As a springboard from all the portrait work I’ve done over the past three years, I, at some time during that process, became really attuned/enamored/moved by people’s faces and started experimenting with a new creative study. Internally we’re calling it “60”. In short, it’s really simple: I’m taking 60 second video portraits of people. No instruction, no direction, no coaching, nothing. Just the camera pointed at them for a minute.
Although the concept is simple, I’ve found the results to be pretty interesting. At a fundamental level, the human face says a lot, even without the person saying anything at all.
While I’ve been at this for a while, I thought it would be time to start sharing some of these portraits here on the blog. This chase jarvis 60 features world-renowned explorer Mike Horn. You may remember Mike from my Pangaea experience across the South China Sea with Panerai watches. [Lots of posts here, here, and here.] It was a life changing experience for me, and a good bit of it was getting to know Mike. Hopefully you’ll get to know him a little here as well.
Love to know your thoughts.
[aside: if you are interested in seeing these videos when I post them to youtube, rather than just the occasional ones that make it here to the blog, you’re invited to subscribe to my youtube channel here. thx]
Shout out to McKenzie Stubbert for the music.
Here’s what I find interesting — not what the subject does but the narrative we apply to the subject in the absence of a clear direction.
When I was in graduate school (MFA in Theater) we had an acting teacher send two people on to the stage and sit, facing us, for sixty seconds. He had given them each a whispered direction before they started — and whatever it was, it was fascinating to watch. There was such intensity and emotionality in their expressions, even while they sat silently for a minute. After the minute was up the instructor asked us to explain what we thought was happening. We all had different but equally involved interpretations. Then he asked the actor what he had whispered to them.
They both replied, “Do nothing.”
So, is the story implicit in the face? Or, in the absence of a narrative, does the face become a mirror to our own souls?
The unmoving camera viewpoint creates a tension between subject and viewer. Would a slow zoom in to a key feature, the unblinking eye, or dry lips, or twitching cheek muscle add or detract from the effect? It’s something I may be forced to try.
What did you shoot this with, the D7000 I presume but what glass? Looks good.
yes. Nikon D7000 with the 85mm 1.4.
Chase, I just tried mine :p… here is the link. The video is not sharp, because i got some stupid error with my FCP. so i had to use iMovie.
here is the video.
http://vimeo.com/18065303
I really like the concept, and the B&W treatment you gave it really works well. My only gripe is that you seem to have used SmoothCam in FCP or something similar that becomes really distracting. The whole idea of this seems to be to focus on every little detail of the subject, yet all I could see were the anomalies of the post-processed image stabilization. I would be curious to see this once more but without that treatment.