In this week’s reading by Frankham, it is suggested that the poetic approach focuses on the openness of listing, in which the author can create brief moments of pause and contemplation (2013, pg. 137). It also allows both the creator and the audience to transform the “raw artefacts” portrayed on screen to create a sense of meaning (Frankham 2013, pg. 145). I found these ideas both freeing and difficult when it came down to starting to make my poetic list, but I really tried to focus on not having to make everything so obvious, and let myself and others find meaning in what I made.
This is super different from anything I’ve made before, and I’m not entirely sure if I’m happy with it, but this experiment has been super insightful in a creative sense. To me, this piece is about anxiety, and the process of feeling calm, then anxious, then calm, in a relatively linear way. It lists the various stages of being anxious, and I play around with speed and buildup and reversing to portray that. This idea was built in tandem with some helpful feedback I got for my personal list experiment, which suggested I play around with repetition and speed.
Originally I intended to make all the shots before the payoff of the green saturated nature the ‘impassive suspense’ of the piece. And while I can still see that to some degree, I feel like I borrow a lot more from the associational poetic techniques, having my images connect on an “emotional” and “impact[ful]” level (Frankham 2013, pg. 139).
I am personally going to continue to play around with this piece and add sound, as I felt like it dictated a big part of how I created it, such as spacing out black screen with the timing of heartbeats, and I feel like abrupt sounds could also bolster the sensation of anxiety.
Reading References
Frankham, B.L., 2013. ‘Complexity, flux and webs of connection,’ in: A Poetic Approach to Documentary: Discomfort of Form, Rhetorical Strategies and Aesthetic Experience. University of Technology Sydney, Sydney. pp. 137-176
Video References
Alien -Phantom From Space, Untitled Artist (Dir. W. Lee Wilder), Public Domain CC, https://archive.org/details/CEP534
Fireplace Close Up – Slow Motion, Jeffrey Beach (Beachfront Productions), Attribution 3.0 CC, https://archive.org/details/FireCUPhotoJPEG
Ocean Waves Slow Motion, Videov, Royalty-Free, https://www.videvo.net/video/ocean-waves-slow-motion/3577/
Stock Footage – collection 2 (Snow), Untitled Artist (uploaded by inu77), Attribution 3.0 CC, https://archive.org/details/FreeStockFootage/Snow.mov
Waves Crashing Wide, Jeffrey Beach (Beachfront Productions), Attribution 3.0 CC, https://archive.org/details/WavesCrashingWide/WavesCrashingWideH264.mp4