The sights and sounds of Darnet Island, in the Medway Estuary in Kent, Southern England. Filmed during canoeing expeditions during 2011 by Dave Wise and put together as part of Kent Coastal Week, 2011. I have made a new film on the sights and sounds of Darnet Island, which is an island I go to often by canoe, in the Medway Estuary. I took a little longer to make this one that others I have made, before. About 3 days in total. The editing was easy, a quick job, there are no quick shots, no dialogue to get in sync, but what was more troublesome was the whole look of the film. I thought, what am I trying to portray here? What emotions do I want the viewer to have whilst watching? I thought back to when I first began to love watching films. They were short nature films, on the Disney program that used to show on Thursday nights. You got these lovely technicolour short films on nature that used to go inbetween the cartoons. Or at least, that is how I remember it all. Now, every form of filming and photography fails to present the real world, as it is. That is one of the major limitation of the artforms. Technicolour, for example, which is the look that many of these Disney films had, revealed a world saturated in colour, the like that never exists in reality. However, it might exist in your heart when you see a sight that captivates you, and you feel something of the magic and sparkle of the world within you. That was, is, technicolours strength. It portrayed what you felt as much as what you saw. Strangely enough, this is also the strength of black and white pinhole photography. It may be blurry, but at it's best it captures the sense of wonder and mystery you feel when you look at a sight or a person that interests you. So, I thought, maybe I should use a technicolour look in this film, and not a digital one. I think that maybe digital is all too representative of our age. There are very few boundaries. There are far too many straight lines. Nothing is true, nothing is mysterious. There are no fairies at the end of the garden. And this is the tragedy of digital. My world was far better when fairies existed. As is everybodies. Not for the sense of innocence, but for the ability you had then to look at the world in all its glory. So, I put a technicolour cast on the film, scene by scene. Each scene obviously has its own feel to it, so each had its own saturation/brightness/contrast and tint requirements. I want you to feel the sense of joy I have about Darnet island as well as look at it.
And then there was the length of the scenes. Many great old film-makers had a 3 second rule. You look at their fims, like Citizen Kane, for example. The opening few minutes is almost entirely made up of scenes that are 3 or 4 seconds in length. They're trying to keep your attention, keep it all going at a fast pace. I didn't want to do that. Darnet Island, and my experiences of it, are all very slow in pace. We arrive by canoe, we stay until the tide turns, until we've done with our pinhole photography or relaxing. We might stay hours, or overnight, or days. Each scene should be ten minutes or so in length, that's how long, at least, that I sit and gaze at each scene in real life. But if I'd have done that, it would have taken days to upload the film to youtube, and that's not possible. So, I made the scenes longer than is normal, 10 seconds or so a piece. I want you to settle into the island, not flick through it's wonders as if they were something to be quickly gained and as quickly forgotten.
Here it is. A first film. I should also say here that the people who commissioned this film (the KCC) have asked me to say that it in no way implies that there is any public right of access onto the islands.
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Canoe Kent; Paddling into Darnet Fortby trekandrun376 views
wow.
shedcastle 1 week ago