Growing up the one thing that I always loved doing was going to arcades. It brought out the excitement and giddiness of everyone. However, on top of all of this excitement there was always one other constant – the pure anger I would see brought out by the dreaded claw machine.
I am hoping to capture visualizations of human frustration. I am planning to collect a series of videos that capture claw machine players’ faces/emotions the second that the item they are trying to win slips out of the machine’s claw. In order to have accurate results and to see the exact moment their emotions switch, I would use a slow motion camera to film their faces. If we have more than one available, I can also record the claw in slow motion to sync up the cameras and make sure the timing is more exact. The final result would be a series of videos (that I would like to present in a similar manner as Tops (1969) by Ray and Charles Eames) or before/after images of the participants.
I reached out to the Dave and Busters in Pittsburgh about possibly filming in their location and they said that as long as I don’t have an extremely elaborate setup, get the consent of the players, and blur out the people in the background I would be allowed to film there.