Sarah Zedig
Media Theorist and Filmmaker
As a grip and electrician, I spent my years in the Oklahoma film industry learning the tricksy improvisational art of carving and shaping light for cinematic performance. Once you've mastered the basic principles and understand the equipment, you start to see film sets as rooms full of transparent clay, and the grip/electric department as its sculptors. You stop seeing objects and instead see the light that makes them tangible, its color, its sharpness, its angle. You take pictures and notes about random illuminative artefacts in the hopes of replicating them in a controlled environment.
My most notable credits are the Discovery reality series Street Outlaws, the horror film Home With A View Of The Monster, and the first episode of the TV series American Gods. You can find my video essays on my YouTube channel "let's talk about stuff." Embedded below is my short film In The Eye.
The work of a grip/electrician:
Simulated sunset using colored gels. "Home With A View Of The Monster," The Greenlee Brothers, 2019.
Simulated street light from the outside, seen on the right side of the image above.
Lit living room showcasing various lighting strategies. "The Painting," Kaitlyn Shelby, 2018.
Bouncing light off a copper sheet into a branchaloris to create a realistic tree shadow.
Shining light through two differently-shaped glass bottles of water to create this vertical ripple effect in a closeup.
Stills from A Video About Transitioning
"Transitioning" deconstructs the video essay by slowly removing background elements...
...
...until all but the bones have been stripped clean.
We enter a metapsychological space of identity...
...confront the angles of ourselves we cannot stand...
...distort our bodies...
...distort our memories...
...distort what others see of us...
...remove the chaff by force...
...and discover anew why we choose to live.
Then begins the process of building yourself up anew.
Stills From STATIC CRISIS (in progress)
NOTE: Because this video is still very early in production, most of the footage shot so far is in a flat color profile and does not represent the final intended look of the piece. Untouched stills are in 16:9 aspect ratio.
STATIC CRISIS is a video about light, and about knowing that things will get worse before they get better.
You're staring out the blinds thinking about climate change.
You're reading news about congress and notice a glare on your hand.
You've spent every hour of every day for three months wrenched with anxiety.
And there is nothing you can do about it.
So you study light as it passes through glass, and you try to make sense of it.
You record your thoughts in audio, and in cinematic artefacts of moments no one but you would notice.
Streaks of light and meaning only you would care about.
STATIC CRISIS should be released before the end of November.
Other Video Essays:
The Simple Art of Trolling Everyone, a close scene & script analysis of the Rian Johnson film Knives Out recorded on VHS tape and uploaded to YouTube in 4:3 aspect ratio.
A Prison Of Our Own Loneliness, a psychological examination of the 2020 quarantine parsed through the Kiyoshi Kurosawa film Kairo and filmed in one take with a silent scream.
Identity Cult, discussing Vera Brosgol's young adult graphic novel Anya's Ghost with an eye towards socially constructed identity, particularly among second generation immigrants.
There Is Something Wrong With Netflix, a look at how the streaming giant's business model disincentivizes formal experimentation and genuine artistic expression from 2018.
The Labour of Art uses the production of Transitioning as a springboard for discussing how our conception of artistic labor is stuck firmly in the industrial revolution, and how this negatively affects aspiring artists in the digital age.