#ArtisticMetaphor

[brandonjohnbarnard]

Production history around: Eggistential

This piece goes into some of the decisions I made when creating my short film ‘Eggistential’.

After creating my short ‘Circles’ I wanted to create a piece that was less about searching (‘Graffiti’ falls into this category too), and more about using elements outside of my control and at home like ‘Doggy Style’.

The ‘tsukanoma no haikyo’ works of Miyamoto were still on my mind, and I wanted to know how I could capture themes of destruction in my own work. I found it interesting that, in the art world, creation and destruction were often seen as one and the same. In order to make something, something else had to be altered in some way. I noticed that this mirrored cooking. You can make a cake, but is this also not the destruction of the raw elements in order to transform them into something else? The end of Eggistential is interesting, as it takes people a bit to notice that the footage is reversed, pushing in the idea that destruction and creation are hard to tell apart.

Using an egg in the piece was for a few reasons. On the practical end, it was a transformation in cooking that can be seen, not obscured behind and oven or microwave door. It is also quite a stark example of destruction and change. The cracking of the egg, the egg turning from translucent to white. The egg can be manipulated while filming, etc.

Also, after filming ‘Broodiest Flunkey’, I had grown fond of eggs. There is something silly yet appealing to them. I was in my egg phase.

(The egg I made for ‘Broodiest Flunkey’ stuck to my office wall.)

In order to work more with chance, and push myself to try different inputs, I asked my wife Isobel to select the background audio. She had done this prior for ‘Circles’, and that worked out well. She chose ‘Glitched_Darbuka’ by RutgerMuller. I feel like this audio has a very nice, gritty other-worldliness to it, like it belongs in Half-Life or a creepy-pasta, so my editing followed suite.

I was surprised by some of the feedback I received — a handful of people did not like the audio, but liked the visuals. Personally I think the audio is great, but on a more perplexing note, the visuals were so heavily influenced by the sounds I had received, so divorcing them is an idea I need to ruminate on.

This film was also a good opportunity to play with effects with no real punishment. I’m really happy with, and surprised by, how well chromakeying worked on the egg yolk. This was not something I thought about at all until I sat down to edit it.

(Editing timeline of Eggistential.)

Side note before I go into the darkness, the comments I received on this were very interesting!

Creating this video has altered the way I cook, which is, in a way a life changing occurrence which I did not expect prior to filming (as dramatic as that sounds).

People letting me know how they interpret what I made is a lot of fun.

Some of them are a little scary though!

Thanks for reading ❤