Okay so I may or may not have been chronically ill Thursday morning during my Workshop, but I was told about this exercise by my friends so here I am. We were supposed to do this so that we might ‘consider and analyse the narrative structure of your PB3 portrait piece’. It’s just a few questions I’ve answered about my project. I skipped one or two just because they didn’t apply to my particular piece, but it was good activity to really get me thinking about it regardless.

1. What is the ‘controlling idea’ of your portrait? My portrait focuses on the artistic career of my interviewee, David Wadelton. He is a painter but I focused specifically on his photography for this project. I wanted to focus on his photography because of his unique style. I suppose you could say the ‘controlling idea’ is to do with capturing a moment in history or noticing elements of our environment that you would usually take for granted – because this is what he does in his photography.

2.  How is your portrait film structured? Though still a working process, I’m primarily using face-to-face recorded interview for my project. This is the base narrative, so that I can experiment with cutaways, display his photography and also use found footage to help enhance the conversation while my interviewee narrates it.

3. What do you want your audience to make of your interviewee? I think the thing I want them to get away from it is how much the world and our environment can change just through our life time. My interviewee talks about documenting Melbourne in the 70’s and how in many ways it has completely transformed since then.

4. How is your portrait being narrated? It’s being narrated by the interviewee, so that the focus is entirely on him and his work. I chose this method because it is the most self contained, all footage is of him and recordings as well. But it also means focus won’t be detracted from the interviewee if you heard my voice or another person narrating.

5. What role will the ‘found footage’ play in your portrait? The role of the found footage is actually pretty crucial, I’d say. Without giving too much away, I gained permission to use stock footage of Melbourne in the 60’s and 70’s to overlay while my interviewee discusses his photographic archive of the same era. It works really well to help enhance what he’s talking about, I think.

6. Does your portrait have a dramatic turning point? No.

7. How does your portrait gather and maintain momentum? It’s hard to say when it isn’t completed, but I think the use of cutaways and a few different angles helps to keep it interesting and maintain a flow that is engaging to the audience. I hope to use audio as a good momentum, having little to no silence but a steady flow so that it isn’t too much in one go.

In a workshop a few weeks back we were told to get into pairs and practice recording interview style with borrowed equipment. Although I didn’t end up using the H2N Zoom in my PB3, it was helpful to test out the overall process.

I did this project with my friend Amber and we went into the RMIT Library and surrounds to ask each other questions. This was the result. We encountered a few problems right off the bat – firstly that the class had spent so much time trying to figure out the mic that we had about 10-15 minutes to complete the actual thing. It was also difficult finding an area to record that was both quiet, and that we wouldn’t be disrupting people by talking in. We hid in a corner of the library, but even then we must have frustrated everyone near us (hence the whispering in some parts). It was also kind of difficult to avoid making additional noise, like cluttering and movement etc., especially when we kept accidentally recording things. There’s a lot of ‘it’s been recording the whole time!’ and shuffling around.

Going through all the audio tracks was interesting for that, many conversations that I’m sure we didn’t even know we being recorded and a lot of 3 second snort laughter. Overall though, that activity was a lot of fun in my opinion. You can probably sense the humor in our voices, we weren’t really taking it seriously and it was hard to just make things up on the spot knowing you were being recorded.

Guess whose trying to desperately catch up on work she’s behind in because she got sick for 3 days in a row!?!?! Yep! It’s me!!! A few weeks back we were given the exercise in the workshop to interview each other and create a clip that was a ‘survival guide to your first six weeks of University’. So much time was spent trying to figure out the mics and the camera (Song MC50 video camera, which I’ve never seen or used in my life) that by the time it came to actually filming, we were very short on time. Not only that, but we (myself and Samantha) were short 1 team member – who was away sick. We needed to have a bunch of different shots; things like establishing, action shot, cutaways, etc. We tried our best, but with limited time and only the 2 of us (while other groups had up to 4 members) it was a struggle! Other difficulties were finding a place that was quiet enough to film. Lots of people kept walking past us during shooting – not only were we shy about talking in front of the camera when others could see, but it was just plain disruptive for everyone involved. We did achieve a good shot for the interview itself – a plain white wall that was well lit and easy to colour correct in post-production.

Anyway, without further ado…

How To Survive The First 6 Weeks of University from Lucy Wadelton on Vimeo.