Waychinicup Water slows down the fast-flowing water at Waychinicup National Park in South Western Australia. The blurred, linear movement of the water takes on the quality of a handmade, scratch film, and as the image and sound slows further, they become suggestive of an ultrasound. The surface of the water gains a solidity, the reflections of light on its surface imply the contours of an uncanny landscape. The legibility of the image and sound is dissolved as the footage slows, imagined interpretations fluctuating with each movement of the water’s surface, until the viewer is pulled up from these depths to be returned to the real-time water flow.
The footage for this film was shot in 2003 in SD at 25fps (interlaced 50fps) on my original digital video camera. I have made several edits since then – this one is a re-edit of the 2014 version, cut down to 3 minutes. The footage is slowed to a maximum of 1% of realtime, giving each frame a duration of 2 seconds, frame-blended to achieve a smooth fade between frames – to avoid excessive visible “jumping” even with the frame-blending I overlaid four versions of the footage, each set half a second apart with increasing levels of transparency. In this edit, the footage is blown up to 720p HD which it seems to stand up to due to the overlaying of footage.
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