Song Credit: A1 - It's just a burning memory by The Caretaker
Styleframes
Overall description
In the middle of 2020, I was witnessing first hand the harshness of the COVID-19 lockdowns. At this turning point in my life, I started to notice I was beginning to be forgetful about things I did in the past. I wasn’t suffering from any sort of memory loss of any kind, just normal forgetfulness while living a busy life and having things slip away from my attention. Over the course of some of these months when I went back to SCAD, my friend Andrew kept mentioning things we talked about in previous conversations or things we did that I didn’t recall too easily. Funnily enough, at some points it was the other way around. In October of that year, an audio experience called “Everywhere at the end of time” by The Caretaker was blowing up in popularity on the internet. It’s a musical album that’s 6 hours in length consisting of faded ballroom music that progressively gets more erratic, distorted, and then silent as time went on. The album is intended to simulate what sufferers of dementia or Alzheimer's disease experience. I was fascinated by the idea of this album, and I decided to make a PSA about dementia.
Planning + Process
I captured the specific look I had for this project almost unintentionally. I created a meme for the Savannah Nerf Underground Club using the song “It’s just a burning memory,” which is also used in the PSA. In the meme, I overlaid a VHS effect I downloaded off of YouTube and used a large quantity of effects in After Effects for color correcting and distorting the footage. When I was tasked with doing another PSA in Professor Duff’s class, I chose to use the visual effects from that meme for this project. I developed the styleframes with the same mindset I had for Eyes like the sky: I wanted to make the appearance of the motion project look tactile and worn out with the usage of collage. I approached the collage style by making the collaged image act as snippets of lost memories for dementia sufferers. What I had to keep in mind was to not overdo each scene or styleframe with graphics or effects. I would render the whole project with the same setting I had for my initial experimentation with the VHS effect. If I did too much for each scene, the project would be burnt to a crisp with effects in it’s final render. As I was getting feedback for the project, my professor and peers encouraged me to make the clips faded out or misplaced to really hone in on the simulation of experiencing dementia while watching the PSA. I also did this by using a few sound effects such as stutter looping my voice, buzzing noises, and radio frequencies fading in and out of channels.
