FTV Blog 2: Copy Shop, The Making of Collision Course

The other night my Mum invited me to sit down and watch a show she came across on ABC. It was an Australian documentary about the process of using high-speed cameras to film dancers (and wrestlers, athletes, gymnasts) performing mid-air to get super slow motion footage. The point of filming them was for the purely aesthetic beauty of the human figures moving so slowly in mid-air, but when watching this after the behind-the-scenes the effect was lost on me because the magic had already been exposed. Also, I was pre-occupied with the knowledge the dancers weren't actually doing anything natural, they had been told to 'collide like this' or 'jump like that'. Strange that the feature was a behind-the-scenes with occasional clips of the polished product. Almost always the making-of has a back seat role but then again, there is no ordinary medium in which to present these slow-mo shots. You can't have an entire TV or episode full of these shots ans nothing else. Perhaps I would have appreciated this documentary more had I already seen these slow-mo shots (apparently projected onto arts centres' exterior walls).

Interuterion by Samantha Ray
A key part of the final product (the shots, not the making-of TV show) was a Samantha Ray song called Interuterion, a deeply emotive and immersive soundscape

Copy Shop. Had no idea what that was going to be about and soon enough found myself hit with the 'what on Earth is going on?' feeling. The film didn't just engage me but demanded my attention as I became more and more desperate to understand what was happening. My impression of the ending was that in killing himself, all the copies would die too (although class consensus seemed that the suicidal man was not the original, just another copy, so the other copies would remain unaffected by his death). To interpret the plot, one analogy could be that all the copies are like voices in your head--the slight but numerous factors, experiences and beliefs that make up your conscience--and the cancerous copy men in the film are like the voices in your head if you go insane; enormous internal conflict and hysteria. So one way to end those voices is to end your entire being (suicide)--in the film, the copied men cannot exist without the original.



Stylistically, however, Copy Shop was very impressive. It was not innately pleasing to the eye (with a dirty, grey picture) but was technically brilliant. There was some clever work with the non-diegetic video, like the superimposed newspaper flicking across the frame (complete with sound effect) as we see a man reading a newspaper, or the transition between one shot and the next when the protagonist tears in half a photocopy of himself--the frame is torn down the middle to reveal an identical shot only without the character, who has accidentally made himself disappear after destroying the copy of himself. (A lazy description of the technique. Best see for yourself what I mean.)