This week we met to show each other our test clips and discuss which direction to continue taking our idea for the final Korsakow project. We decided to refine our prompt to “filming individual’s feet while interviewing them to get a glimpse into their lives and how they’ve found their feet, without ever showing their face.”
We established some more constraints in order to ensure that our project will run smoother. We agreed on a file management system, which includes how we label the clips and where we store them (on Imogen’s external hard drive). We also decided we could compress our video and thumbnails as we go, aiming for the former to be under 8-10MB each.
We arranged to meet after class next Tuesday (13 May) to film a selection of shots together in various locations around the city. We created a final deadline for all shots to be Monday 19 May.
One challenge we are facing at this stage is finalising the question which we will ask our sixty participants. For our test clips, we began with two questions which were:
- What excites you/gets you going/get you up on your feet and why?
- What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned (and how has this helped you find your feet)?
After speaking with Seth to get some preliminary feedback about our idea, he suggested we continue trying to refine this question in order to come up with a perfect one-liner we can ask all participants. He pointed out that the success of our piece will be entirely determined by our interviewing techniques, which is important to keep in mind as we go along.
We agreed to try and incorporate as much variety in our fragments as possible – through things like movement (to keep the eye engaged), a variety of interfaces (which we will talk about and design next week), and variations of different feet in different situations (which aligns with our goal of showing that a person’s feet and environment can tell a lot about them. We also talked about whether we want moving or static previews, which we are going to experiment with once we have started filming. We discussed the use of text in our project and whether it would add or detract from what we are trying to do. We ultimately decided to leave the project as a visually-driven piece that doesn’t spoon-feed its viewers with text cues.
Imogen presented the visual research she had conducted by showing us some examples on vimeo which she was drawn to (including ‘Hands + Feet’ by Jeremy Snell, and ‘Looking Down’ by Hrrrthrrr. Ren also discussed the Polish film ‘Talking Heads’ (1980) by Gadajace Glowy which has a similar interview style which we are attempting. Seth also pointed us in the direction of Gillian Wearing’s works to further our research. He also suggested that we could use lapel microphones to get the best sound quality we can, and create another layer of intimacy with the interview subject. He thinks we should conduct the interview first and then record the footage, as this may help us get an idea of the visual footage we might want after hearing the content of the interview.
We are now beginning to think of how we will keyword our Korsakow project, and whether this will be thematic or visual. We like the idea of using the responses of our participants to categorise the clips and group together certain emotions and ideas (i.e. love, family, success, etc.). We also have a very rough working title which is ‘Finding Your Feet’.