While I was considering ideas for a surveillance theme, I noted that the word surveillance comes from the French root to watch over. For this project, I decided to watch over my subjects and monitor the behavior of their faces in the relative neutral environment of my home, using common technology in a non-common way to create a tension for the subjects.

I created a surveillance system in my family room with the use of a DV camera on a tripod to document subjects’ reactions to film clips that varied in their level of disturbance/intensity. Each clip was displayed to the subjects from my laptop screen. Although originally I experimented with a web cam for the surveillance, I eventually switched to a DV cam due to quality issues.

The format of the completed surveillance video was inspired by the Brady Bunch sitcom from the 60’s. In the beginning of every episode, the theme song plays with each family member’s head presented in square box which together form a larger square. I used a similar format to combine the surveillance videos into one cohesive visual. Each individual video was tightly focused on the subject’s facial expressions as they watched the clips to provoke the viewer’s thoughts about the personal impact of this surveillance effort. For this three minute movie I used Final Cut pro and Mpeg4 codec.