Today we watched everyone’s self portrait videos film festival style. It was really interesting to see just how much people had done with only one minute of editing together bits and pieces of themselves. Every single one was its own unique, coherent little narrative. It was really nice to see.
It’s so interesting seeing how many different ways a one minute video can be told, so inspiring too to see how unique every person’s idea was. It gives me hope, even if it is a naive hope at this point, for the future of the narrative, because there really are infinite possibilities.
Here is the second assignment of the year, a video self portrait combining all the mediums from the previous self portrait:
Through this piece I really wanted to show an emotional journey, the kind I feel my life has been and still is. From the beginning of this project I knew I wanted to create an emotional crescendo through the music, which starts out calm and peaceful but quickly becomes hectic, crazy and cluttered, as my mind often is.
I also wanted to show myself through images of my favourite places, and as I have grown up literally surrounded by parks, I have used trees as a motif to convey different areas of my personality throughout the piece. At the beginning I use trees moving in the breeze and fades to show my calm and positive side. This then develops into the idea that I myself have been labelled a tree because of my height. The vascular tree images, which I created using Adobe Illustrator, also give the idea that the tree is alive, through the use of montage theory which makes the tree pulsate.
To me, trees also symbolise growth and development, as each bump in its trunk was created by some event, it grows in a certain direction, it has many branches and thick roots. Trees to me also symbolise life itself and the journey of growth and change throughout life.
I found it very difficult to get the right meanings and ideas across in the middle of the piece, where things become more hectic, as I was originally going for a quantity rather than quality approach to the editing. But once I really thought about it I found an idea that worked. I still think there is a little too much going on, but I like the meaning that comes across throughout the piece through the editing.
The main idea I wanted to get across through this piece is that I changed so much in Year 12 that over the summer holidays, I felt I had finally gotten to know myself, only to discover once I reached university that I had continued to change and now I feel as though I know nothing again. I really wanted to capture that confusion and feeling of both freedom and being trapped at the same time.
Today we revealed our self portraits and explained why we chose to create those products, as well as gave feedback to all the other people in our little groups of five as through the use of four of the De Bono six thinking hats. Either the ‘positive’ yellow hat, ‘gut reaction’ red hat, ‘there’s something wrong here’ black hat, or ‘oooh! Now do this!’ green hat.
It was surprisingly comforting having all these creative minds appreciate and accept my work and give me advice and ideas and inspiration. I was so anxious for no apparent reason and it felt so good to just de-stigmatize so many things for myself through photos and film and audio. I can’t wait to try and create a one minute fluid sequence with new, fresh ideas, footage and images as well as some old ones from this project.
For Media 1, for our first assignment, we had to create a self portrait of ourselves. So, this is what I thought of myself when I started Uni;
Through this image I wanted to convey the way I felt throughout high school, and in a way, still feel now as I learn to adjust and settle into the style of university life.
This is an homage to Rene Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images”. I wanted to show that this self portrait is only a representation of myself and not actually me.
Through this filter I aimed to show my unique and whimsical view of the world.
A while ago I had surgery on my back and in order to de-stigmatize it for myself and give it a new kind of beauty, I decided to get my dad to paint a tree around it, to show growth and strength.
This is a recording of my favourite place to just relax.
This is a recording of me singing “Singin’ in the Rain”, as I feel this song best shows my positive attitude towards life in general.
‘I’m naive. But I embrace my naivety. “So it goes” – Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Slaughterhouse 5’
I chose these words to somehow sum up myself, because I found this so hard to do and wound up writing in circles, until I finally decided to go with something simple. But how do you sum up one person in 50 words, let alone 10, 000 words? not even a film could achieve such a feat.
Through this video I wanted people to feel the way I feel when I walk my dogs, which for me is having gorgeous furballs constantly smile at you, and feeling the sunshine as I walk through along this path. Hence, why it’s called sunshine in a lense, an inherently Australian thing to capture.
This, for me, was yet another way to de-stigmatize something and show the world how I see things, both literally and metaphorically. I have a condition known as visual snow, which, as you’ll see from the video is like having the static of a TV screen over your vision all the time. I wanted to show that although I may see the world in a literally different way to most people in the world, I really do see the world differently to everyone else. Not because of my condition, but because of me.
