Described my many as an organised mess, I wished for my Media Self-Portrait to reflect this aspect about me. I compiled and edited 4 photographs, 3 videos, and 4 sound clips that were all taken on my iPhone 7.
Project Brief 2: Media Self-Portrait asked us to compile videos, photographs and audio snippets that we had taken and then edit it into a coherent self-portrait of ourselves. For my project, titled HELLO, MY NAME IS:, I compiled together 4 photographs, 3 videos, and 4 sound clips that were all taken on my iPhone 7.
I didn’t just want to show myself through images, so the rapid pace of the film itself was made to represent my nature: fast-paced, choppy, messy, and out-of-whack. The film begins with a single photograph of a pile of books that is flipped back-and-forth from the left to the right side.
The photograph itself contains some of my favourite books that have influenced and altered me as a person. As the photographs were overlapped with audio of pages turning in a book, the editing technique intends to reflect flipping through pages of my life and mind. This is seen both at the beginning and the end of the film as the beginning and end of a book.
Each shot represents the things that are part of who I am: books, art, home and tea. Home is represented through three aspects of the one shot: my kitchen in Melbourne, a candle made in my home town and the sound of waves.
Making this film was such an experience, as I thoroughly enjoyed being able to experiment with ways of editing to create a fluid and cohesive self-portrait that reflects who I am and tells a story in an abstract manner. Though, I did find it difficult to find the perfect audio to layer the paint-mixing scene, and I don’t believe that I succeeded in doing so.
I believe that the narrative could have been even more fluid and filled with more meaning, motifs and better editing. I also lacked in producing text, and I wish I could have experimented more with adding text into my project.
