Today I did a brief character shoot, beginning with my dad as a subject. I chose him, honestly, because he was the most willing and accessible person to me but I attempted to delve deeper within him as a subject to see what I could produce.

In this exercise I wanted to explore how close-ups and less traditional means of coverage can be used to explore a person. Nicolette and I have been working on conventional modes of interviews, asking questions to evoke a story. I wanted to do this without the audio aspect, looking at the person and letting the subject natural evoke itself.

When I placed my dad in our bathroom, as it is the brightest room in the house with the most neutral colour pallet. I thought this would be a good contrast from the darkness of his skin and the vibrancy of the red shirt that he had appropriately decided to wear that morning. Dad dresses brightly, dark colours are always the furthest of those from his mind and fashion is indisputably his thing. When I put him in this sterile location I felt I sense of disparity in him and this created a kind of awkwardness within his oozing coolness that in someway presents itself across to the camera.

So I began shooting dad, using quite a lo-fi approach, trying to capture only close-up to capture only a discrete selection of his character. I shot for roughly five minutes and then loaded the footage onto my laptop to attempt to identify themes. Dad was quite singular when translated across to screen. But what I found interesting within the footage, was a shot him touching his wedding ring and how the rest of the shots seemed to radiate and build themselves from this particular shot. This is when I decided another shoot was needed and another character too, my mum.

Mum and dad are your typical middle-aged married couple. They’ve been married for twenty-eight years, together thirty-seven. They’ve had kids, moved states, bought a house, a dog. Mum would say dads married to soccer and spends the majority of his free time with his beloved (Arsenal football club).

I shot mum in a way that mirrored dads shoot, hers was perhaps more painful however as she strongly disliked the idea of me filming her. Both the shoots ended with mum and dad, as each character, laughing at their unfamiliarity with the situation and both of their inabilities to peruse acting careers no matter how hard their hearts desired. And again, I loaded the footage onto my computer and began the search for themes. The largest that drew my eye were the differences and similarities between both of their portrayals.

This is when I decided I needed audio. Unfortunately neither mum or dad were available to record, and as I didn’t have an equipment at my disposal, I decided to just keep with the lo-fi approach and record mum and dad over the phone telling their sides a like story. I called mum first and asked her to tell me about the first time they met, I then told her I wanted to record her response and use it as audio for the exercise. Mum was embarrassed of the story of when they first met (mainly because of the late 70s/early 80s outfit she was wearing) and suggested perhaps telling the story of their first date. She said it would be interesting to here what dad had to say and whether or not he would remember it. So I recorded her for one minute and when she was home later that evening, we called dad to hear what he had to say. Dads story was more brief, less descriptive and frank. Both were honest, but in different ways – vivid in concern, but mild in context. The next step is to edit.