My penis erects at the thought of war

The first sequence is a slow crane back from an electric pencil sharpener symbolizing the barrage of bullets launched from the machinegun that kills the electric soldier.  I used a dithering transition to highlight the fragmentation of his already skewed perception.

The explosion of black spheres represents the neural assault on his nervous system from the wounds he sustained. His thoughts and perception are flying in all directions. The next sequence continues in the same vein. The blood loss he is suffering is shower water cascading down a shower curtain, while that soundtrack played backward is the sound of staccato machinegun fire. “We are drowning in the blood of martyrs,” played backward repeats with the visual sequence here. The image of the blood is replicated until it is columns of blood. These columns diminish as he bleeds to death. A period of blackness heralds the first sound of actual gunfire from Battlefield 3, real time at first and then stretched out.  

I nearly bled to death some years ago and as I kept losing consciousness, my eyes were burning with a white fire around the edges of my peripheral vision. I wanted to introduce this into the piece. This next visual is of a campfire with exposure turned all the way up.

The next piece is a dark representation of the hollowness he feels from the loss of body mass. It’s travelling up and down his perceptual awareness, threatening to consume him as it multiplies and grows grittier.

Recoiling at the horror of the situation, his mind conceptualizes the situation in an innocent way, harkening back to his youth. He is represented by the green army man and the enormity of the situation is a huge-tentacled monster. The stuffed animal represents Cerberus. Now plush, he is represents the mind’s attempt to accept death in a palatable way.

Bits of memory assault him as he travels through his own mind. His mind is finally beginning to accept the magnitude of the moment. Fragments of his death play through his mind. He’s on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, but time echoes. Waves wash in even as they depart. Is the same thing happening to him?

The blood loss is already nearly enough to kill him. His nervous system is doing all it can to save itself, sending out distorted visuals abstracted down to multicolored blood splotches and an overwhelming aural cacophony disrupt the peace of the shore.

Random firing of dancing motes against a backdrop of white, snatched from his mind distracts him from the moment, but reality tries to assert itself with the flickering of the gamespace around him. Some motes twirl around, while others skip off the screen to the left and others streak back on.

Low exposure film of a shark swimming along illustrates a feeling of drowning, trapped underneath the predator with nowhere to go. This is in contrast to a grainy black and white screen with maximum movement, though the images are blurred from the unreality washing over him.

Once again, we’re on the shores between life and death. Flashes of the gamespace increase in frequency until we’re lying on the ground in a desert firefight with our hand out, pleading for aid. At this point, the realization of where he is brings the memory back of how he got there. He was shot down in a hail of gunfire. There is the one veil that the dying soldier never pierces. His death is seen through the filter of a video game.

Streaking lights, contrasted again colorful holes and pastel auras swirl around his brain, even as bullets whiz around him. Another harbinger of death-a seagull-emerges, flickering between this vision and a steady focused solid stance on the beach. It walks off screen as he dies, reliving his final moments one last time.

Time

Our memory isn’t time based. Recollection is more from association than a set timeline. With this in mind, I didn’t want the timeline to follow a classic A – B – C configuration. Some of the footage is played backward. At times making some sense and others gibberish.

Unity

I feel the one unifying aspect of the piece is the sound of gunfire. From the time it is introduced until it plays at the end, it brings everything together.  It’s not immediately obvious, but this firefight is taking place next to the ocean. I believe that creates a unity of visual images: from the water of the shark aquarium, the shower curtain and the waves slipping in on the beach. Another reason I chose this was partial inspired by this definition I found at dreamdictionary.net, “A beach is a boundary between solid land and fluid, changing water. A beach in a dream represents a boundary between your pragmatic thoughts and your emotions, between knowledge and instinct.”

Scale

I varied the native ratio of some images to signify the impact it had on the dying mind. Some of the images were 4:3, academy ratio and others were widescreen. At times, I scaled it to fit the 16:9 of 1080 to introduce degradation of the images, but others I left it as is. Especially epic moments, I replicated the image into dozens of times for added emphasis.

Tension

I tried to add tension to the video by not revealing the subject right away, while using jarring sound. Many of the images are very kinetic to aid in this, especially the shower curtain scene and the blood splatter sequence. Movement helps establish this. There are very few sequences with little to no movement. I also try to vary the speed of the clips.

Conclusion

I did my best to explore the last moments of a soldier using a combination of video and gameplay footage. We often interpret the world through filters of experience and memory plays a large role in that. The last thoughts of his dying mind are abstracted into sounds and images that he associates with his death.