This week we presented project brief three. The following was my formal reflection to the work:

For this draft I have conducted interviews and created a basic cut to convey the stories being told. My process for this involved a number of tasks and i endeavoured to involve participation as thoroughly as I could in each stage of production. This project is a rough draft of the resources I have gathered thus far and I don’t think that this is what my final documentary should look like.

I attempted to let my participants direct the interviews, primarily seeing if I could get them to tell there stories without direction from me. I have in past interviews that it is rather easy to provoke particular answers. Asking certain types of questions can sometimes guarantee the response, though I wanted to stray away from this method to create something that came directly from the voice of my participants. As such, I didn’t prepare any questions and tried to carry conversational tone where by expressing myself I would be able to help others express themselves.

I decided to do conduct phone interviews for a number of reasons. The first was simply practicality – I could conduct these interviews anywhere and at anytime that suited both me and the participants. This created an environment by which they were able to be in a comfortable their setting – they were all at home when I called them. I think that a phone call also

Aesthetically, the implementation of a phone call is explicit and direct reference to long distant relationships. I was speaking with people in ways that they connect with others and I think that this with hopefully translate across into my final documentary.

The participatory approaches I used in the initial interview shadowed my role as an author and I do not think my presence was a challenge until I entered the post production stage of editing. I began with an hour of phone conversations and had to work out how to craft this into some sort of documentary draft. Thus began the ominous task of cutting, omission and selection. I first cut my voice out of the conversations and found the common threads that linked each piece in themes and specific terms. I tried to keep the general conversational flow of each phone call, maintaining the tone and order by which the participants spoke. In doing so, I attempted to omit things that had already been said – the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ that broke the flow of speech.

I really struggled with the visuals in this draft and that is something that I need to work on in the final documentary. I found that the audio was quite compelling and I didn’t want to take anything away from that, I didn’t want to distract the attention away from the words being spoken. I think that this is kind of also reflective of long distant relationships, before the likes of Skype and FaceTime. They were reliant upon one’s ability to communicate verbally and this made the audio aspect naturally seam itself into the project. The visuals were secondary and I toyed with multiple ideas that I would like to further explore in future drafts. Here I shot a bunch of roads and tried to convey travel and distance. In an early draft I featured lots of jump shots overlaying one another but I found this far to distracting from the words. One key feature I wanted to portray was that of participatory awareness. The subjects were only told by their voices and thus there words needed to be a key feature in the project. I employed text to help me achieve this and typed out every word spoken on each phone call. I felt this created something a bit basic and didn’t have any dimensional featured that would create something captivating. I then decided to overlay the text with a duplicate and make much of the written work incomprehensible. I felt that this firstly, would unhinge an audience as it is quite impractical, later forcing them to rely on sound and the actual words being spoken by each person, rather than the scribed text on screen. This created something visually jarring and compelled multiples of each sentence which is reflective of one of the subjects final lines in which she says she feels as though she coexists in two places.

I attempted to let a lot of my editing be guided by my participants and as I was working with people I know closely, I was able to involve some in the editing process itself. I tried to show many drafts to the subject so they could see the way in which I was working with their words and they were able to give me feedback on what they wanted to include and what they wanted to omit. This was useful as I was able to get multiple insights into the piece before it was complete, whilst incorporating the ideas that were not only reflective of my thoughts.

One challenge that arose from this means of participation was creating balance. I wanted the draft to not only reflect on the conversation of one person and to not be directed by any form of singularity. I felt that there was a natural element of narrative storytelling that compelled each conversation forward and although there was similarities in subject, the content initially was vastly different. The phone calls themselves also varied in length and creating a balance across the story I think relied heavily upon my ability to balance the participation across multiple anecdotes. I attempted to create a rhythm and equal voice to all four of the conversations and hopefully this translated well.

I think that there is definitely room for improvement and ways in which I could better not only the project but also the participant’s contribution to the documentary. The film is a bit long and I think by itself it is unsustainable in some elements. I could add more conversations and aiding visuals that compliment the words being spoken rather that jarring what is being heard from what is being said.

We had two guests who listened to our presentations and gave us feedback on our ideas and progress. The general consensus from my feedback was that the phone interviews did not stand up to a film of long length. The visuals also were quite bland which I was quite aware of too. From here I think that I need to concentrate on visual treatment and improving the quality rather than the quantity of my work. I think that I was trying to reach the length required for the project and it didn’t really succeed. Kim said to us that the film should be ‘as long as it needs to be’ and from now I think I should work with this idea glued to the back of my mind.