Since its closure in 1988 decay has transformed the prison on the island of Procida into a space inhabited by many patterns. A bizarre beauty reveals itself through the stark contrast between this space of patterns and the prisons dark past. This photo film focuses on the impermanence of that which is regarded as solid and unchangeable - a prison slowly transforms and past human actions dissolve.
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This is a short photo film for the assignment on multimedia. Having made more than 500 photos of the prison it was quite a challenge to make a selection that fits into a ninety second piece. The sound and photo editing process was an interesting one - I first made a rough photo edit, the second step was to create a raw sound file together with the composer Rob Canning. The piece was much longer at first and I gradually narrowed it down to a little longer than ninety seconds. The narrative element only came with time, the whole piece is different to what I initially had in mind. I had to drop many photos, funnily enough this process of “letting go” was rather difficult! I had proper internal dramas and headache sometimes, thought the piece will fall into pieces if I drop certain photos. I was sticking to an advice that I got from a documentary film maker - kill your babies..! The ones you are attached the most have to go… There is this emotional attachment to it, that the viewer doesn’t have and therefore we might exaggerate the importance of the photo.The lonely sock is one of the babies that had to go. While I was going from cell to cell I came across this one sock, I remember so vividly how my thoughts went far, thinking what this sock must have experienced and what story it could tell us etc… yes, I was cruising god knows where with my thoughts (luckily I found the way back). The one baby I couldn’t kill is the photo with the mirror on the wall, even though a friend told me to drop it, I didn’t follow the advice and I wonder why..?
[caption id=“attachment_496” align=“alignnone” width=“700” caption=“THE LONELY SOCK”]
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I enjoyed a lot to work on this piece, so much that I want to make an extended version of it. I must say, that Rob’s sound complements immensely to it and I am very fortunate to have this chance. The photo film and his compositions are release under the creative commons attribution share alike licence. It’s a work of art that should be viewed to everybody who likes it and it can be re-worked if people want to; much in the sense like time is transforming a prison - nothing is permanent.
Below I am listing the different software I used to create this photo film. I am working on a Linux based operating system (puredyne), therefore all the software is open source. It was a positive experience to work in this way and I can highly recommend it.