The idea of creating a documentary in itself is daunting. The time and footage constraints add to the limitations I had already placed on myself for this assignment.

When brainstorming for this assignment I gave myself two major rules:

1. No irrelevant artistic shots just to break-up dialogue. I did not like the idea of including footage that was purely aesthetic and then apply meaning to it later as a convenient way of making my work look more ‘professional’. Every shot is to be meaningful, thought about, contrived.
2. Have more than one opinion. I wanted to interview more than just my subject. I did this to include not only personal experience from the subject himself, but outward perceptions of him and what facial hair represents on a wider scale.

I ran into a lot of difficulty keeping the documentary between 2-3 minutes due to the amount of people I had interviewed. This have me a lot of material to work with, but also hours of footage that I needed to condense.

What it all means

The introduction to this documentary involves close-up, slow-motion footage of all of the interviewees (who are close friends of the subject). Initially their faces are being shown one after the other before hands slowly reach into the frame and touch the participants. I chose to do this for a few reasons, the first being that these people are all close friends of Joshua, the guy with the beard. By having their faces touched and hair ruffled I wanted to symbolise the feeling of being judged by people you know for your outward appearance, more specifically, your face. Secondly, the hands focus on the participant’s accessories (the septum piercing, the sunglasses and the beard). This was to emphasise the idea of personal taste and what people include in their representation as a way to express themselves to the outward world. This is accompanied by the voices of the people on screen talking about Josh and their personal opinion of his beard and beards in general.

The final frame is of Josh himself and a hand running through his beard. This was to introduce him as the subject of the documentary while the title appeared on the screen.

What follows is fairly self-explanatory. Josh is interviewed about his facial hair. I have chosen to include a shot of him laughing and smiling when he discusses his decision to grow a beard as it symbolises happiness and freedom of expression. While he speaks of having to shave to live up to his high school’s standards, footage from the 1920’s Samson and Delilah play, specifically the scene of Delilah cutting the hair off Samson. As this biblical story is of a man who gains his strength from his hair I thought this would be fitting, as it symbolised the moment he became weak.

As he begins to talk about being employed and having freedom in a now more accepting society, the dialogue frame from Samson and Delilah is shown saying “wherein leith thy great strength?”, to which the answer is inferred by the audience as in his beard.

When critiquing my own work I would say that the narrative isn’t too interesting. There is somewhat of an arc in terms of Josh deciding to look a certain way, then not being able to, then having the freedom to do so, however it isn’t the most compelling documentary.

Some of the cuts are really rough, I could have done a better job at editing the dialogue to make it flow a little better.

I definitely should have used more ‘found footage’, I was happy with the Samson and Delilah clips but I also could have used more stock footage of the old-fashioned ideas of ‘manly men’ and their facial hair, as well as comparisons between ancient ideas of ‘professional appearance’ as opposed to a more modern representation.

This short documentary describes self-expression in appearance through the eyes of Joshua Rushin, the guy with the beard. This documentary discusses modern attitudes to facial hair and restrictions against self-expression in high schools and workplaces as well as Joshua’s experience facing these challenges with facial hair.

Filmed in black and white with poetic imagery, this documentary reflects changes in public opinion across age groups and eras.

Rhetoric documentary is persuasive and bases its arguments on beliefs, however to believe something does not make it truth. There is a lot of grey area in what is considered ‘fiction’ in documentary for this very reason. When does something become false? Is it the same as not being entirely true?

To justify a belief does not require proof, all it requires is an explanation. To say that you hold a certain belief because it is what your parents believe is all that is needed to support your belief, because that is why you believe it. To justify knowledge, however, proof is needed, facts are needed. To know something and to believe something are two very different things.

If a documentary is based upon a belief, how can in be accepted as a fact or knowledge?

I have recently begun to consider just how important it is to pursue creative endeavours outside of the tasks that need to be completed.

Film making has always been a love of mine, when it feels like a task I am less likely to enjoy it.

So here is a short clip I created that reminds me: sometimes you just have to get creative for no reason.

