In our Cinema Studies screening this week, we were introduced to experimental films. For a person who has never watched experimental films before and has always been into narrative films, this was all so new and weird to me. The first film we watched was Ballet Mecanique and about halfway through it, I literally said to myself, ‘You know what, just watch it for what it is and don’t even try to figure out a story out of it because there isn’t even one.’ It was literally a series of random shots of random objects. All I was thinking was that the first filmmakers really got excited by the idea of filmmaking that they just went out and just filmed whatever they saw and labeled it as ‘experimental’. And the image I can’t get out of my head is a group of Albert Einstein-looking filmmakers doing just that.

But by the time we got half way through our screening and onto our third experimental film, I realised that in a way, our second project brief where we have to create a creative self-portrait video, that the videos we make, or at least the video I’ll be making is sort of an experimental film too. My video doesn’t exactly have a narrative. It’s literally just a compilation of random videos and photos the I took, matched with some random sound effects (also recorded by yours truly). I mean all the videos and photos are a reflection of who I am as a person, but they don’t necessarily have a story to it, like a particular event that happened in my life. So in a way, because we are also experimenting further with editing using Adobe Premiere Pro, my self-portrait film will be somewhat experimental.