Worthing Beach

The first question you might ask, and has been asked already, is why when I’m in the most beautiful part of the world I’ve ever been in, am I spending my time looking at a scummy beach from back home? Well, I managed to capture this beach looking the best I’d ever seen it out of thousands of visits, just before leaving, and had to bring the footage with me if there was any chance for it.

I grew up on this beach. Well no, not on it… Near it. It’s the main feature of my crappy little hometown and I must have spent a total of a year of my life (or something, literally no maths or real thinking applied there) sitting on it’s dusty rocks and crabs, staring out at the grey seaweed filled water, and ending up stinking of tramps.

It’s always nice to live by the beach though, no matter what it looks like, and many people I know from anywhere further north have been jealous. You don’t appreciate it when it’s normal but there have certainly been times when I realised that I would miss it. I decided to spend a free day I had before leaving going down and grabbing some footage, as I know I would want to look back on the defining images of home. I had no idea how good this footage would end up looking.

The first of this videos, Demons Of Light, has been barely touched. These images are captured in camera, obviously I had a little fiddle with the settings, but in post production I found myself unwilling to change the look of a single shot. The sun was just perfect, the sky was blending and mixing its shades between bright blue and the usual light grey, light flares were creating dark black silhouettes of the pier stands and the groins (hehe). This is the beach as I saw and experienced it on that day, as I had never seen it before, and possibly never again.

The video is edited in chronological order to simply represent my journey as best as possible, and even though I felt the song worked with the video perfectly, I wanted to try a more off beat approach and avoided cutting away just because it felt right with the music, I left the cuts and length of the footage how I wanted it originally.

Earth | Worthing Beach | Demons Of Light from Matt Shutup on Vimeo.

This second video was a response to a conversation with my friend Jon. After showing him the first clean edit, he mentioned that the video made it feel as though he was taking an idyllic  and dream like stroll along the beach, like he was watching memories of better days and seeing his home town from a nostalgic and improved reality point of view. I explained that the video was actually the exact opposite, but I was amazed at how the footage had created that impression even though I had barely touched it. He suggested that if it was intended as a passionate memory invoking piece then the editing should match, with shots of birds and crashing waves cut between the landscape shots of the sea and the pier. As I said, it was not intended as a brains nostalgic look back interpretation, but that got me thinking about a version that could be.

I pretty much went ahead and did the opposite to what I’d done in the first place, and what Jon had thought I’d done. I created a memory piece from the way I would expect my memories of Worthing Beach to appear. Bleak, dull, and dark, but with contrasted shots of over exposure and blurring, representing the brains failed attempts to create a perfect image. I also took Jon’s editing advice and completely rearranged the order of the edit, which as he said, is much more suited to show images as they would appear in your skull, as I don’t know about you but I am unable to recount every step of a journey in order without other parts of it flashing in and out. This created the Angels Of Darkness version of the video, which I believe contains the same beauty but with a very different tone.

Earth | Worthing Beach | Angels Of Darkness from Matt Shutup on Vimeo.

I’m so glad I was able to capture this footage of home before leaving, and I now have an idyllic and also a interpretive way of remember the main features of the town I grew up in to look back on, and as rarely happens, managed to find music which fitted the mood perfectly. The title of the chosen track; Demons Of Light, Angels Of Darkness, also worked perfectly with the dual videos idea and even though it did not inspire the idea, it certainly gave it a perfect title.

Click on the pictures below to take a proper look and please leave your comments underneath.