Yang Fudong is a film maker that I admire intensely who I have similar ideas to when it comes to film and colour.
Fudong never believed that cameras where capable of capturing the true beauty and intensity of colour until his exhibition ‘Filmscapes’. Until this exhibition all of his works where in black and white. To this day his work in Filmscapes is the best footage I have ever seen in colour in terms of vibrancy and demeanour.

My personal experience with colour is that it never fully encapsulates the essence of the mood of a scene I try to create. The mood of the colour never really accurately represents the story I am trying to portray, and until I can master colour, I would prefer to film in black and white.

This weeks workshop involved critiquing some student’s work in it’s early stages of being edited. Though my work was not critiqued I felt that I could apply a lot of the advice that was shared during class.
One common critique that stood out for me was how people where choosing to pace their documentaries. Timing is everything and silence isn’t a scary thing. While it may seem that with only 3 minutes of footage for a documentary a lot of dialogue is needed in order to cram as much information as possible into the short amount of time, this often leads to confusing, jumbled meaning and content that is hard to follow which leads to the audience being disinterested.

What I also found interesting was the different styles people had chosen to use. While some people were interested in having the subject filmed, others were more interested in having the subject recorded and the film would be suggestive of what the subject would speak about. I chose to include both of these things in my recent edits.

Sometimes I think it is easier to critique something from an audience’s perspective rather than a film-makers perspective. Most people watching won’t be too distracted by the specifics but rather the overall film and whether it was enjoyable. This comes in handy when I get too caught up in my own work. Sometimes just taking a step back from the minute details and looking at my work as a whole instead of separate cuts and fragments makes it easier for me to understand if my work is actually heading in the right direction.

Despite apparent simplicity of ‘deciding to notice’, developing the sensitivity to notice particular things, and to notice them when it would be useful to notice them when it would be useful to have noticed (and not merely later, in retrospect) requires effort.

The most prominent idea that this writing has provoked in me is this: Ghosts.

Though I am aware that this article pertains to the idea of noticing the waking world and the moments that we live in as we are living them, it also makes me think of the things people claim to notice, why only some claim to notice them and why the majority can’t or won’t.

The majority of people use the argument of not having proof that the paranormal is a part of reality simply because they have not seen or experienced anything that could convince them of its presence, but maybe they just aren’t noticing.

If this is the case, what else don’t people notice? There could be four different species of alien living among us but due to lack of sensitivity to noticing, they have gone unrecognised.

Victor Burgin’s ‘Looking at Photographs’ inspired one prevalent and recurring thought in me.
The construction of photographs are mostly very contrived. The placement or subjects, structure, content, brightness, contrast and depth of field are all ~mostly~ intentional, for the purpose of evoking particular emotions in it’s audience or to solely be aesthetically pleasing.
Even when the purpose of the image is to not explicitly allude to a certain feeling it wants to evoke in the audience, when the image is purposely ambiguous in order to achieve a variety of responses, this is contrived. It is created that way. Nothing just happens.

This specific idea reminded me a lot of my favourite film director, Stanley Kubrick, and how he intentionally inverted colours that are typical of the horror genre for his film ‘The Shining’.
Kubrick used pale blue titles for the opening credits of The Shining and many of the most confronting scenes, including the famous bathroom scene, contain placid, pale and light colours that are often associated with peace and tranquility. He intentionally takes a widely recognised colour for blood and changes it to pastel blue. Kubrick was not looking for the audience to recognise the symbols of horror through shadows or the colour red, he was looking to assign horror themes to what we all know as ‘safe’. Rather than wanting the audience to infer meaning from recognisable elements, he is challenging the elements or symbols we associate with horror and forcing the audience to create a new meaning to certain symbols.

This leads me onto my next thought: Inkblot pictures.

Inkblot tests are used to evoke a response in its spectator and rarely do they receive a unanimous reply. The blots themselves are not created to evoke one response, rather to be a completely randomised shape or image that the spectator will assign their own meaning to. The inkblots have no universal meaning or message and therefore cannot be constructed to manipulate its audience.

