“Minority Report” vid

[hazelk]

Title: Silence
Artist: Portishead
Movie: Minority Report
Format: DivX
Size: 52.9 MB
Summary: I’m tired of the future

Download here (Right/control click and save target as/download linked file)

Feedback is quietly appreciated


Tempted in our minds
Tormented inside lie
Wounded, I'm afraid inside my head
Falling through changes

Did you know when you lost?
Did you know when I wanted?
Did you know what I lost?
Do you know what I wanted?




I didn’t want to make this vid. I wanted, I still want, to make a big multi-source meta extravaganza about robot apocalypses but some of the source hasn’t even come out on DVD yet. Still I had the song all planned out and I’d managed to convince myself that even though Minority Report doesn’t have robots or an apocalypse it would be a good idea to try playing with its precog imagery just to steal the look and maybe try and apply it to actual apocalypse footage later. So I laid the first dream sequence over the intro of my robot music, didn’t so much remix as give it a quick stir to fit the beat and looked.

On which it became clear that wanting to do this really had nothing to do with effect appropriation and all to do with seeing how pretty the damn thing looked set to techno. So the upshot was that I found a new song, tried to come up with an idea that went beyond just “Shiny!” and made this vid. It’s been interesting.

There’s a quote about Fred Astaire to the effect that were you to break down one of his dances to its individual frames he’d still look perfectly graceful in every single one of them. Considered purely visually, Spielberg is like that. The transitions and the lighting, colour and cinematography all look just as shiny under the vidder’s microscope as they do on the big screen. It’s true of other elements as well. Considered as a plot, the fiendish noir plotting works pretty seamlessly, the chase scenes are adrenaline-pumping as well as witty and allusive, the heartbreak is heartbreaking, the pasted-on happy ending calm and redeeming. But all these good things combine to obscure an uncomfortable truth - that at its heart this is a story about Omelas and one for which walking away is not the solution.

In conclusion Samantha Morton is awesome.

Comments

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Fantastic! You made great use of the music; the change when the vocals come in was awesomely executed and there's superb movement throughout the vid.

I'm mostly interested by the way you choose to end the vid - not as the movie ends, but with our protagonists returned defeated by technology, tidily and almost serenely, but no less horrifyingly.

Thanks for sharing!

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I'm mostly interested by the way you choose to end the vid
Thank you for being interested in this:-) In some ways it’s ending the vid where I instinctively felt the movie should have ended the first time I saw it but there was a deeper purpose too.

Minority Report was a movie that got under my skin a little and after spending some time trying to figure out where or why it wasn’t quite working for me I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t that the happy ending was unearned or unjustified by the plot and in fact just cutting the story short at the protagonists' capture would leave all the storylines about Anne Lively and what Burgess did to her unsatisfyingly unresolved. The problem was more that, for me, the most compelling part of the movie was its world-building aspect, the idea of this perfect society, this world without murder, utterly dependent on the enslavement and the suffering of the precogs. Like U.K. LeGuin’s Omelas story it’s a potent, if allegorical, critique of Western capitalism but the problem with capitalism isn’t that there’s a Lamarr Burgess figure deceiving the populace into accepting the bargain, it’s something that everyone who benefits from the system is complicit in, consciously or not. So I suppose my vid is an attempt to par down the story to those essentials by depersonalizing the villain but if you do that there’s then also no one person to be defeated and there can be no ‘victory’ for the protagonists.

[malfeasanceses.livejournal.com]

Like U.K. LeGuin’s Omelas story it’s a potent, if allegorical, critique of Western capitalism but the problem with capitalism isn’t that there’s a Lamarr Burgess figure deceiving the populace into accepting the bargain, it’s something that everyone who benefits from the system is complicit in, consciously or not.

Ooh! I agree so much. Love the changed focus of the vid.