Project brief two requires more thinking and practical editing compared to the first self-portrait. Here’s my reflection on my self-portrait video:
#1. Reflection:
Quite expectedly, there is one contrary fact that I know myself too much to brief my identity in only one short minute, yet in the meantime, I also understand myself too little to express it rightly. It felt like that I was stuck in philosophical conundrum of trying to answer who I am. After hours of pondering, I came up with this “Black Envelope” idea. One thing that appears “black” because it does not reflect light, so I chose it for a “mysterious feeling”. It is negative, cannot be seen, which also is the colour of the universe if we eliminate all those stars. I’d like to compare myself to a speck of “stardust” that is a part of universe and essentially, the universe itself (everything in the universe, as I perceive, is a whole). The “envelope” part is like the space that I am limited to; but if you have seen the video, you will see that within restrictions of my understanding, I believe I could still be anything without boundaries due to maybe my imagination.
The ideas are quite vague, so let’s look more into the video itself. For this time, I am first trying to express that I am always on journey. Then, I wish to reveal several interests that I have through demonstrating my stuff. I cannot prove that I am me, but the things surrounds me can definitely show something about me. And the last thing I hope to show is my unity with the universe as “a stardust”. Thus, combined the display of physical objects with mental expression, I expect to tell you about me effectively: So the whole idea is structured by a thing that happened: someone picking up a black envelop from the mail box. The first two pieces of texts directly mentioned my idea of the stardust pondering existence. I am me, how so? What can show who I am and my existence? On the background, we can hear the trains which represents my journey. I edited all the pictures and clips together along with the beats of the music to make the videos look flow, but actually the whole video is quite discontinuous. I use a lot of pictures in this videos for that discontinuity because life is continuous; and when I need to show parts of myself, images are perfect to represent segments of my life as a contrast to real life. Things (which I particularly photographed)that the person takes out of the envelops includes a lipstick, a music box, a set of rulers, a small camera lens, and a book. Those items correspondingly indicates me being a female, and my interests in music, science(or maths), photography and reading. Then when you jump to the last bit, you can see my effort trying to indicate my idea that I mention at the start of the video: me as a stardust, as a part of the universe.
After finishing the video, there are some reflections I’d like to make upon my result. I still love my idea of the black envelop as a trigger for the somewhat-story and eventually getting to my point of being a member in the universe. I think my using the 4:3 screen throughout the video(except for the very last bit) and black and white colour is also a successful attempt to give a look of “the past” (because I believe it is the experiences I had from the past that make me who I am now). Though on the other hand, I think the effects for the appearance of the video are still not good enough; also the last bit of the universe—I should have done a better job for that special effect to make it look more realistic. As for the music, I think now that it doesn’t quite fit the mood of the video. It is good, but just not enough, not quite the feeling that I was going for. Maybe it’s because I co-composed this piece with one of my friends, so the communication here is showing a down side. I told him the feeling and the rhythm that I had in my mind, but still, it’s the first time for me doing this job. I will come to some improvements in the future.
#2. Video display:
