Compiling the visuals have been substantially more difficult than originally thought. This was made evident chiefly through the fact that

a) Much of the stock footage available online of natural phenomena are watermarked or low quality

b) Ruby’s shot footage and the found footage still require some unification in terms of their temporal ordering

c) The projector sequence was anticlimactic

Perhaps most notable of these three in terms of my own learning process is C) the projector debacle. Having borrowed and hauled the necessary camera/tripod gear from the tech department to my home, I set up projecting the found footage onto a white pair of underwear to some dissatisfaction. Immediately evident was the strange sizing of the underwear as a canvas and ill-fitting scale of the projections which seeped onto the white wall behind, resulting in an illegible warped effect. Brainstorming and troubleshooting within minutes, I further devised a cut out of the shape of an underwear silhouette on white paper against a black background. This seemed to work more effectively, with the projections only bleeding slightly onto the black paper and thus, while oddly shaped, still remained mostly visible.

However, upon entering the editing suits and uploading the footage, Haylee and I agreed that the projections seemed blurry and thus were not suited towards our general purpose in creating an aesthetically engaging and beautiful rhetorical film composition. As our documentary’s political undertone necessitates an engaging and de-stigmatising visual apparatus, blurry footage will not do. So we scrapped it fairly brutally. Yet in loyalty to our original idea of the underwear as the site of an ephemeral and natural / cyclical process, I employed my photoshop skills (rusty as they were) to quickly devise a mask through which we could have our imagery appear within. Or in other words, I morphed the shape of the screen itself in order to give the illusion of footage appearing within the boundaries of an underwear. Liam further helped us to apply the texture of  sheet (from Ruby’s footage) to the backdrop, a factor which brought the footage from a strange inanimate 2D style white backdrop, to a more nuanced and flickering canvas.

Additionally, this week has been informative in terms of the amount of imagery required. For instance, some of the feedback we received in class was to cut the audio down to the most interesting statements. In doing so, we created more room for contemplation; a technique which I think enhances our documentary’s poetic approach to rhetoric, as it favours the ambiguous over the explicit, didactic, or expository forms which often characterise more rigorous forms of commentary. As such, we were left with gaps between audio that required footage but lacked any audio cues.

Through editing, we resolved this by employing Ruby’s footage of her hand crushing fruits, speeding their temporal duration and having them reverse in a cyclic play-through reverse play-through pairing. Doing so felt in line with our documentary’s theme of cycles and flow, and afforded the film form a more subtle and spacious emotional landscape.