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Nicholas Mayne’s ‘Ravined’ featuring Tatiana Cheladyn

Edmonton born artist Nicholas Mayne has put together a fantastic video here, with an extremely well thought out premise and explanation. So, I shall let him describe for you what this video is all about, seeing as he has done it so well:

“A twisted, disoriented art nouveau dance poem shot with vertical framing on the Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Technically, Ravined was a proof-of-concept project focused on the vertical frame that has emerged in response to the inclusion of digital cameras on vertically oriented smartphones. To fit today’s 16:9 distribution standard I have aligned four 1080p vertical frames to horizontally fill a 4K frame. The content of Ravined uses imagery I have wanted to shoot for years: a young woman (Tatiana Cheladyn | tatianacheladyn.wordpress.com ) in a plain, timeless, white dress responding to nature in the ravine beside my childhood home. The chair and suitcase inject society into the natural context and are used to stimulate the viewer’s narrative imagination, so make of it what you will. Ophelia? Mother? Prey? Inamorata?

The choreography was improvised by Cheladyn under some loose direction from myself. We shot guerrilla-style one September afternoon, grabbing the dress from the local thrift store and the chair and suitcase from my apartment. The shoot was silent with music added in post. I edited silently based on impulsion in Cheladyn’s action and in the visual rhythm of the cuts themselves. I chose a 115 BPM tempo (which has a slightly dazed pace) and roughly cut to a click track. The rough-cut was then sent to Forest Mackay ( martinfireseed.bandcamp.com | soundcloud.com/martinfireseed ) to develop the soundtrack. Mackay worked with the 115 tempo and used his baritone guitar to create all the sounds in the final score. Once the audio was mastered in Live, the video was recut tightly to the final score. In counterpoint to the colourful beauty of the locations Mackay’s music reflects on the harsher contrasts and the rhythm of Cheladyn’s movement to draw out the psychological tension, voyeurism, anxiety and unsettled physics and focus created by the lines of symmetry.”