In this week’s workshop I began work on Project Brief #2. Using an editing software, I am to compile video, audio and photographic stills into a one minute presentation that will become a self portrait. As I have realized with self portraiture in the past (having done it both in Project Brief #1 and in VCE Photography in high school) capturing one’s self is quite difficult because there are so many ways to go about the task. As every human, there are countless aspects of my personality and physicality that couldn’t ever be summarized in a one minute video, or even an hour long video for that matter. My hardest task at the moment is deciding which ideas to pursue. Because the time limit is only 60 seconds, I need to focus on just one or two ideas to present in my final.

My article posted earlier in March entitled “Investigations in Self Portraiture” contain some references to artists whose clever portrayal of themselves have inspired me. Although they are all of the photographic nature, the works of Kyle Thompson, Zhang Huan and Bryan Lewis Saunders encourages me to go about this task in a more creative way.

I have decided to pursue the idea of a “symphony of catastrophes”. In all social spheres I am known as the horribly disorganized one, the person who is always lost, late or looking for something. My clumsiness causes me to frequently earn myself bruises and scratches, and my skewed depth perception means that I often slam things (such as a glass I have been drinking from) because I think things (such as a table to put the glass on) is farther away than it actually is (you can imagine how bad I am at sports!). If I were to make a score for my life, it would be made up of tracks that feature sounds of me bumping into or breaking things, “ouches” and constant noise created from the various musical instruments (and household utensils I use as instruments) that I like to play. As a nanny for 7 different families, noise is something I am very accustomed to; whether it be screaming kids or barking dogs. For the audio accompaniment, I plan to record some of the cacophony of noise I am so accustomed to hearing and sync it rhythmically to footage of some of these occurrences amongst other things that attribute to my personality.

More on this as it develops!