Faraway, so close.

Faraway, so close from Skye Mescall on Vimeo.

Beginning with 5 minutes of layering and drifting through images, and making connections, the images start to make their own narrative of sorts. An inertia. Taking those 5 minutes and running them backwards from the endpoint, the story runs away from itself in both directions, touching lightly at a precise frame. The second 5 minutes is shifted, images adjusted and moved slightly, in some instances replaced by other images. The resulting 10 minutes of footage is grouped again and run backwards after the first 10. Again meeting and careening away from itself. A mirror image, replicating glitches and amplifying them, or concealing them. The film is intended to be immersive, to prompt a feeling of déjà vu, a half remembrance or either personal connections or of images from earlier in the film.

Overlaid over the completed footage is the sometimes mirrored breathing in and out of a river reflection. Breathing slowly and deeply can calm anxiety, can activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which produces a relaxing effect. Maybe this is self-soothing, along with grids and counting, but maybe this can also be another way of drawing in the viewer. If you replicate the breathing of someone and then slow down your breathing, you can trigger them to do the same. The innate empathy that prompts a yawn or the mirroring of folded arms can affect our whole body, our breath.

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