Slow City – Parks
We tend to think of an aging society as slow or at odds with the times. Especially in a “fast” city like Hong Kong, people are immersed in a day-to-day cycle. An aging community like Sham Shui Po is increasingly out of tune with the city. In this video, I filmed in the park downstairs from my house, trying to discover the people and things in this “slow” park in the corner of Sham Shui Po.
As you can see in the video, the people in the park are mainly middle-aged and elderly people. They tend not to be alone in the park but tend to gather in certain parts of the park, such as next to the chess table or on a few closer benches. Of course, their most frequent place to stay in the square in the park, where they do square dancing. When I was about to leave, I also saw the old man picking up the bottle from the trash can. I bought her a bottle of water. Out of respect, I didn’t record this.
Looking at Google Maps, it can be found that there are more than a dozen nursing homes in Sham Shui Po, which is one of the reasons why there are so many elderly people in the parks in Sham Shui Po. But we can’t really blame middle-aged people for this situation, and many things in the park reflect the pressures they face. It can be seen from the video that in addition to the elderly, many children are playing beside the adults in the park. In today’s Hong Kong society, many parents have difficulty taking care of their children by themselves due to the pressure of life.
In this video, since the main shooting/discussion object is the elderly in the park, in order to fit their age, I chose to use the vintage camera at home to shoot; we can still see that the video is obtained after passing through this vintage device many changes. These include increased colour temperature, increased contrast, sharpening, and noise.
In addition, another purpose of my old video recorder is to achieve low frame rate video effects, but unfortunately, the “OK” button of my old video recorder often doesn’t work properly, so I can’t reduce the frame rate and click the “OK” button. But the final video is still rendered with low frame rate effects. Instead of using a frame-rate reduction effect (and there is no frame-rate reduction option in iMovie), I did it the other way around. First, I resized the video to 3/2x speed (150%) of the original video and exported it, then resized the exported video to 2/3x speed (I used 67% here). With this method of speeding up and then slowing down, I managed to get a low frame rate that I was happy with. At the same time, the audio track adjusted by this method also achieves a “lo-fi” effect that I am very satisfied with.
In terms of shooting techniques, I tried to shoot with a lot of long lenses in order to better show the behaviour of the subjects. Therefore, you can see the behaviour of the characters in the clips in each ten-second clip, which allows me to better show the subject being photographed.
Reference:
https://www.hkeconomy.gov.hk/en/pdf/el/el-2019-02.pdf
https://extranet.who.int/agefriendlyworld/network/sham-shui-po-district/
ZHU YIFAN
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Hi，Yifa, you’ve really done a good job! I am pretty appriciate the way you narrate the video. you’re a really good stroyteller. I think it is also a wise choice that you did not adopt on-screen text in your video, as it may adversely affect the atmosphere of the video. I think next time you can try to speak more fluently. you can also try to emphasize some relatively important words so that audiences are much easier to understand
The content of your video essay is spectacular. Your commentary brings compassion to the everyday people we might pass in everyday life. Due to the fast paced nature of living in Hong Kong we tend to make people disappear from our peripheral vision. And talking about people in a slow paced life is very important. I like the way the light diffuses in the video. It would be better if you could discuss more about the effects and editing used to achieve this. You could also discuss broader issues of ageism that people face in Hong Kong especially. Overall, a great interpretation of the ‘slow city’.
The video is conducted very well! I think you make a wise choice of using still shots, this create a feeling of observing the city. I also like how you chose night as the time for filming the video, which further highlights the “slow” in the video.
For the text, I think you may included a caption so that the audiences won’t missed your intersecting description in the video.
First of all, there is no extra music in the video. Instead, the video is dubbed with its own originally deeper voice, which makes it easy to get into the atmosphere of slow. Secondly, the main colors in the video are warm colors, which is very appropriate to the theme of Slow City. When I think of slow City, I usually think of small cities or cities at night, but I ignore the elderly population. However, the aging problem is a big problem in our country. This video helped me open my mind.
Aside from commenting on your work, I just want to share my thoughts after watching and reading your work. The city is a theater. Citizens are audiences, at the same time, actors. The city scenery is the movie. I felt like the video showed the film with the audience’s (your) comment voiced over. Plus, you dealt with different types of actors based on the speed of their movements.
The theme and the content of the video are quite reflective of the current situation in HK. The video is The frames of the video are not that clear but old school, the feeling of slowness is emphasized by the contents, the style of the video shooting, and the rhythm of VoiceOver. But you don’t only focus on the superficial slowness but also on the social phenomenon behind it and let me think of what the fast city development brings to different groups. I think if some comparison can be included in the video will make the “slow” more powerful and also help the demonstration of social issues indirectly. Also, your voice sounds quite nice, and it will be great if it can be more fluent or more rhythmic.
I like the rigor of your ideas. I see that you have added a lot of data to the description of the city in your article, which makes your point of view more convincing. I think your video is also well conceived and demonstrates the theme of slow city well.You shoot and edit from different perspectives, which makes your video highly integrated
You made various interesting observations, some of which could be expanded, substantiated and organised within the video essay better. For example, the points on ageing, the relationship between the park and its surroundings and the mixture of uses are all rather intriguing in their own right. Perhaps, you could go deeper into either of them or connect these ideas by analysing them more closely to the word ‘slow’ which you have chosen. I appreciate the effort to experiment with the visual design of the video. Perhaps the audio can be edited so that it is smoother. You can also conduct more virtual research to support your analysis and cite your references accordingly.