NUIT BLANCHE 2014: VISION OBSTRUCTED

To make any kind of art, be it a painting or a piece of music or a video, you have to have a vision. In your mind you have an idea of the art which you want to create. It can be something fully realized, every brush stroke on the painting, the range of colours, the direction of the light across the canvas. Or the vision can be "soft", incorporeal, loosely defined. An idea, an emotion, a soft shape existing at the corner of your eye.

This part is actually easy. The difficult part is realizing these visions. That's where technique comes in.

nuit blanche is an yearly event in Toronto, an all night (mostly) outdoor art festival. There are nuit blanche events in other cities but this is the one that I attend. Duh. I live here.

I have made many nuit blanche videos. The event lends itself to the visual. Duh. It's art. Sort of.

This year I wanted to try something different. Instead of just a document of the festival I wanted to do something a bit more impressionistic. Even before I saw what the night had to offer, I had a vision in my mind. But each nuit blanche is different, which makes it worth attending but also makes it difficult to plan for.

For me, people wandering through the city all night long has become as compelling at the art itself. The intangible of nuit blanche is that the entire city becomes an art piece, and with the addition of us the people, a performance piece. And that's what I wanted to capture.

I'm not sure if the video is entirely successful. It is not my fully realized vision but it satisfies the idea very well. Technically, I'm not entirely happy with it. I decided to shoot at 24 fps (frames per second). It is not a setting which I normally use but I used it to film the exterior of the CNE video below on that setting and I was very pleased with the result, I thought the frame rate added an attractive depth and contrast range to the video

C.N.E. 2014 Day One from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

But the midway at the CNE has a tremendous amount of ambient light, the streets of Toronto not so much. Also, slow down 24 fps is not as clear and clean as slowing down 60 fps on which I normally shoot.

I did not spend near as much time at the event as I should have. The layout was very different this year and there was a lot of space between the "zones" where the art was distributed. So, I probably did not give myself the best opportunity to duplicate the vision in my mind.

Still, I was able to do something different. And at my age, something different is always a triumph.

The Dreaming City: nuit blanche Toronto 2014 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.