What was your intention with this work? Did you achieve it?
The original intention of this short film was to create a spotlight piece on young, Melbourne based, singer/songwriter Georgie Currie, and to promote the release of her new solo Extended Play (EP). The stakes of the piece were to outline that Georgie was going to return to university if, after a few years of full time music production, her career hadn’t picked up. Through the pre-production phase this held pretty much the same, however after the first rough cut of our footage, we felt that the stakes did the opposite of what was intended. Rather than draw the reader in, they took the audience out and made her career seem somewhat trivial. We also found that a part of the interview where she expanded on the struggles and experiences of being a young female musician, came to the forefront as something we needed to make central to the piece.
So the film kept its original intention as a spotlight on Georgie and her album for the first first half of the interview (which is all about her album and musical style), the second half of the piece focused on navigating the musical industry as a young woman. All in all, I think it achieved what we were aiming for when setting out to create this media, especially in terms of functionality for Georgie, as she used some of the footage on her social media platforms to promote her tour and her EP launch show in Melbourne.
What aspect are you proud of? What can you improve upon?
I think the centre point of the piece is what I’m most proud of. The images of Georgie with flowers in her hair, playing in front of a wall of more beautiful yet fleeting flowers inside a florist, while her interview audio over the top describes her fears that age is incredibly important for female artists, and that every year she gets older that she fears people will care less and less about what she has to say (something that is particularly true of women artists) creates a poignancy that I found really striking.
In terms of what I could improve on, audio engineering is definitely up there. I’m just not well versed in creating a sound space around the interviewer. I took some recordings of sounds to layer the piece with, but I think a much more planned and deliberate approach would have been better. A nuanced yet more diverse sound sphere around Georgie would have really elevated the piece in my opinion.