Intel Visual Life - Post Mortem

A few months back I was approached by the good people at Intel about being a featured artist in their Visual Life series. The project is truly amazing; It is a video series trying to inspire people to use their technology in an intuitive way and push the creative envelope. Previously they've featured a handful of really cool designers, musicians and photographers who all uses the computer as a center pillar in their creative process - And I am really honored to be a part of that group of cats.



Now since I am a videoartist by trade they called me up asked me if I would be up for the challenge of creating my own profile film, and I virtually jumped with joy of the thought; cause lets face it it is a dream assignment to be asked (and payed) to do a 6 minute narcissistic piece on yourself and your work. Haha. But it proved to be be one of the toughest and most frustrating assignments I have ever done out of a series of reasons...

I come from an animation Sfx background and unlike a lot of other vidoartists I hardly ever portray myself in the stuff I do - because I normally say what I want to say through fictive characters and constructed universes, and I pretty quickly came to realize that self image is a bitch. Apparently I am as overly self critiquing as a 15 year old girl - I love giving interviews and you cats who know me, know that I love talking, but in interviews the stuff is edited by others who has a clear vision of how they see me. I think it is interesting how different other peoples vision of you is compared to your own.
In the beginning of this Odyssey I had a sitdown with one of my good friends and collaborators, Peter Ruschel, where we talked about what to include in the video, how to structure it etc. And it became quite apparent that my vision of myself isnt quite the way I am perceived by the world around me, so before I could dig in and start the actual filming and editing I had to figure out who I am, and define myself as a character. As I also state in the clip; It is a caricature of who I am and what I do because the reality is way to complex to put down in a 6 minute portrait. And since I have never really worked with that caricature of myself before it took a bit of time to define this persona.

My second headache was to condense everything I do down in 6 minutes. I had so many things I wanted to show in this clip that my first edit was around 16 minutes (I had 8-10 hrs of footage) that had to be condensed down to 6, so there was a lot of stuff that got cut like my music for instance.

All in all the project has been a really crazy learning experience, because it has been so different from all the other projects I normally do. It was so much fun editing an almost pure live action clip without having to think in terms of Sfx shots and animation and as I mentioned before the self definition part was such a crazy eyeopener as well. My only regret is that I had to push the deadline for it a couple of times. and I normally NEVER miss a deadline, but I am really grateful that the cats at Intel was flexible with the schedule & had the attitude that it wasn't a school assignment, but a clip where quality is more important than the deadline.

I would also like to give a short shoutout to the cats who stuck around and pitched in helping me with this huge piece of work. Most of all Schumann/Bach who did an amazing job on the sound design, wrote a bunch of the music and helped me arrange the stuff I wrote for it.
Mo Jäger who helped me edit all of my of footage & Peter Ruschel who helped me shoot a ton and structure it all + my dear Eva who helped me out so much by holding cameras, filming bits and pieces, doing interviewsessions, making me food and telling me off.

& a shoutout to my sister Julie Bach who designed the yarn puppet I ended up animating in the plant in my livingroom...