Filming on the WTC plein
I have been working on the idea for a new video recently, which will feature me doing things very fast indeed. This will be filmed in a public place, with other people doing normal things at normal speed, and then played back in slow motion. The idea is that I will then appear normal, and the others will appear to be moving veeeeeeerrrry slooowllly (the spell-checker didn’t like those last couple of words very much).
The idea is fairly simple, but actually doing it is less so. It is always this way, as can be seen with my last film project.
Myself and Astrid headed down this morning to the WTC plein next to Amsterdam Zuid station, which is the location that I wanted to use. This is primarily because it has quite a striking architectural appearance, with many long straight lines and sharp perspective, but also because there are always people going past to or from the station and the surrounding buildings, including the unfortunately-named World Trade Centre (WTC).
Well, it didn’t go all that great today, mainly because of the weather. It was a lovely sunny day, too sunny in fact to film in the direction of the station, but more serious was the wind; because the plein is surrounded by several tallish buildings, it funnels and accelerates the wind, making it very difficult for me to do things at normal speed, let alone super fast. For example, one of the things that I would be doing is flicking through the pages of a book, which is of course a bit difficult when the wind keeps blowing the pages back and forth.
After some pointless attempts to get some usable filming done, during which I got very worked up and stressed about all the things that were going wrong, I decided to call it off and begin again another day; next time, do not ignore the part of the weather forecast which says windkracht 5 (“wind force 5″), as I had stupidly done.
