This week Haylee, Ruby and myself have continued to refine the audio. Having collected together all the necessary interview footage, we found it was easiest to group together excepts of statements from each of our interviewees under specific themes. Doing so helped the editing process yield a rough draft for our documentary. This was specifically helpful in the context of our visuals; as Ruby is still filming some fruit footage, and my collected found footage is still very roughly cut.

Perhaps one of the most challenging things made evident during this process was how to structure the visual imagery to the audio files. Indeed, as we have taken an associational form in terms of our filmmaking structure, the film’s diegetic sound does not literally correspond to any imagery (i.e. the interviewees are unpictured, and their anecdotes are not re-created). As a result, much of our editing so far has been about uniting the material under general thematic or emotional tones. We decided this was a priority as it will be the audio’s rhetoric which guides and probes certain metaphorical imagery. For instance, an interviewee might speak of the pain experienced during menstruation, and thus, the imagery will reference in some metaphorical / associational tone, the concept of pain or discomfort which occurs in nature (such as a bee sting, or a venus fly trap).

As the imagery will be a case of trial and error in order to construct a cohesive and efficative correspondence between sound cues and resulting imagery, we chose specifically to start with drafting an audio instead of footage. The reasoning behind this decision was the observation that it will be our interviewee’s personal accounts / lived experiences which bring the our project its political impetus. Thus, in prioritising the sound first we ensure a substantial basis on which to further enhance our ability to deconstruct the political / social discourse on periods, and people who experience periods, as taboo or ‘other’.