During the last few weeks of editing, I struggled to find a way to introduce the video portrait smoothly, rather than in a jarring way. Initially, I tried to incorporate an introduction from Moholy Nagy’s Vision in Motion book that inspired Robert during his years at art school. However, the introduction was quite wordy that it wouldn’t translate well to the viewer. I decided to experiment by filming the words from the book and layering the words onto footage of Robert painting in his studio. But yet again, it became too wordy and unnecessary to the context of the video portrait itself.

This particular lesson we had Jenny O’Meara to check out our rough cuts and provide industry feedback. At this time, I only had my cuts of the interview and the audio synced onto the footage. Jenny was impressed by the content and progress I had thus far, but suggested that I would swap certain sections around to provide the “hook” for the viewer.

Robert Owen mentions certain jazz records throughout the interview that Jenny suggested that I added in some found footage. In particular, Blue Note records are favourable, however being under a copyright license, using it into my video portrait will be a risk so finding public domain footage of jazz bands from the 1950s or 60s will be ideal.

Jenny’s feedback was essential with keeping me on track and confident with the foundations of the interview before moving forward to adding overlays, background music and eventually refining.