[Video Essay] Corridors – Hybrid city
The theme of the video is “Corridors” and the keyword I focused on was “Hybrid City”. I chose this combination because my initial inspiration was from an example shown during a tutorial. The example video was about alleyways within the city and highlighted various aspects such as scale, time, people etc. For my video, I wanted to focus more on variety as a way of showing examples and questioning what a corridor could be. I chose to look at multiple instances where a corridor may be present, some more obvious than others, in the hopes that it creates suspense or even doubt in the viewer’s mind about what a corridor could possibly be. In order to do this, I started off with a familiar setting to almost anyone, the corridor outside their homes leading to elevators. I thought this was a crucial starting point considering Hong Kong’s general populous’ experience of living in high-rise buildings and thus being very familiar with using elevators on a daily basis. From this, I transitioned into outdoor and semi-outdoor areas which visually speaking, still agree with the definition of a corridor. However, these locations would not usually be defined as a corridor. The settings and places used were, pedestrian walkways, footbridges, shopping malls including different parts of the mall, car park and the MTR. All of these locations present a varying degree of areas or spaces that could be considered a corridor.
My research into producing this video initially started off as finding more about corridors. When I first chose this keyword, I thought I would be producing a video which shows a compilation of a diverse number of corridors. For this, I would have to visit many buildings that serve different purposes. These could be looking at different types of residential buildings, commercial buildings, shopping malls etc. Although this did have the potential to be quite artistic if I had chosen a certain control factor for all of the compiled clips. This could be a fixed perspective and focal point across all the clips, for example, making sure that the so-called ‘end’ of the corridor is always fixed to the centre of the screen and the depth is more or less consistent. However, all of this was slightly changed for my final iteration because I started to read more into the concepts of a corridor. Initially, I was curious about the diverse definitions of a corridor. This was because some definitions had a strict outline about what determines a space to be a corridor, but others seemed a bit looser, almost as if leaving room for interpretation. This lead me to take more inspiration from images that comprise components which would seemingly make up a corridor. I did this part by looking at various images on Google but they all seemed to have a general template. Based on this I thought if there is such a general template, why can’t it be applied to different areas and spaces? From this I began to do site visits around some locales which would represent most people’s lives, so essentially collecting places such as homes, walkways, buildings, footbridges, public transport etc. This was intentionally done to sort of spark ideas into the viewer’s mind about how they can interpret the space around them as what they are normally looked at as, for example, a footbridge, but how they could also define it as a corridor. I think this message would be portrayed a lot better if my technique was at a much higher level than what it is currently. Although I tried sticking to the idea of having a certain control factor across all clips. I tried to make sure that all the clips would have a similar idea of essentially all the surfaces leading into one ending similar to the general template that most images use
Md Hasan Abid
3036094643
I appreciate your efforts on the video-editing process, especially in the beginning of your work. It helps to provoke audiences thoughts on the idea / definition of a ‘corridor’. However, while you are attempting to trigger reflections of your audiences through your video and text, it is a pity that I cannot see your stake or arguments on the subject. Your written description mostly summarizes your planning process of the assignment but not using any sources or references to respond / support to any research research questions raised. I hope to see more devotion in your research methods and process to enrich your content on ‘what is a corridor’.