Psychogeography Project

We began an interesting project before Christmas based on the concept of Psychogeograpy, defined by Guy DeBord as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’ (DeBord, 1955)

Psychogeograpy is mainly concerned with how humans shape their environment and more importantly, how the environment shapes humans. With roots in the Situationists, DeBord looked at the ‘ambiance’ of places, the atmosphere within urban landscapes to invoke emotional responses through mundane surroundings.
It begins with a journey, taking the viewer through everyday life with particular focus on details that would normally be missed. Psychogeography allows its spectators to see more than meets the eye within their daily routine by making a journey unplanned and drawing attention to the ordinary, simply by changing the way a journey is taken. For example, choosing which route to take by the roll of a dice or documenting the journey through photographs can give a journey a whole new purpose.

After watching several videos from previous students, in groups we brainstormed ideas and looked at locations for the setting of our journey. We decided to set it in Birmingham as it was a setting that was unfamiliar to us all and would make it more exciting set in a different City. After a group meeting in the library, we planned how we would set the journey up and how we would decide the route. We looked at writing a list of routes and directions to show where we go but decided that it wouldn’t be random enough. We came back to the idea of rolling a dice but settled on the idea of using a paper fortune teller as we thought it would be more interesting to follow a route determined by allowing the participant to select from emoticons in keeping with the theme than a list or numbers on a dice.

The journey (as shown below) began from Leicester train station to Birmingham New Street station, where the route taken was around the centre of Birmingham following directions (left, right, straight) using the fortune teller.

We each decided who do what in the project and assigned roles with two members of the group filming and taking photographs then we each had a go at doing filming, trying to follow a plan of how we would shoot the video. We used Hannah as our subject of the video, who we shadowed and filmed for the whole day as we thought it would be easier for viewers to watch Hannah (below) and follow her through her journey to Birmingham.

We spent a whole day in Birmingham filming and ended the journey back at Birmingham New Street Station. We used several locations such as the stations, the city centre and various back alleys and streets in the city of Birmingham to show where many people walk on their daily routines but as we had all never really seen Birmingham before, we were all taking our journey through the City with fresh eyes, taking note of every detail.

As the journey is about mapping emotions through Hannah's journey, we asked members of the public to write down one word on a board to describe how they were feeling at the time and place. We then asked permission to take their photograph and use this within our video, although we found that some people were quite reluctant to have their photo used.

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For the editing process of the video, we used Final Cut Pro as it allowed us to explore and be more creative with our video as the software is used by many professional film makers. We spent several days editing and putting together the journey, cutting many hours of footage down to six minutes. We added the photographs of people writing their emotions on the board at the end as a montage.

The music we used was Alex Turner's Piledriver Waltz, which we all agreed after various suggestions that it was a good choice and was melodic enough to fit the journey and it's purpose well.

The following week we presented our finished project (above) by showing the video in our workshop. The feedback we received was generally good yet we went over the time limit for how long the video should be which dragged on with all the walking scenes. I felt pleased with our finished project and enjoyed the experience of filming and exploring Birmingham.