Salience
"The idea for 'Salience' came from a whole bunch of emotional concepts I had been thinking about, and then a whole bunch of technical things open up. Originally, I wanted to play with the green screen suits to reveal the human figure through negative space. Like showing fog through the silhouette of the shape of a human!"
"And then I got to thinking about what you could show through this negative hole in the image. I started to think about what really defines the shape of the human body and how could you experiment with that. How far could you go? Could you just hint at the human body in a really abstract way, for example!"
"That’s kind of where I started the whole thought process. And, then I had this opportunity to use the Phantom Miro Camera, so I started to think about my idea and what would look really interesting at a seriously high frame rate in super slow-mo?"
“With this camera, something that is instantaneous, suddenly becomes two and half seconds in duration. Although the whole colored powder thing is pretty well exhausted as far as a viral slo-mo video goes, I was trying to think of new ways of turning it on its head. It was a matter of combining two different effects to create something new.”
"I thought it would be seriously interesting to see what happens to the colored powered and the residue left behind to show hints of the human form! I thought it would be interesting to show hints of the shoulder, hips, or even parts of the head just using the clouds and residue from these powders."
“It was all about being able to show the human body without showing the human body. By using colored powders and a high speed camera we could reveal the human body in a split second; where we can see so much happening in that single moment."
"The one big unknown with this project was the way the powder would behave. The whole thing was riding on the fact that the powder would hit the people in the green suits in the right way for it all to work visually. Overall, the effect was a lot cloudier than I expected or wanted it to be. I had originally wanted to the color to be more directional, almost like colored rain. In the end, the cloud formations I think actually look pretty cool."
"Over the three shoot days, we were playing with different directions that we could throw the powder into frame and how you could best fill the atmosphere with powder. For me I can definitely see a progression in learning on how to use all of these things, and us becoming far more confident with the camera by the last day."
"I knew that this was going to be a strictly visual piece, but I still wanted there to be some sort of progression. It still needed some sort of abstract narrative, such as the perception you have to your environment and the people that are around you. I wanted this to alter the things that we find familiar to us. I wanted it to be positive, and for us to see something new in the things that we see everyday! So the the title ‘Salience' actually means to have something emerge from the background."