The Caterpillar
Brown and furry
Caterpillar in a hurry;
Take your walk
To the shady leaf or stalk.
May no toad spy you,
May the little birds pass by you;
Spin and die,
To live again a butterfly.
- Christina Georgina Rosetti
This project was much more difficult than the previous because I lacked a concept I wanted to do. I kept digging through poems but couldn’t find anything that would inspire me. Finally a found this short children’s poem entitled The Caterpillar. A few of children’s songs and poem have a tendency to come from disturbing events such a Ring-Around-the-Rosy, which comes from the Plague. I wanted to do the inverse with this poem. Take something sweet, find the deeper scarier aspects, and bring them out. Ultimately I wanted to make an almost satirical experimental film.
I checked out the Panasonic and captured some great shots of plants and caterpillars. I adjusted the shutter speed and was able to obtain some unique shots. But when I tried to upload the files I ran across an error. All my files on the card somehow got corrupted so I had to use the pickup footage that I had shot with D300. I lacked the time to reshoot so I gathered up the footage I had, along with some earlier footage I had and combined them to get the feel I wanted for the film.
I started off the film with old footage I got from the Prelinger Archives. The non-HD footage and lack of color tends to throw off a person who is used to crisp images thus automatically making the viewer feel uncomfortable. The changing color background was created by taking off the lens of the camera and running above this colorful flag on the wall. The sunset was an interesting shot because as the sun went farther below the horizon the brighter the foreground got making the shot useless after a certain point. That is why the sun doesn’t go completely down. This shot represents the end of the happy warm colors and the beginning of the dark tone and color. The cutting between the two guys exhibits conflict and war of nature with green as the earth and blue as the water. Also the guy is tinted blue because blue is a cool color which makes a person feel calm/depressed. This helps represent the blue guy as the struggling caterpillar trying to survive the nature (toads/birds) around him represented by the green guy. The card shot represented life in that life is random and it’s the luck of the draw. I manipulated the color to represent both nature and the caterpillar also making it slightly out of focus because the future is unclear. The shot of the “caterpillar boy” had an equalizer filter put on it to bring out the black changing to the tone to an even darker feel. The defocusing and fade to black represents the metamorphosis he is about to undertake. The scenes from then on represent change and transformation. The content in these shots are strange but that’s because change is strange. In the end, the caterpillar has completely transformed into this creature that just radiates light.
The final shot of the cup and the audio of me trying to learn how to work the camera shows that this piece isn’t as serious as it comes off to be. The whole piece is actually supposed to be a satire of the life of a caterpillar. Life is not supposed to be taken completely serious and change isn’t supposed to be scary but should be a fun time. The whole premise is from a kids’ poem and that helps reiterate that message. Another challenge I had in this project was trying to get a message and a feeling across without doing a narrative.
