Ceiling in Motion -- Dingnan Zhang (Paul)

 

I came up this idea before I came to Boston. I tried to push myself to “do something different!”in this "new" world.

I am from a different country where is totally different cultural background. Being “different” is not so hard for me: I speak different language, I don’t like burger king very much, and I also don’t think the restaurant in China town is that ‘good'. However, this kind of “different” is not exactly what I want. In other words, those differences only mean that I don’t want to explore, or even feel this new culture. This culture is new for me, but I am new for it, too. I am just like a new born baby. And I am pretty sure  when you are a baby, no matter what you are looking at, there must be a lot of  fun!

Basically, I was trying to refresh my original view to observe this world. In the beginning, I have been hanging around the city and looking for anything which can be special and unique. But I failed. Then I realized that I need special angel rather than special objects. My first video was taken two months ago in Prudential. At that time, I was standing on the escalator, and moving around my head to relax neck. Suddenly, I was attracted by the incandescent hang on the ceiling. The escalator was moving down slowly and smoothly. Simultaneously, I noticed the lights upon my head showed an incredible rhythm. I felt so happy, and  recorded this moment by my iPhone immediately. When I showed this clip to Ben, he mentioned that he liked this ‘ceiling motion’. Eventually, “Ceiling in Motion” also became the name of this project. “Ceiling in Motion” this name inspired me. It offered me an unique angel to explore this world. Another special part of this video is that I tried to shoot this view again with my DSLR. However, it has never come out as good as the original one. After all, I realize this is life which is always changed by time, and many other factors include my mood.

    This project was built up by several different clips. Even though most of them have been shoot several times, like the “bridge”, “tunnel”, and so on. I dropped most of them, because I was trying to find out that “different”. But some of the videos were shoot by once,such as the last piece. I even knew it would be unique when I shoot them. The truth is, at that time, I was going to shoot the wave of the lake, but a duck flew into the scene accidentally. This video became my favorite part in this project. I treated it as a gift from life. Sometimes it happened to come into your life, but you cannot always be ready for it, so you have to take the initiative to find it. Like what I stated at the end of the video -- Life has a lot of surprises, just keep looking...