In A Flash

Whenever I don’t have to drive, but am driven, I like to look out of the window at the world as it passes by, to daydream. It reminds me of my childhood and Sunday afternoon drives, safe in the car away from all the witches and ghouls which were out there in the woods, which were left behind – those were the days when you didn’t have to wear seatbelts – I was fascinated with looking out of the rear window to make sure that we weren’t being followed, to watch as we left behind.

I remember my father driving us in the darkness to catch the ferry back to England to visit my grandmothers, the bright lights of the car dashboard, of the ferry and port. The moment of held breath as we embarked, over the ramp, the car laden with all of our stuff, low to the ground. Even now I get a buzz of excitement when driving late at night and the heavy machinery rolls out onto the motorway, the flashlights, the hi vis, the noise.

Over the last year I’ve started filming the landscape as it rushes by. We went past Stonehenge on our way back from Exeter in June with all of our daughter’s stuff in the car.

The sky is more or less static and the mid ground moves a long quite slowly, with Stonehenge almost gliding across the screen. And then there is the fast moving foreground – I find the fence line and the traffic paraphernalia fascinating – the way in which the posts seem to be animated, punctuating the foreground, jumping up and down, reminding me of the graphic equalisers on my first stereo.

I wanted to create an image with less immediacy, with some distance, some sense of layering and so I experimented by filming the footage from my iPad with layered clingfilm over the screen.

I like this shortened version, I think it has more impact, or maybe it gets to the point a lot sooner – my social media shortened attention span at work.

I played around with different effects and took some random screenshots.

I like the abstract nature of some of the images, the sense of ghostly imprints, an image which is not quite there, or that was there, but has since moved on.

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