There's something really personal that I wanted to share with you, regarding social networks.
I consider myself, among the many artistic fields I try to be involved with, a sort of filmmaker. I mean, I try to bring some filmmaking aspirations into my work with photos and video, naturally. One of my opinions when it comes to filmmaking is that it's a work done mostly with a respectable dose of dedication. It's a type of work where we deposit our patience, creativity and even some hope (hope that the result will be a satisfying one).
When asked by friends why I spent all this time working with photos and videos and shared very few stories on Instagram and never joined TikTok, my answer is:
I don't want my dedicated work to be mixed with all sorts of no serious or stupid content.
I mean, let's face it - there's a great amount of content in these platforms that brings nothing into our lives.
And even if we consider those videos that still bring some useful information, we must remember that they're put in such a maze with other types of thrash that, at the end of a one hour entertainment that someone may have spent watching this stuff, the viewer ends up with nothing clear in his head. In the end, almost nothing bears fruit.
However, these days, I have to recognise a fact. These messy places, where much of what we find is worthy being called garbage or useless, this is the place where one has to prove why one deserves attention, why do we deserve having our work appreciated.
Yep. With 7 billion people in this world, we must satisfy ourselves with this particle of show time we're given.
I still do not think life has to circle around these trends. Especially if your work or that which provides you a living doesn't depend on that. Under these conditions, I'd like to state that: your life quality shouldn't be interfered with by these algorithms.
Now, regarding my craft, I ended up getting into this world. Because, despite the minuses I mentioned above, there's for sure a great amount of people who are sensible to valuable work. There's always someone who will feel attracted by what we produce.
Art is a passion of mine. It's something I believe everybody should nurture in their lives and this is the belief that pushes me towards sharing my work.
Video project with Alina Avina
My friend Alina is a video streamer. She currently makes part of her income with this activity. As she told me about that, the first thing that came up in my mind was to do some work together involving photos and videos. So both she and I would have new content to share in our social networks and virtual spaces.
We decided to meet last Tuesday, when there was such a thick fog all over the city and of course, pretty cold weather (especially for me). The spot we chose to shoot was Moscow City, which if you haven't heard about is the business center of Moscow, formed by a bunch of tall glassy futuristic skyscrapers. They form nowadays one of the most visited attractions of Moscow, creating a striking contrast of architecture if we take a look at the majorly old and Soviet style buildings present in the city.
We did our shooting during evening time, when daylight was completely gone. Luckily, this area is well lit by the large light bulbs and displays spread all over, dispensing the use of light LEDs. The combination between the fog and the super modern architecture creates an atmosphere that we're most likely to see in movies set in some age with interplanetary civilizations.
Shooting footage for short stories or for an Instagram reels means that the footage will be quick and hardly be able to tell a story on its own. Instead of focusing on creating a proper story for the little piece of video art, I instead preferred to create a content that is rather good due to its visual appeal. This lack of explicit statement seems to be a quite new pattern in society, which doesn't inform you exactly the purpose of what we're watching but yet is able to please us.
Besides shooting videos, we also made some portraits following the same style we used for the footage.
All this work (that which was done outdoors with the cameras) took me an hour to make. It is not really a great amount of time. The only big barrier for me was the weather but, you know, I'm stubborn with such ideas. Of course, posteriorly there's a bunch of work still to be done with editing. However, I believe, the part of the project that demands more action and labour from us is what we do outside. Once this part is done successfully, the rest comes easily. It is so because at this point we want to see what we did. In the digital world, from seeing to editing takes only a few clicks.
Here below you can find links to read more about the place we chose for our little project and also Alina's Instagram, where she shared her version of the video. We'll appreciate having your feedback.
Moscow City - Wikipedia
Alina’s Instagram