Project Brief 3: MADDISON

I decided to do Project Brief 3 on my older sister, Maddison Gillespie.  I chose my sister because she has such strong views and so much passion for so many things in her life, including herself.  With the audio, I focused explicitly on her mental health (depression), her incredibly impulsive nature and her views on herself, her freedom and how she is as an individual.  These spoken explanations were teamed up with passing images of her other personal loves and interests such as her party life and care-free attitude; represented through the three photos of her mooning the camera on different occasions, as well as three of her own pieces of art. Intermixed with all of this were samples of text posts from her own blog on which she writes her every thought and opinion; the title screen of this film is the title of her blog.  Footage of the beach around where she lives (another passionate love of hers) is used as a linking element between each feature.   The found footage is symbolic of Maddison’s firm stances on feminism through the use of the iconic women cartoon characters, Betty Boop, Olive Oil and Wonder Woman. 
A feature that I think worked well was the natural, unscripted sounding voice over.  We recorded this by simply having a half hour long conversation like we would any other day, only this time I was questioning her on how she considered herself.  I believe that by doing this instead of having a formal interview, the nature of her recordings come across much more raw.

What I struggled most with in this assignment was choosing a feature about Maddison to focus on as I find her so interesting in so many ways.  It is for this reason (my indecisiveness on what to focus wholeheartedly on) I feel my planning was not adequate, making the whole project difficult to string together coherently.  Maybe I tried to include too many features of her in too short a time, not going into enough detail about any? 
Also, choosing someone who lives too far away to simply go to proved to be a bit of an issue.  The audio was a pain to record as, at the time, I was not tech-savvy with the ZoomH2 and had the voice gain up too high and our connection kept on cutting out, causing the audio to cut out. 
Having said that, I feel I compromised adequately and efficiently with these problems in order to make an overall some-what effective piece.