When presenting my personality and life – I wanted to be as honest as possible; and stick to mostly showing rather than telling. I assessed that the five major activities I do in my life are travelling, skateboarding, playing music, playing with my kitten, ice hockey.

My stylistic choice was to represent that I don’t see my life as all that extraordinary. So I decided to use the first part of the video documenting my morning activities – getting up, washing my face, and having a cup of coffee. I deliberately edited these clips to be black and white to represent the aged ritualism of this process.

From there, I decided to keep those activities that I think make me “stand out” as a human in colour. This is to create bold contrast between the activities that many people partake in and those that I feel are special to me. I also used a fairly dream-like soundtrack to draw out this idea. I also attempted to use a variety of camera angles throughout this piece to add variation; rather than monotony; and make each activity distinct from the next. Jump cuts were also used to shorten clips and select key parts – such as in the clips of train travel, feeding my kitten Olive, and playing ice hockey.

I used text to emphasize certain points I was making in my narration; as I wanted these to be impactful and felt that text would make these points stand out.

Finally – I used some short stop-motion animation when discussing the idea of being “a book half written”. I wanted to try to do something different here to create a better spacing between the two film sequences. Originally I was going to use this as where I would present my title, but I figured it wasn’t clear enough by this point so I ended up using text overlay earlier on.

I think my biggest constraint in creating this piece was perhaps the deadline by which I had to complete it. By the time I had created a concept, I effectively had only two days to shoot, edit and produce this. With more time I would have perhaps added more effects to the text; and had each word appear on the screen as I said them.