperation, anger or sorrow, instead of sweetness and longing. Even more surprising was the fact that progressively, me and my boyfriend would write more in the language native of where we were: making the physical/geographical separation even more apparent. The first messages were all in English (the language we speak when together) and slowly it shifted to full sentences in French or Spanish. My boyfriend doesn’t understand French very well, and I understand little to nothing of Spanish. So instead of being addressed to the other, every message seemed to be addressed to ourselves.
For this project, I am using sentences and words taken from these emails exchange last summer. The video, that will be used as a background for the typography, was made with series of lights inside a darkroom, a camera flash, and with a video camera on a rolling skateboard. I used different “filters” over lamps that I hand-made with cardboard and aluminum foil.
I edited with Final Cut Pro. The only computer generated effect used, aside from one or two transitions, was desaturating the footage.