I’ve come away from this assignment thinking:
“Man this turned out weird”
I remember looking over the work my classmates had produced and noticing how unusual mine were in comparison to theirs…
I produced 3 writings for people to read:
- Betty Botter bought some butter but she said the butter’s bitter. If I put it in my batter it will make my batter bitter. But a bit of better butter will make my batter better So ‘twas better Betty Botter bought a bit of better butter
- I stand alone in an empty hallway, despondent and dispirited. Unbeknownst to my confidents, it’s not the first time I’ve been absconded to isolation. An extensive time hadn’t progressed when I detected that I’d received a message on my telephone from my father to notify me of my mothers’ death. I expelled an exhausted exhale, and resided back to the living room couch.
- As I look across a field of green, I dream. I look to the stars and wonder just how far, and I dream. I dream of worlds beyond where peace and love are one, and so I dream. If worlds like that exist and can live in heavenly bliss, why can’t we?
The first was meant to make them stutter and laugh, the second was also meant to make them stutter, but it was more sombre. I wasn’t initially sure what I wanted to do with the third poem. If I had stuck to my initial plan, it would’ve been pretty pointless, but luckily I made it part of the soundscape as an example of agreement or coming together.
My sound piece went in a different direction than I had originally planned. I found that after I had sifted through around 15 minutes of audio of people reciting the 3 paragraphs, I only had about 15 seconds of the hesitant sound I was looking for. I managed to overlay them and it worked quite well, but I still had little sound bites to work with. After I had communicated my initial idea, I wanted to further demonstrate the way that people would display the expressions that other people had conveyed to them. I had the paragraph I wrote spoken by different people slowly overlapped to create what sounded like a chatter, which comes to a stop when everybody says the word “death”. I added this to symbolise a “moment of silence”. I think the silence works effectively, because it communicates the way that people often come to a mutual agreement to be silent because of something that’s communicated throughout a group. Overall, I don’t think I changed the idea I had for my soundscape; but rather developed and added to it.
My film on the other hand was really quite close to the idea that I had in mind. This is pretty unusual for me, often my finished piece differs dramatically from the idea I had in my head. My goal was to showcase the small idiosyncrasies that people subconsciously display, and I feel like I effectively communicated that.
I decided to play a few simple chords on my electric keyboard to accompany the video, but I wanted to leave the majority of it it silence. I mostly just wanted the warm chords to accompany the smiles, to really hammer in the feeling that it conveys.
There are a few technical faults that I made that I would like to highlight now so that I don’t make them in future projects:
- The ISO was too high, it made a lot of the footage look grainy
- The colour temperate was off, I forgot to change it from 3000K which made it look warm.
- The focus was off for some of the people
- I forgot to click record for some of the audio pieces
Despite the fact that I did quite like the way my film turned out, I feel like I could’ve related it to entanglement better somehow. I wanted to highlight the way that people silently communicate, but to do this more effectively I might have needed to have more actual communication, or the way they would act differently depending on the audience, group or space. It would be very difficult to do, but I’d like to explore the way that people body language behaves differently with contrasting personalities and various audiences. The way we interact as humans in a meshwork in itself, with an array of things that influences the minor decisions we make in day to day life, and I would love to have the opportunity to explore this idea in future assignments.
