For this final project, I aim to express my love for wood as a material, and to show my appreciation for wood as once a living being.
Wood has always been my most favorite material to work with, it’s easy to process, it’s cheap and versatile, and it looks beautiful — the knots, the rings, the grains, the color, the way they interact with light in different angles, everything about them is just so naturally beautiful and I love it. However, the wood around us are usually so processed that we forget that they were once a tree, and I’m here to try and change that.
In order to show wood and its beauty through my eyes, I teamed up with a filmmaker Ri Chang, to try and film a documentary about wood and woodworking. We want it to be a meditative and chill experience, with Lofi-esque music and beauty shots of some of the wooden pieces I made along with the process of woodworking. I purposefully chose pieces and shot angles that accentuate one or more characteristics of the piece of wood I was working on, like the big knot on some of the pine pieces, or the natural ebonizing process of oak, or just how the walnut grain absolutely POPs under the application of some oil finishing. In the end, if anyone feels that wood could look more diverse and dynamic than they thought, I would consider my job done properly. Bonus point if I could get someone to wonder (or even better, and ask me) about why wood look a certain way or why we treat them a certain way, which I did get a few after class, I would be really happy.
question: how is a “woodporn” style video help with making people realize wood is a being not a material?
answer: It’s not supposed to. My appreciation of wood as a being came from years of experience working with wood, understanding their structures and “habits”, I can’t directly give you the feeling of “wow this was a tree”, or “damn this is a difficult piece of wood to get along with”. The best way for me to start giving anyone this kind of feeling is to have them work on some wood pieces with me, then I will really be able to show why we work a piece of wood a certain way, because of this natural characteristic or that one. So again, I want to inspire awe curiosity at least, and urge to work with wood at best, not to directly give you the feeling that I have about wood.
anyway, here is the youtube link to the video we made in the end.
and here are some behing the scene images and the wood pieces for the experience
