Mark Wagner – Money is Material from The Avant/Garde Diaries on Vimeo.
My inspiration this week is a profile video about an artist named Mark Wagner who makes amazing collages out of dollar bills. The work this guy is doing is incredibly detailed and takes an immense amount of patience. The way the video is made, it really captures that detail and patience. It does this through the amount of extreme close-ups which show us even the tiniest elements very clearly and really takes us in there so we see what he sees. It also does it through the pacing of the video, which is a little slow but I think works to portray the tenacity of this guy. Also, the time-lapse videos help to break up some of the slower pacing and show a complete cycle of what would otherwise take a long time.
The interview is done really well and uses proper lighting and framing, and I like that we hear the artist’s voice for a long time before we ever actually see him talking. The lighting throughout the video is consistently nice, it all looks very well thought out and deliberate, and the camera movements all flow well. The editors also used a trick I always find effective for transitions, and that is at 2:20 when it cuts from the end of the time-lapse of the art piece to a view of it hanging on a wall and it is in the exact same place in the frame from one shot to the next. Its kind of like the classic scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey where the bone is thrown up into the air and then we see a satellite in the same spot in the next scene.