For Project Brief 3, I interviewed my sister, Ashley, who is transgender and enjoy making costumes. I initially wanted to focus largely on her being transgender and how this has affected her life, and therefore I wrote the questions also focusing on this. I organised the interview with her fairly early, so I’d have plenty of time to edit, and recorded it using the Zoom recorder which I borrowed from the school.

As I created a storyboard for Project Brief 2, and found it immensely helpful in streamlining the production and post production process, I wanted to do the same thing for this project. However, as it was difficult to predict what my subject’s answers would be, I really struggled to do so. In hindsight, I think this was due to a lack of creative vision in regards to the narrative structure of the project. Next time around, I will need to spend more time in pre-production and work out what I’m trying to say with my project. Admittedly, I think my slackness in this regard may be due to the fact that I was interviewing my sister, who was readily available. As a media practitioner, I need to be consistent in my work practices and not allow myself to skip important tasks, as a lack of a strong plan really hindered my progress on Project Brief 3.
Keeping in mind the Lectorial regarding interviewing, I tried to write open ended questions. Despite this, my sister was still quite shy and her answers were not as elaborate as I would have liked. This made me think of one of the points Louise raised, regarding making sure the interviewee is ‘good talent. My sister was definitely no Donald Trump in terms of charisma, but nevertheless, I thought there was an interesting story to be told and I was determined to make it work.

I sourced my found footage from www.archive.org and Youtube. This footage consists of shots from 1950’s instructional videos that show women in traditional roles, such as sewing, as this linked to my subject’s practical skill of making costumes. I also used footage of ‘cosplayers,’ as this provided more visual reference for what my subject does with the costumes she makes.

My initial idea was to have purely voice over, through the interview clips recorded on the zoom recorder, which would be combined with visuals of my subject and found footage clips. I struggled editing this together however, due to the brief answers of my subject, I found that it didn’t tell the story I wanted it to.

After the Narrative Structure Exercise in the week 6 workshop, I realised that there was a lot lacking from my portrait. I decided add a stronger focus on my sister’s costume design, and to tie this together with her being transgender, and how it helps give her ambition, and helps her cope. Thus, I wrote more questions and interviewer her again, this time recording the interview on a Canon 600d, as I didn’t have time at this point to borrow the Sony camera from the school, and I thought this had comparable visual quality. However, the audio quality was not as good, and it ended up being quite noticeable where I transition from using the original recordings and the new ones. By adjusting the volume and adding background music, I tried to minimise this effect, but as I mentioned earlier, this problem could have been avoided by being more clear about my creative vision during pre-production.

In the end, I’m glad that I recorded the additional footage as it added a lot more to the final portrait. I also thought the simply animated opening credits (which I created in Adobe Photoshop and caused me a fair share of frustration) worked quite well and suited the overall motivating tone of the portrait. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I wish I’d planned the project better so the portrait would have been stronger and more unified, but overall, I’m not entirely dissatisfied with the result.