The term I settled on during the early stages of this project was encountering. However, throughout the production of my Assignment 3, I’ve always felt the piece was created with both encountering and lingering in mind, as they both go hand in hand with my idea for the media product, the struggle and battle between nature and industry. Throughout the audio-visual component of the assignment, I focused on showing the encounters between nature and industry, and how they affected each other within their own world. Rust played a big part in showing the contrast of the themes visually, as well as their effect on each other.

The start of the film is very nature heavy, this was done to show how our world once began, dominating man-made structures. As the short abstract piece progresses, industry starts to play a more prominent feature in the world, with more roads and metal objects being present. Towards the end of the film, industry takes over, both narratively and visually, and the film takes on a more urban city style. The final shot of the finished edit is the progression of nature and industry, literally. The final shot is framed with nature in the foreground, being the trees and leaves, what I have called industry in the middle, which is the electricity posts, which are a mixture of both industry and nature, as the posts themselves are made of wood. Finally, in the background is the Melbourne city, with helicopters flying across skyscrapers and industry and urbanisation at its peak. This ‘future’ my narrative has predicted matches the aesthetics and style of the music choice present throughout a majority of the piece. The repetitive, urban-industrial beat fades out however in the final shot, and is drowned out audibly by the diegetic sounds of the shot itself. Once the song fades out, the soundscape of the piece is engulfed by the constant re-emerging sounds of cars revving their engines as they pass and the high pitched chirps of the birds. These sounds replace the repetitive beat of the song ‘Beautiful Guurls” by Ricky Eat Acid, and create their own repetitive rhythm throughout the last minute of the piece, reflective of the repetitive rhythms of a person living in an urbanised area, going to work, etc.

Furthermore, while the diegetic sound drowns out the music track, the shot itself doesn’t follow the precisely timed rhythm previously established in the previous 2 minutes of the film. This long, drawn-out shot lingers for the rest of the film’s duration and is intended to make audiences feel uncomfortable and uneasy, as what has been previously expected to happen has been completely tossed on its head, similar to how the world was when landscapes were industrialised.

Overall, I’m proud of the process and outcome I achieved through this Assignment 3 task. Writing reflective posts twice a week was a big help in having records and keeping track of what I wanted to make for the assignment, as well as flesh out my ever-expanding ideas and thoughts about the audio-visual aspect of the task.