So I may not have been as faithful to the guidelines of the prompt as I could have been. I say that only because you’ll notice that in the video I made there are clearly two video clips—one overlaid atop the other. The initial image that you see is of a deflated Navy life raft. This clip I acquired through the Public Domain Project. From this video clip I selected a roughly 5s section, and it more or less repeats 5-6 times. The major alterations to the clip involved opacity (which decreases than increases), as well as scale (which increases from 50% to 100%). As a side note, I did run into some issues with figuring out how to scale the clip so that it appeared in Premiere as it looked in its source file—a process which in turn lead to the “zooming in” decision as a compositional effect.

I appropriated the second clip, which also provides the video’s audio, from the Prelinger Archive. The selection is a 30s slow motion underwater shot of a group of female swimmers. The source video (which was a also an appropriation film) titled “AquaFrolic” also contained shots of male cliff divers. I appropriated part of the original title for my “FrolicFloat.”

I used this second clip as my temporal foundation to mark out an approximately 30s sequence onto which I could collage the life raft footage. While working with the two clips in this way it was clear that the interaction between the images generated the suggestion of a narrative, as well as a sense of distance from their original and archival sources. In the new context the levity and buoyancy, which the word “frolic” might connote seems to be not just overshadowed by a literal floating object, but also subverted, as what were playful swimmers appear more like ghostly figures reaching for (and failing to reach) the raft. I like the word “frolic”—and it seemed, given the material a place to explore Baron’s idea about the relationship between the archive and “the joke.” As she suggests,

the affinity…has to do with the fundamental ambiguity of the meaning of the archival fragment as both figurative (it stands for something else as a sign of history) and literal (it gains its evidentiary power from its specificity and particularity), which lends itself not only to factual assertion but also to “misuse” and play. (112)

Initially, the footage of the swimmers had a playfulness about it, as did the bright orange floating raft. However, the title of the video and the appropriated video fragments become much more ambiguous placed on top of one another and generate an unexpectedly dark/melancholic mood.