Behold, my finished video for Project Brief 3.
I decided to call it Eraserhead, both as a reference to collector culture and as an ironic nod to one of the most disturbing films of all time — and possibly the film least like mine in all of cinema history.
The film is an interview with my brother, Gavin, who has held on to his small, crappy collection of erasers for 30 years despite their total lack of usefulness. I’m really interested in the idea of nostalgia as one of the biggest mediators of human experience/behaviour, and my brother’s collection is a direct manifestation of his attachment to childhood objects.
Aesthetically, I decided to place Gavin against a plain white background and shoot him with high contrast lighting and exposure. I hoped that this would visually separate him from “real life”, to reinforce the idea that his collection is a bit weird and abnormal, and also to give the interview a slightly clinical feeling. I first saw this visual style in the films of Errol Morris, my favourite documentarian, and I tried to replicate his aesthetic as best I could using a home-made lighting rig against a wall in my living room. I was pleasantly surprised at how close to my vision it ended up being. In a studio environment with a professional lighting set-up it would be quite easy to improve it even further.
Another aspect of my film that I’m happy with is the audio, and specifically how it is constructed. I made heavy use of J-cuts after first learning about them in our week three Workshops, and they really help to tie everything together into a cohesive whole. Each sentence flows into the next and it feels like a single piece of dialogue even though there are dozens of cuts in the audio track.
It was a real struggle to find footage online that I could incorporate into my project. Even when I could think of suitable types of footage that I could use to illustrate what Gavin was saying, I would search online and more often than not I would come back empty handed. I had a very specific idea of the kind of footage I wanted to incorporate (vintage black and white educational films) because it would tie into my theme of nostalgia, but it was actually impossible to find such footage in most circumstances, particularly the shot of a child crying. I ended up having to “grunge-ify” some recent footage so that it would fit the rest of the piece. Next time I’m planning a video project that will incorporate found footage, I think I’ll try to source it before I finalise my vision for the project, because it really was the hardest part of the whole exercise.
But I think the biggest weakness of the film is that it was difficult to shape Gavin’s interview answers into a narrative that adequately gets the film’s point across. I think audiences will likely watch my film and then afterwards think, “so what?”. I am really interested in making documentary portraits, and this was a useful experiment for my first time, but in the future I think it will be valuable to ensure my subject has an interesting story to tell that doesn’t need to be shaped too much (or at all).
On the other hand, I really like films where the “point” is either ambiguous or subjective, and it’s up to the audience to do the work to understand it, so that could be true of Eraserhead too. I guess I’ll find out when it’s presented to my classmates.