The high priest of American experimental film, Stan Brakhage have once said “There is an area of film that has absolutely nothing to do with multi-million dollar movie productions.” Which is referring to independent, experimental and abstract film productions. Abstract works have always been my style and something I want to get better on. I love making works that could drive my audience to think about what it means and what I am trying to communicate through my work.

For this assignment I need to create 4 short videos responding to “word”, “portrait”, “joy” and “hurt”. In my opinion all four of these videos have a strong personality that separates them from one another. I have been producing works that have the exact same style for a few years, since the purpose for our studio is experimental film-making, I decided to change my style and create four videos with very different styles and features.

Zhen, Samantha and I teamed up to film the “word” and “portrait” videos. For the “word” video we decided to imitate a scene from the movie “The Sixth Sense”, however because of the casting and technically difficulties we had to make some changes from the actual movie. For the shooting we borrowed a movie camera and two LED light panels from RMIT  in order to get the best visual effect possible and also to gain some experience of shooting with professional film equipments. One of the problems we had during the shooting was I forgot to bring my own microphone, so we could only use the clip microphone during the shooting which also the reason why the audio of the final video wasn’t clean enough. This experience has made me more familiar with filming as a team and also taught me to be 100% prepared before a shooting in order to get the best result.

Portrait has always been my weak spot in photography so I have never done any portraits videos before. To be prepared for this challenge I did some research on Vogue magazine’s YouTube channel. I found out that they like to shoot the details of their model when they are filming a short documentary of a photo shoot so I decided to focus on details for my video but adding some of my own elements in such as the change of focus. All three of us shot our very own clips with the same model, and I mainly focused on lighting and focusing. I used a 100mm macro lens to achieve a shallow depth of field on the close-up shots and I am very happy with the result. To create some diversity into the video I also put in a piece of inspiring music and used blackout scenes to make the video fit into the tempo of the music.

Video that contains positive emotion is also not my strong suit, so it was hard for me to think of an idea for the “joy” video. I had my inspiration after I watched a Thai film called “Joy of Giving”. The film focused on the main character only and showed how much joy he feels when he helps people. I like the way it focused on the personality of the character so I decided to focus on myself for my video. I still used my favorite close-up shots in this video and combined both slow-motion and timelapse videos to show my audience what are my favorite things to do.

The “hurt” video will be my favorite one out of all four videos. Not only because it is the closest to my shooting style but also gave me a lot of space to be creative with abstraction and lighting. I used a very dark and unstable lighting to create the depressing atmosphere to collaborate with the “hurt” theme. The first scene of finger tapping not only shows stress to explain the reason of what is about the happen but also worked well as the soundtrack of this video. The blood and hand gives the videos a little horror elements but in a relatively abstract way. The final scene of the fingers moving  is where I want to make my audience think if the person is really dead. Instead of a still hand telling the audience someone died of cutting his own wrist, I prefer an open ending to give room for my audience to use their imagination.

In conclusion, from this assignment I have gotten better at working in a team and also learned more knowledge in lighting and composition when shooting a video with narrative. I also completed the challenge I set for myself, which is shoot four videos in different styles. Finishing this assignment has been a valuable experience and I am looking forward to learn more skills in the studio.