I hope you enjoy the world I have created... I am particularly proud of this one!
The Idea
The idea for the video came about as pure chance. I had been toying with the idea of some kind of stop motion animation of some pencil drawings or a flip book for some time but never really knew where to begin… especially as my artistic talents are somewhat limited! Whilst editing the “Far From Home” video, I was playing around with effects and ideas when I discovered something that pretty well created that effect for me without the need to get my pencils out. I was quite relieved at the amount of work I had just saved and you should also be relieved you didn’t have to see my drawings!
The Song
Semaphore is a song written about the failings of communicating digitally. When reading or writing a message, it is too easy to find different meanings to what was intended, to the point where you may as well communicate with flags on top of a hill... Through the video, I attempted to capture this as a black and white world where only the outlines are visible. I also actively tried to separate countryside shots from more urban and industrial cityscapes to highlight the different ways of life I was experiencing at the time of writing.
Locations
The video itself was filmed in central Manchester as well as at Watergrove Reservoir, Darwen Tower and my back yard!
The filming took place in a couple of stages. From old footage I had taken, I experimented using the filter to see what types of things would be picked up well in this new world and what looks good in colour but doesn’t work as an outline. Once I had done that research, we went to two locations north of Manchester to see what we could find.
Thankfully, restrictions on travel had been lifted and our first early morning took place at Darwen tower in the Lancashire moors. I chose this location as I knew that the tower would be a good outline to start off with and thought it would be possible to get some footage of driving around country lanes. Unfortunately, this plan didn’t quite work as with the equipment we were using, the footage was far too jumpy to use from the car.
Likewise, my initial plan to get some outline shots of the industrial town from the vantage point of the hill didn’t turn out the way I had hoped. However, with all these filming sessions, sometimes it is the happy accidents which turn into the best footage. By chance, we noticed a couple of Lapwings playing in the sky and searching for food on the ground and we managed to catch the perfect shot to lead into the chorus! I knew the second I saw it back through the filter that this was a keeper…
The next morning, we went to Watergrove reservoir and managed to capture the beautiful ripples on the lake which start and end the video along with more landscape shots including those with the wind farms in. The combined footage of these two locations formed the “country” parts of the video.
Overall, my favourite morning of filming took place in the centre of Manchester in the Castlefield and Ancoats areas. I knew exactly the types of things I wanted to film from experience of the areas but even though I know them both well, we still stumbled across a couple of gems! For example, I hadn’t considered the idea of filming a train passing through the shot or anticipated the family of geese we ran into under one bridge!
With a lot of people working from home, the city centre was a lot quieter than usual so we were able to get the shots with minimal human interruption and looking back at the finished result, it is easy to imagine how this city would have looked 100 years ago.
I hope you will fall in love with my world as much as I have:
