DESCRIPTION

Copyspace was produced as a solo Left of the Border Films project during my first year of teaching in 2003. I was teaching vocational media production at a college in Lincolnshire and was still in the process of finding my feet when something occurred to me. This was that I spent quite a considerable mount of my non-contact teaching time at a photocopier. While I greatly enjoyed my teaching practice at this college, the seemingly endless amount of time I spent stood by a photocopier started to grate on me. So I thought I would exorcise this particular demon by producing an experimental short that I hoped would creatively reflect my mood at the time. After shooting my footage, I embarked on a process of creating individual sounds that would be linked in the edit to specific shots of the offending photocopier. This quickly developed into an extremely complex ‘mirror’ edit where the duration of my sounds exactly matched the duration of my video images. By editing this way, I found a new found respect for the precision of video editing. In retrospect, what I now realize this video represents to me personally is the hectic nature of teaching, where many days on the surface may seem similar but are very rarely actually the same. This, it turns out, is one of the things about teaching I like the most.