Found in Transition: Catherine Grant’s Dissolves of Passion

Watch Found in Transition exercise examples here.

“It was through editing edits that I was discovering not only how much of a film story is told in these spaces between shots, but also just how audio-visual our experience of these (supposedly) in-between-narrative segments can be.”
—Catherine Grant (2016, updated 2019)
Dissolves of Passion: Materially Thinking through Editing in Videographic Compilation

Part of an exploratory series, this exercise is designed to encourage feminist citational practices in which the process is envisioned as a means of public thinking through a media object without the pressure of polish or publishing. In other words, we encourage you to embrace the mess of discovering through doing to see where it can take you on the timeline.

Prompt: Inspired by Catherine Grant and her work DISSOLVES OF PASSION, this videographic exercise focuses on how a specific transition is used in a media object and what the use of that technique might teach us or reveal about the work. Drawing on some of Grant’s other parameters used to create DISSOLVES OF PASSION, this exercise incorporates several other formal constraints: the maker must feature slow motion, use a colour filter, and commit an “act of vandalism” in relation to sound (Catherine Grant, “Dissolves of Passion: Materially Thinking through Editing in Videographic Compilation,” Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, November 10, 2023).

The intent of this exercise is to examine the ephemeral nature of the shot juxtaposition with a specific look at the use of transition choice and how this impacts the materiality of the media object in digital space. Here the video essayist is asked to focus on what has already been ruptured and sutured by the media object’s original makers to call attention to disconnects, overlaps, what has been cut out, and what has been brought together. Materially disrupting and investigating these connections is an illustrative intervention to further interrogate the text.

Consider: How is a particular type of transition used in your media object of study? How might the transition shape your understanding of the media object and your relationship to the text? What does a focus on and exploration of this transition reveal about the edit? How do these observations inform your intervention? How might transitional moments of disorientation heighten the affective qualities of the two shots being joined? What happens to this awareness of the transition technique when additional parameters shape your investigation?

Guidelines

Focus on one type of transition in your media object
Use a colour filter (your favourite colour?)
Use slow motion in some way
Commit an act of vandalism in relation to sound
1-3 minutes max length
Be kind to yourself in terms of how much time you spend on this exercise
Cite Catherine Grant as a source of inspiration in your credits

This exercise was devised by Lucy Fife Donaldson, Colleen Laird, Dayna McLeod, and Alison Peirse as part of Ways of Doing (2023).

Version 1.3: This exercise was updated on June 9, 2024. These updates are reflected in this page as well as in the pdf.