Regardless of what the photographer wants to evoke in an audience, we are not homogenous. We will assign our own experiences and meanings to whatever we please.

22.03.2016

“I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone, because I am the person I know best.” ~ Frida Kahlo

When given the opportunity to piece together a one minute video containing every interesting thing about me, my first thought was to, yet again, try to contain extremely dense and large amounts of very short clips as I figured this to be the only way of actually capturing myself on camera given the constraints of the project brief and short time frame of the film itself.

The three sound recordings I chose were of myself picking a violin to create a simple, layered musical effect that would not only accompany the footage nicely, but symbolise my love for musical instruments. The notes however do not actually play a tune, they are chosen at random. I chose to do this to give the viewer a sense of curiosity as it would not sound familiar, but also to ensure that the sound did not distract from the footage.

The first frame is of me, my eye to be exact. I have chosen to do this to immediately create a sense of identity for myself. The extreme close-up and slow motion have been put together to create an intense and lasting image of me. The first thought that comes to mind when asked to create a self-portrait is physical appearance, however it is not the most important part and that is why I have chosen to only include my eye.

The frames that follow may seem ambiguous or misplaced, however they all do have their meaning.

The shots of the ocean water are from a rock pier at my favourite beach. This beach happens to also be the place I first started my filming endeavours as my very first short film was shot here. I have chosen to include this as filmmaking is my passion.

The next scene is a stop-motion clip including an image of a close friend of mine, who had played an important role in expanding my creative mind and served as a great source of inspiration for me during a difficult time in my life. The eyes that come across the scene and onto his face are those of another close friend, who has amazing creative vision. These two people helped me gain the traits I am most proud of today and are therefore completely necessary in my self-portrait. I used these images in stop-motion to create the sense of physically creating something, which would directly relate to why these people are so important to me. I also felt this created a level of texture to my piece.

My written text in this film is then incorporated, though very shorty, through the construction of an origami crane. The writing on the paper is of a letter to another important person in my life, who happens to practice intricate paper folding. What comes next is a combination of meaning: The Zippo lighter symbolises WWII and the 30’s-50’s. This happens to be my favourite era of history, fashion, culture and cinema. The burning of the letter and crane represent my stance on romance and the transient nature of most relationships.

The last scene is a combination of every other scene played back at a higher speed before the frame rests back on my eye. I have chosen to do this to change the tempo of, what had been so far, a very slow and simple piece, but also to recapture everything before closing the self-portrait with the same image it began with.

One other very important note: I film in black and white as an allusion to my favourite director, Alfred Hitchcock, and also as I believe colour can sometimes interfere with the meaning of a shot.

I feel the most successful part of my Self-portrait was the overall simplistic, poetic style I have chosen to work with. The downside to this and perhaps the least successful part of this project is that it makes inference of meaning very hard for the audience. If I could have done things differently I may have included a voice over to explain further the importance of each shot to create a story for the viewer, which would mean my self-portrait would become more understandable.

21.03.2016

“No one is as deaf as the man who will not listen.” ~ Proverb

John Cage’s 1952 performance of 4’33” involved sitting at his piano, and that was all. He did not play a note or make a sound, he just sat. His intention was to make the audience listen for his music, rather than just to hear. In the 7 minute piece re-enacted by William Marx, the audience applauds him to the stage and then they sit silently waiting for the music to begin.

“Everything we do is music.” ~ John Cage

The audience sits in silence even after minutes pass of Marx at the piano. As he opens and closes the lid of the piano the audience does not know whether to anticipate an actual musical piece or not. So they eagerly wait, and listen. All that can be heard are muffled coughs from the audience and the occasional creak of the piano stool.

What Marx and Cage have both set out to achieve is to evoke the action of listening in the audience. To listen requires focused attention and effort, while hearing does not. While the audience waits, they are listening, focusing intently on the musician to start, to make any noise. It is arguably the most listened to piece of music.