Assignment 4: Video Art Reenactment

The 80s' had some great sounds and visuals. The art of that time was something else, and something I wasn't really familiar with until years later since I was just an infant at the time. Despite that, we were tasked with finding a short video art clip to reenact, and it could be from the 80s' if we wanted it to be.

With that said, I discovered a gem short film from 1983 titled Damnation of Faust. It was created by video artist Dara Birnbaum, and I found her video on UbuWeb, which is a site our teacher gave us. It's a great website, I'd recommend taking a look. There's no telling what you might find.

Sometimes the best way to learn new tools is to try to "reverse engineer" how something is done, and then recreate it with the tools you have at your disposal. In this case, our class was exploring Adobe Premiere, and with Premiere, we were to make our own version of the video we selected.

Enter Damnation of Faust Pt. 2. Armed with a camera and the original video loaded on my phone, I analyzed each scene and scouted locations to recreate it. I then brought in my star actress, Rebecca Black, to play the mysterious woman by the windowsill.

Once all of the footage was recorded (which was mostly done on campus and at home), I worked away in Premiere to do the recreation. I wanted some tie-in with the original, so I used a little bit of After Effects to bring in the clip that you see playing on the TV at the beginning of the movie. The rest is all recreated from scratch.

Here is a side-by-side comparison video with the original:

Or, to view the original in all its 80s' glory, please visit:

http://www.ubu.com/film/kitchen_birnbaum.html

This assignment was created for Clint Sleeper's ART 245 class at the University of Nevada, Reno.